Washington Merry-Go-Round

IMMEDIATE RELEASE 5 September 2026WASHINGTON MERRY-GO-ROUNDToday’s Events in Historical PerspectiveAmerica’s Longest-Running Column, Founded 1932Our potentially Putinesque midtermsBy Douglas Cohn and Eleanor Clift                                        WASHINGTON – To disable a machine, it is only necessary to disable a single critical component, and the Trump administration believes it has found that disrupting component in the U.S. election system: mail-in ballots.Eight states and Washington, D.C. – California, Colorado, Hawaii, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, Vermont, and Washington – employ universal mail-in voting. Fifteen additional states utilize combinations of in-person and mail-in voting.With the midterm elections (plural because constitutionally all elections are conducted by the states, not the federal government) less than two months away, a disruption of mail-in voting would effectively create sufficient chaos to undermine those contests and create a Putinesque outcome.Having failed to eliminate mail-in voting, the Trump administration is seeking to have the U.S. Post Office control who receives a mail-in ballot and who does not. An anonymous postal service whistleblower stepped forward to warn that the Post Office is scrambling to develop a system to implement what Trump wants despite legal roadblocks.The 1970 Postal Reorganization Act turned the Cabinet-level Postal Department into an independent government agency similar to the Federal Reserve, except that a presidentially nominated, Senate-confirmed Board of Governors, rather than the president, selects the postmaster general, in this case, David Steiner, the former president of Waste Management and President Trump’s preferred candidate.Having refused to answer questions from members of Congress and continuing to create a new system to handle election mail, Steiner appears to be acting in concert with Trump’s wishes.President Trump is on a trumped-up fool’s errand to find potential fraud and to identify what he and his team claim are a multitude of undocumented immigrants ready to cast ballots and corrupt our electoral system.It’s called the Unlawful Voter Initiative, and it’s being carried out by the Post Office and federal agents from the Homeland Security Department, who are diverted from other tasks like fighting terrorism as they wade through voter lists in key states to find fraudulent voters.Past and recent efforts have found no evidence to support Trump’s insistence that the 2020 election –he says he won – was rigged, and that illegal immigrants are voting in numbers large enough to affect the outcome of an election.In fact, there is no evidence to support this hypothesis. On the contrary, anybody without a green card would be risking life and limb to even show up at a polling place with ICE agents likely standing by to nab anybody who looks suspicious to them.The Trump administration is compiling lists of eligible voters by fishing through Social Security and tax records, and demanding voter registration rolls from the states, which they have no constitutional obligation to provide. The plan is to forward this information to a compliant U.S. Postal Service.This meddling in state-run elections is being contested at an emergency hearing before the Supreme Court, another institution that has repeatedly enabled some of Trump’s questionable executive orders.The constitutional determination of separation of federal and state powers should be clear but may not be if five of the six conservatives on the Court – three of whom are Trump appointees – cast votes based upon their politics instead of the law (as blatantly occurred in the 2000 Presidential Election case).In the end, the issue at stake is stark. What will become of the American form of government if a president’s administration can issue arbitrarily devised voter eligibility lists to the Postal Service that disenfranchise millions of voters? The Constitution gives the president no such power; the Supreme Court could. See Eleanor Clift’s book Selecting a President, and Douglas Cohn’s latest books The President’s First Year: The Only School for Presidents Is the Presidency and World War 4: Nine Scenarios (endorsed by seven flag officers).© 2026 U.S. News Syndicate, IncDistributed by U.S. News Syndicate, Inc.END WASHINGTON MERRY-GO-ROUND CandC-5-September-2026-Our-potentially-Putinesque-midterms.docx