#Trump Is Building an Election Trap, and Millions of Americans May Not See It Until It’s Too Late
by Thom Hartmann, October 9, 2026
"Something stinks.
" #Astoria is one of my favorites on the #Oregon coast, a small town of around 9,000 people with great restaurants and crafts shops. Two of them, a coffee shop and ceramics studio, are owned by a small businessperson, Audrey Long, who’s mailed herself five postcards since August to test the mail. The results have been grim, particularly since Oregon is a 100% #VoteByMail state.
"So far, only two of the postcards have arrived, and the first one took more than a month (and Oregon doesn’t even send out ballots until next Wednesday). Across the street from one of her shops the town’s City Hall isn’t getting its mail reliably, either, and the same is true for the tenants of a 40-unit apartment building next door, according to reporting by Oregon Public Broadcasting.
"Oregon Senator Jeff Merkley is looking into it, his office telling OPB’s reporter, 'The timing of these issues is especially concerning.'
"At first, I figured this was a one-off; something weird or broken in the Astoria post office. But when I mentioned this on the air Monday of this week my lines were flooded with calls from states across the nation saying that they’re having similar problems with the mail. The calls have continued every day since.
"Yesterday, an American listener who follows us on YouTube from Germany called in to say that his ballot was mailed out on September 19th (the law requires all foreign-resident ballots to go out by then) and he’s tracking it online but it still hasn’t arrived at his home in Mannheim.
"Earlier this year, Trump signed an executive order limiting who could get a mail-in ballot that the Supreme Court knocked down last month. But apparently he’s still working on the Post Office, just in some different ways, many of which are being kept under wraps. But there are some clues.
"Raw Story’s Alexandria Jacobson reports that nearly 1,000 #Armed #PrivateSecurity guards have been deployed to at least 55 postal facilities in places with lots of Democrats like #Atlanta, #Phoenix, #Denver, and #Chicago.
"Instead of using the Post Office’s own police force, Trump’s people have hired #Prosegur, a Spanish multinational armed mercenary force that #Norway ’s sovereign wealth fund blacklisted in 2024 over what its ethics council called “an unacceptable risk that the company is contributing to serious #HumanRights abuses.'
"The company’s also been accused of intimidating union organizers across Latin America, which may be why Frank Albergo of the Postal Police Officers Association worries out loud that nobody from the #PostalService seems to be supervising them. He described the result as 'private contractors in and around ballots without any federal control.'
"In other words, we’re already partway there: armed men who answer to a foreign contractor and Trump instead of to the public, with no transparency and no clear reason for their being there, are overseeing the buildings our ballots pass through this month.
"Then there’s Trump’s wannabe #Schutzstaffel of armed, masked, anonymous, unaccountable thugs now equipped with electric gloves that are used for torture in other countries who seems to delight in shooting people — including American citizens like Renee Good — in their cars. Democracy Forward just released 166 pages of internal ICE records they got with a FOIA filing and the result is shocking.
"This renegade agency that seems to answer only to Trump and #StephenMiller has now collected 50.6 million voter roll records from the Justice Department.
"What the hell is ICE doing with our voter records? And what could their having our personal voting habits possibly have to do with controlling immigration?
"But it gets worse: they also got another 48.4 million 'voter records' from what the documents call the 'independent sources” of #ElectionDenier #HeatherHoney, who’s now the Department of Homeland Security’s point person on '#ElectionIntegrity.'
[...]
"This administration has also joined #Russia and #Belarus as being the only three countries in the world to refuse to allow in international election monitors from the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe ( #OSCE ), which has overseen our elections for decades. What are they hiding?"
#Elections2026 #USElections #VoterDisenfranchisement #RiggedElections #OverseasBallots #MailBallots #CharacteristicsOfFascism