It's absolutely about what the current Republican Party in government does.

> It's about what enemies of the state do.

That may be true, but that doesn’t negate the preceding point.

> Many Republicans are speaking up alongside their usual opponents

Many former and out-of-office Republicans are, and over the past few years also some in-office-but-already-announced-retirement Republicans have.

A handful of ongoing Republicans-in-office have, over the last several years, expressed mild and momentary concern before returning to the ranks to toe the line on substance, but none of them are speaking up—or, more importantly, acting in ant substantial way.

Uh... who? I think I read that Susan Collins wrote a letter... Republicans, as they have been throughout the administration, are almost universally silent on Trumps corruption.

All it takes is two Senate republicans to take Majority control away from McConnell and to this day, not a single one has faltered in their support of the Senior Senator from Kentucky.

Where are all the Republicans speaking up alongside their opponents where it matters most? Cause it sure ain't in the Senate.

Look, I agree with where you're coming from - there are certain things that are simply matters of right and wrong and are not a matter of whether you're on Team Red or Team Blue. But the whole reason we have political parties is that it turns out we disagree, strongly, about what right and wrong are. It is a disservice to the cause you agree with and an insult to the seriousness of those you disagree with to say that such-and-such decision about how we run our country should be non-partisan instead of acknowledging the reality that it is.

It happens to be the case that for many things, like "Should we have elections or simply have hereditary rule" or "Should people be allowed to leave their religion" or "Should we invade our neighboring countries because we are the rightful owners of this continent" or "Should people be allowed to marry outside their race" or whatever, the two major parties, organizationally, do not disagree with each other. But those are and have been political debates in other times and in other places. Sometimes questions that you wouldn't expect to be political, like "Should people stay away from each other during a plague," become political.

If you believe in a particular answer to one of these questions, and one team agrees with you and the other doesn't, do not delude yourself into thinking that both teams agree with you merely because you think they should agree with you.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/08/13/politics/donald-trump-mail-in...

This is not a "both sides" issue.

The Republican party is blatantly criminal, and anyone that supports them is either incredibly ignorant, or treasonous. I'm sick of this "both sides" bullshit when what used to be called the center of the free world is in the process of being destroyed from the inside.

If the gov can purhase (internet collected) personal data, will privatized mail create a legal loophole?

There's some laws from after this doctrine was established that attempt to rein this in by explicitly extending the 4th amendment, so like that's why the government needs to get a warrant for a wiretap, but without a specific law passed by congress, the third party doctrine applies.

I tried to google if there's a 3rd party doctrine for mail services, but I haven't been able to find anything yet.

Voting by mail in a pandemic is very wise. Advising against it is a murderous suggestion.

It's kind of a thing.

That's a huge stretch from using the USPS to rig an election. Both sides are accusing the other of trying to take advantage of the sudden surge in interest in mail-in voting.

edit reply: you can't on the one hand argue that mail is a reliable way to run an election and on the other argue that a politician is trying to use it for their advantage. Not giving up, he didn't say he was using it. He said the Democrats would use it. Either way, these arguments underscore just how hackable and exploitable mail in voting is.

He admitted it on TV. Give it up.

“If we don’t make a deal that means they don’t get the money. That means they can’t have universal mail-in voting. They just can’t have it. Sort of a crazy thing,”

He is explicitly trying to remove the USPS's ability to handle voting by mail.

We're talking about what trump said.

Trump said the post office needs two bills that fund it to be passed for it to be able to adequately handle universal vote by mails, and if he doesn't make a deal with the people trying to pass those bills, then the post office doesn't get the money it needs to be able to do that:

>>> “If we don’t make a deal that means they don’t get the money. That means they can’t have universal mail-in voting. They just can’t have it. Sort of a crazy thing,” Trump said on Thursday.

This is technically correct, the best kind of correct. If 100 people actually vote for Smith and 101 people actually vote for Jones, and you count 99 of the votes for Smith and 98 of the votes for Jones, you have not counted any fraudulent votes.

The test of a democracy is whether it is representative, not whether it counts only non-fraudulent votes. Avoiding fraud is a very important means to the end, but it is not the end itself.

Here is an analogy for the HN crowd: If my site is broken, and I need to do a deploy to fix it, and we have a rule that says that every commit must pass tests and tests take 4 hours to run, then great, the rule is making sure that no code that's failing tests hit prod - but the rule is certainly not helpful in bringing prod back online. The rule is a means to the goal of making sure that prod works. It's a good rule, of course. Nobody is questioning the merit of testing your code or saying that untested code is a good thing. But you cannot justify missing your SLAs by saying "All of our code needs to be tested in order for us to know that our site works."

Quite the opposite, mail in ballots create an irrefutable and unfalsifiable paper trail for each vote.

Republicans (and Trump) are against them because they know the more people vote (ie. the more democratic America is) the less chance they have at winning.