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The USPS wants barcodes on mail ballots and Democrats are hysterical; meanwhile HUD defunds LA's billion-dollar homeless agency — which can't house anyone but never loses a ballot. Connected? Yes.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Friday! Today’s roundup focused on two closely related stories: the USPS’s new rules, which we discussed in detail a few days ago, are now suddenly creating panic on the blue side of the aisle; and the Housing Secretary cuts Los Angeles off from a billion dollars in federal aid for homeless ballot harvesting. Oops! I meant to say, “services.”

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I told you this was a bigger story than they realized at first. Yesterday, the New York Times reported, “Postal Service Issues Proposal to Block Mail Ballots in States That Don’t Turn Over Data.” The story referred to a new rule proposed last week by the U.S. Postal Service (but only covered now, since Democrats have realized the risk) that would require states to provide lists of eligible voters, along with unique barcodes, so that mail-in ballots can be processed and delivered. To the Democrats, this is a completely crazy idea that will literally destroy democracy itself. And it’s fascist.

Specifically, Democrats and voting-rights NGOs claim the proposed rules are “clear evidence that the Trump administration is trying to unconstitutionally intrude on state-run elections.” Wait till you see how much sheer, unadulterated panic this created. Plus, it would be too hard —“expensive, cumbersome and chaotic to comply”— with only 150 days until the midterms.

For years, we have been told over and over that mail-in voting is the most secure, flawless, and utterly perfect system ever devised by mankind. It is so secure, in fact, that even questioning it makes you a dangerous conspiracy theorist, a threat to democracy, and probably someone who enjoys fish pizza. But the moment the federal government says, “Okay, great, let’s just add a little barcode and a checkoff list to make sure these highly secure ballots are going to actual, living, eligible voters,” the Democrats react as if someone just suggested replacing the Statue of Liberty with a giant gold-plated statue of Donald J. Trump.

Behold! A Democrat ticker-tape parade of doom: Oregon Secretary of State Tobias Read thundered, “This would deny eligible people the right to vote. Full stop.” Maine’s Secretary of State Shenna Bellows bellowed that, if courts side with Trump, you will see a virtual elimination of mail-in voting.” (We can but dream.) California’s Deputy AG Michael Cohen told a federal court that “it’s just difficult to overstate the disruption that this will cause to election administration.” Senator Alex Padilla of California —who as a former secretary of state called questioning mail-in ballots “unconscionable”— warned that “tens of millions of eligible voters could be prevented from voting by mail.” And the National Association of Letter Carriers union president Brian Renfroe prophesied that Trump’s Postal Service will “completely refuse to deliver mail ballots or other election mail.”

Virtual elimination! Tens of millions disenfranchised! Total refusal! Dogs and cats, living together! I did not make any of this up. These are actual quotes from one hysterical article. There were more.

But the truly hilarious part was that the Times acknowledged the elephant in the room. The story claimed without citing evidence that “Republicans have been convinced by Mr. Trump’s unfounded claims that mail balloting is not reliable and invites fraud.” In other words, half of the country distrusts the mail-in ballot system and believes Democrat postmen might throw their untracked ballots away.

You would think that a political party claiming to care deeply about “our democracy” would be thrilled to implement a simple, technology-based tracking system that would provide a reassuring pressure valve for half of the country.

Amazon can tell you which front porch your salted peanut clusters were delivered to (along with a picture!), but a barcode on a ballot? Never.

If nothing else, better tracking would resolve the massive, festering trust problem within our democratic institutions. But no. The prospect of actually verifying who gets a ballot has induced a level of unbridled hysteria on the left that is usually reserved for when a conservative tries to speak on an Ivy League campus.

The Times quoted a totally unbiased and neutral “former USPS Board of Governors Vice Chair” —the Times’s description— named Anton Hajjar, who told CNN, “If proper postage is paid on a mail piece, the USPS should deliver it. It’s that simple. The proposed rule says it’s not regulating elections— but that’s what, in effect, it’s doing.”

Anton Hajjar. “Former USPS official.” Sounds super authoritative and totally neutral, right? Just another concerned, non-partisan postal bureaucrat who merely wants to ensure that your notice of proposed property tax increase doesn’t arrive until weeks after the vote.

But, in typical Times fashion, that wasn’t exactly the whole truth.

A quick look at his actual background reveals that Hajjar (who, it turns out, spent his entire career as a far-left labor lawyer) is the former head counsel for the American Postal Workers Union— an AFL-CIO affiliate widely considered the most left-leaning of all postal unions. He was nominated to the USPS Board by Joe Biden (or the Autopen, we aren’t sure) specifically to be a pro-union, anti-conservative voice.

So, when the Times fronted Anton Hajjar, they weren’t quoting any old neutral “former official.” They were quoting a partisan, far-left-wing, TDS-afflicted labor lawyer. It’s exactly the same as quoting any other Democrat. But the Times didn’t mention that. They just presented him as a nonpartisan expert— classic corporate media sleight of hand.

🔥 But there was an inconvenient buried lede the Times tried to wave away. The article mentioned, practically in passing, that the USPS’s proposed new barcode and tracking system was considered “best practices for mail voting” by Tammy Patrick, the chief programs officer at Election Center, a non-profit that serves election officials across the country.

Tammy noted that some large counties in Arizona and Colorado are already using ballot envelopes with barcodes, designed exactly the same way as the USPS is now proposing. In other words, the “unprecedented, catastrophic, democracy-ending” technology the Democrats are screaming about is something that responsible election jurisdictions have been quietly using for years. The only thing unprecedented here is the Democrats’ reaction to being asked to do what good election administrators are already doing without, apparently, wrecking democracy.

Here’s the summary: The USPS just wants to use simple barcodes to track ballots against approved lists— which is already considered the best practice. Half of America distrusts the current system, and better tracking would go a long way toward fixing that. The Democrats, who insist the current system is perfectly secure and Must Not Be Interfered With,™ are screaming that tracking ballots will literally destroy democracy. And corporate media is platforming union lawyers disguised as “former officials” to tell you why you shouldn’t be allowed to know who is getting a ballot in the mail.

I can’t see the Supreme Court upholding a judicial injunction that would prevent this commonsense upgrade. So. I predict it will take effect, despite Democrat hysteria. And maybe even before the midterms.

Next, I bet you won’t believe the same news cycle linked mail-in voting to homeless NGO fraud. Well, get ready.

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Yesterday, the New York Times reported, “Trump Suspends Funding for Los Angeles Homeless Agency.” The subheadline dramatically declared, “Mayor Karen Bass warned that people will lose their lives.” Contradicting its own headline, the cover photo’s caption explained, “Scott Turner, the housing secretary, said his agency would not fund what he called the ‘corrupt failure’ of Los Angeles’s homelessness efforts.” In other words, it was Secretary Turner, not Trump. But never mind. Why be accurate when there’s a good narrative handy?

The Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA) has received an eye-watering $1 billion in federal money over the past five years. The article reported that Los Angeles has gotten more federal homelessness funding than any other jurisdiction in the country, while it has “misspent millions of dollars and failed to properly account for its spending.”

The Reckoning™ has arrived and wants a word.

“There has been widespread criticism of LAHSA’s spending,” the Times admitted, “even from those who believe in its philosophical approach.” LA County officials, the article reported, have themselves pulled $300 million from LAHSA, and built their own department, because the agency had become “unwieldy” and “mired in various layers of bureaucracy.”

This story included one final, but wonderful, example of its low journalistic standards. Even after acknowledging that LAHSA is poorly run, has misspent millions, been reviled in probe after probe, failed audits, and that even liberal LA County has pulled its funding, the Times still quoted exactly zero people agreeing that pulling its federal funding was necessary or even just logical. It was just another Trump temper tantrum. Times readers are the least informed people on the planet.

CLIP: Fox News report on defunding LAHSA (1:58).

It’s almost like there’s some reason progressives want to keep the money spigot on despite all the waste, fraud, and abuse.

🔥 Well, the silver lining is that LA’s homeless population apparently has a strong sense of civic participation. Unlike nearly anywhere else on earth, LA’s underpass dwellers vote in surprisingly large numbers.

Even more interesting, LAHSA maintains a dedicated “Vote” page that teaches its grant-funded service providers how to ‘register unhoused clients”— unhoused meaning, drug-addled or outright crazy. Even while experiencing homelessness, you can still vote!, the official homeless services website explains. I did not make that up.

They can still vote— and not just in person. They can be homeless and still conveniently vote by mail. Your government at work!

LAHSA’s website explains that homeless folks can just use cross streets as a residence, and shelters or even agency offices as mailing addresses. It encourages same‑day registration at vote centers. Activist groups publish primers for their workers on how to get drug-addled homeless people signed up. And lest you laugh too hard at Los Angeles, the federal government is also peddling homeless voting at Vote.gov, which is just as ridiculous:

You don’t need a home to vote. Apparently, you don’t need an apartment, car, tent, or even a shopping cart with a broken wheel to vote, either.

“If you do not have a fixed home address to get mail,” the federal Vote.gov page advises, “you can use a different address as your mailing address. You can use a description of the place where you live or sleep as your home address, such as a park or the intersections of street corners.” You can just say, “here,” or “Frank’s backyard.” Just put any old thing.

What is conspicuously missing from these websites is any rationale for why people who can’t hold a job, get a credit card or open a bank account, or keep themselves off the streets, should still have the legal capacity to vote. I’m sure there is a good rationale, but I just can’t think of it. Nor can I think of a reason for putting up thoroughly detailed, step-by-step websites teaching homeless people how to vote more easily by mail.

Like me, you are probably wondering: how are the homeless even getting onto these websites to read this advice?!?! There’s a simple answer. Through NGOs. Here is another, different federal government website, the United States Interagency Council on Homelessness, dated from the Biden era, which also teaches NGOs how to register the homeless and help them vote. Helpfully, the guide can even be viewed in Arabic and Tagalog!

Isn’t that nice? The multi-language feature is for selfless, giving people who just got here but want to start helping out even before their citizenship issues are sorted out. I help you, you help me.

I don’t know how many of these taxpayer-funded, homeless-NGO-advising websites there are in total, but I think it’s a lot.

🔥 It is a vast, interconnected, byzantine bureaucracy purportedly reflecting empathy, but which never seems able to actually reduce homelessness. But the one thing it is good at is registering people who can’t think straight to vote. LAHSA can’t find the money, the receipts, or the homeless. But it has never once lost a voter registration form.

Here is a handy-dandy guide to just the parts we can see:

Now, I can tell what you’re probably thinking. You’re probably thinking this whole thing is really a giant, fantastically expensive vote-buying, ballot-harvesting operation. You’re probably thinking, when stacks of mail-in ballots arrive at local outreach centers (which the homeless have used at their mailing address), there is no conceivable way that the highly motivated office staff are heading out to highway overpasses and beggars’ corners to personally deliver ballots.

You are probably also skeptical that the highly motivated homeless people somehow become telepathically aware the instant the ballots arrive, and head right down to the services center to make sure their votes get filled out and returned in time.

Obviously, the homeless and only the homeless are filling out those ballots. How dare you insinuate that center staff are too lazy to go looking for homeless and just fill out the ballots themselves. And look here— the federal website for providers even teaches providers to “educate” the homeless about who to vote for. Wait! Sorry! I meant, provide them with non-partisan information about both sides of the complex issues surrounding the funding of public charities, of course:

So, just the part we can see shows federal taxpayer funds —billions— are used to “educate, encourage, and help homeless vote.” If that’s not a taxpayer-funded ballot harvesting operation for progressives, then I live under an overpass with a pack of wild dogs.

Local and off-year elections are determined by very small margins. After the polls closed, late entrant Nithya Raman was losing so badly she gave supporters what everyone thought was a concession speech. But in the week following the election, around 3,000 more ballots for Raman than Pratt came in. Just three thousand. LA’s homeless population is estimated over 72,000. In other words, you’d only need around 4% of the homeless to put Ms. Raman Noodle over the top.

They’re obviously not helping get homeless off the streets. The homeless population gets bigger every year. But they are helping the homeless vote. It’s right on the United States’ own website. It’s the one metric of success. More homeless are registering and voting than ever.

But here’s the thing. When the USPS barcode rule kicks in, we’ll be able to see that homeless ballots aren’t coming from Frank’s backyard, but from a single homeless center, all on the same day. And any ballot that does come from a cross-street will be returned to sender.

I wonder whether the Trump Administration is aware of these homeless-voting websites on federal servers. Somebody should make sure.

Have a fantastic Friday! Return tomorrow morning, for our Weekend Edition roundup of essential news and caffeinated commentary.

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