Tap to Vote

By Jonah Goldberg

Wednesday, August 20, 2025

 

Today’s G-File is a two-parter. So if you don’t want to read about Russia, scroll down to my contempt for mobile voting.

 

Russia is a deeply screwed-up country, but it is good at a few things. One of them is exporting dysfunction to other countries.

 

If you take offense at my description of Russia because you’re of Russian extraction, fine. Then again, most of the people of Russian descent reading this are reading it because they, or their ancestors, had the good sense to get the hell out of there.

 

If you take offense because we’re not supposed to talk that way about countries, meh. I think differentiating between the regime and the people in the cases of, say, China or Iran is wholly justifiable. I think Russia has lost that benefit of the doubt. They’ve been so messed-up for so long, de Maistre’s famous quip—“Every nation gets the government it deserves”—starts to apply.

 

Not to all go George F. Kennan here, but Russia’s taste for mucking with other countries is as enduring as its hunger for a warm-water port and territorial expansion generally.

 

Catherine the Great funded the Targowica Confederation to undermine Poland’s 1791 constitution—essentially manufacturing instability to justify Russian intervention. The Okhrana, the Czarist secret police, undermined liberation movements in Eastern Europe and the Balkans throughout the 19^th century.

 

In 1903, the Russians published the fake Protocols of the Elders of Zion. It’s often said that the Protocols were written to foment antisemitism. There was definitely a lot of fomenting. But I think in some respects this gets the story backward. Antisemitism was so prevalent in Russia and Europe, part of the goal was to use existing antisemitism to undermine democracy, nationalism, capitalism, communism, and liberalism. Tell people that all of these new-fangled ideas are simply tools of the Jooooz and they’ll stick with the Czar who, after all, just wants to protect us from the bagel-snarfers.

 

In the Soviet era, the KGB played a similar game of antisemitic exploit-and-exacerbate. Most of the “Zionism = Fascism” garbage that flies around the West has at least some Soviet origins. Mahmoud Abbas, now in his 20^th year of his four-year term as president of the Palestinian National Authority, got his Soviet equivalent of a PhD from Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow. His dissertation: The Other Side: The Secret Relationship Between Nazism and Zionism.

 

Then of course there was all the KGB’s meddling in the American Civil Rights movement. The Sword and the Shield, a book by Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, chronicles years of KGB measures in the U.S. to sow racial unrest. In 1967, Moscow aimed at removing Martin Luther King Jr. from his leadership role within the broader civil rights movement. According to Andrew and Mitrokhin, KGB higher-ups approved a plan to “place articles in the African press, which could then be reprinted in American newspapers, portraying King as an ‘Uncle Tom’ who was secretly receiving government subsidies to tame the civil rights movement and prevent it threatening the Johnson administration.”

 

Under Vladimir Putin, Russia has meddled in the domestic politics of pretty much every NATO country, including the United States. They fund rabble-rousers, radicals and other troublemakers, neo-Nazis, and social media influencers (including useful idiots like Tim Pool and Benny Johnson).

 

This all barely scratches the surface. In short, the Russians are good at this stuff.

 

That’s the context I had in mind when Donald Trump revealed that Putin—a former KGB agent after all—told him that the 2020 election was rigged because of mail-in voting.

 

If you watched the Trump-Zelensky meeting, you may have noticed that one of the only moments when Trump was really passionate and animated about anything substantive was when he talked about the perfidy of mail-in voting. Then there’s the associated Truth Social post. I’ll reprint the whole thing, if only to reward Jeff Blehar for his heroic work transcribing it (Trump’s Truth Social Posts are now behind a paywall, so he copied it from a screenshot):

 

I’m going to lead a movement to get rid of MAIL-IN BALLOTS, and also, while we’re at it, Highly “Inaccurate,” Very Expensive and Seriously Controversial VOTING MACHINES, which cost ten Times more than accurate and sophisticated Watermark Paper, which is faster, and leaves NO DOUBT, at the end of the evening, as to who WON, and who LOST, the Election. We are now the only Country in the World that uses Mail-In Voting. All others gave it up because of the MASSIVE VOTER FRAUD ENCOUNTERED. WE WILL BEGIN THIS EFFORT, WHICH WILL BE STRONGLY OPPOSED BY THE DEMOCRATS BECAUSE THEY CHEAT AT LEVELS NEVER SEEN BEFORE, by signing an EXECUTIVE ORDER to help bring HONESTY to the 2026 Midterm Elections. Remember, the States are merely an “agent” for the Federal Government in counting and tabulating the votes. They must do what the Federal Government, as represented by the President of the United States, tells them, FOR THE GOOD OF OUR COUNTRY, to do. With their HORRIBLE Radical Left policies, like Open Borders, Men Playing in Women’s Sports, Transgender and “WOKE” for everyone, and so much more, Democrats are virtually Unelectable without using this completely disproven Mail-in SCAM. ELECTIONS CAN NEVER BE HONEST WITH MAIL IN BALLOTS/VOTING, and everybody, IN PARTICULAR THE DEMOCRATS, KNOWS THIS. I, AND THE REPUBLICAN PARTY, WILL FIGHT LIKE HELL TO BRING HONESTY AND INTEGRITY BACK TO OUR ELECTIONS. THE MAIL-IN BALLOT HOAX, USING VOTING MACHINES THAT ARE A COMPLETE AND TOTAL DISASTER, MUST END, NOW!!! REMEMBER, WITHOUT FAIR AND HONEST ELECTIONS, AND STRONG AND POWERFUL BORDERS, YOU DON’T EVEN HAVE A SEMBLANCE OF A COUNTRY. THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER!!! DONALD J. TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.

 

Now, this rant is chock-full of factual and constitutional nonsense:

 

·         We are not the only country in the world with mail-in voting.

 

·         Mail-in voting is not new, though it has been expanded in recent years, mistakenly in my opinion.

 

·         Voting machines work just fine.

 

·         States are not “agents” of the federal government. 

 

The president has zero constitutional authority to dictate how elections are conducted. States are in charge of their elections, and to the extent the federal government has any ability to influence how elections are handled, that falls almost entirely to Congress and to a lesser extent the courts, which can interpret how the law or the Constitution is being followed.

 

Oh, and just to be clear: Trump didn’t win the 2020 election and, despite three-score court cases, many before Trump-appointed judges, Trump’s lawyers never presented any tangible evidence to the contrary.

 

But thanks to the most cost-effective Russian psyop ever—just a few words from Putin—Trump is on a jihad to convince the American people that our electoral system is broken and corrupt and that any election outcomes not to his liking are presumptively fraudulent because the other major party in America is a conspiracy against the American people.

 

Whatever happens with the “peace” negotiations with Russia, Ukraine, and Europe—I’m hopeful but deeply skeptical—Putin scored a win with that one well-crafted Wormtongue gambit.

 

Zero cheers for mobile voting.

 

I actually didn’t set out to write about this at all, but I got on a roll. So let me briefly scratch the intended itch.

 

In response to Trump’s new unconstitutional “movement” to eliminate mail-in voting, erstwhile presidential candidate Andrew Yang said on X, “We should be making it easier to vote – like voting on your phone – not harder.” He then posted a link to another “movement,” helpfully titled Mobile Voting.

 

Mobile voting is a rehabbed version of online voting, which was very popular during the early days of the internet. In 1999 Jesse Jackson Jr. pushed for it. About a decade later, Dick Morris took the toes out of his mouth long enough to write a terrible book, Vote.com, which called for mass online voting, not just in elections but in referenda. (I wrote about it for National Review at the time—the headline was Vote.con—but sadly, it’s unfindable now).

 

There are some ideas that are bad because they won’t work. There are other ideas that are bad because even if they worked, they’d be bad. And there are some ideas that are bad because they won’t work, and trying to make them work will make everything worse. Online—or, now “mobile”—voting is in that sweet spot.

 

I said above that I think the expansion of mail-in voting was a mistake. I don’t think it’s a mistake because it’s an invitation to fraud, though there is somewhat more mail-in voting fraud compared to other methods. I think it’s a bad idea precisely because it makes voting too easy. I don’t want to disenfranchise anyone. I want people to take their franchise more seriously. The widespread adoption of early and mail-in voting has lowered the cost—in time, in effort, in reflection—of voting, and when you lower the cost of something you also reduce the perceived value of it.

 

It’s been three decades since Robert D. Putnam introduced the idea of “bowling alone.” This is the observation—verified again and again—that civil society is unraveling as people no longer participate in voluntary organizations the way they used to. I subscribe to this view because I think it’s an empirical fact. But after 30 years of high-minded discussion about this fact—from books like Charles Murray’s essential Coming Apart to David Brooks’ most recent op-ed—we’re still pushing the idea that the central communal civic event of our political system—Election Day—is an unjust burden or intolerable inconvenience.

 

We’ve had mail-in voting since the Civil War, but the idea then was to allow people with very good reasons not to have to make their way to a polling station, stand in line with their neighbors and fellow citizens, and cast a vote. If you’re stationed abroad or have some other predicament or condition that requires you to vote in absentia, so be it. That’s reasonable. But we lose something important when we erase things like deadlines and the civic ceremony of voting.

 

Mobile voting supercharges this point. What is to be gained by making it possible to vote after watching a TikTok video or between games of Candy Crush? The assumption behind these sorts of schemes is that we lose something incredibly valuable when people are too lazy, too unconcerned, too uninformed to vote. What is that thing? The person who says, “Yeah, I’d vote. But going down to the polling station is too much of a hassle” may be a perfectly decent person. But why bring the mountain to them? I’ve never understood this. Now the idea is that filling out a form and putting it in the mail is too burdensome. And, while I have no data on this, I bet many of the people pushing this idea are still moved by JFK’s line, “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.”  

 

Asking them to take the time to vote—even by mail—is too big of an ask?

 

One of the reasons why small donors are a major driver of our political dysfunction is that politicians and consultants have figured out that you can eke a few bucks out of people if you make them really angry for a few minutes. They see some rage bait on Fox or MSNBC and make a quick donation to “save America.” With mobile voting the same methods can be used to get people to vote in real time, before they have even the chance to find out that Marjorie Taylor Greene just lied to them. This makes better citizens? This improves the quality of the people’s “voice”?

 

I know I am a broken record on this, but the idea that we get better policies or politicians when turnout is high is just a romantic myth. The idea that, if only all “voices” were heard, we’d get better government, is rooted in warmed-over hogwash. Voting doesn’t create better citizens either. The peddlers of mobile voting, or lowering the voting age, often suggest that voting is the gateway drug to good citizenship. Where’s the evidence? I think good citizenship should be the gateway to voting. 

 

So much for my philosophical objections. I do not believe that mobile voting can be made reliably secure. One of the great advantages of our current system—mail-in and early voting included—is it’s incredibly difficult to hack at scale: Successfully forging so many ballots is an impossible task. Each school board and dog catcher election is like a watermark ensuring where the ballot was cast. Mobile voting eliminates that problem.

 

But I am open to the idea that I am wrong about the technology. Maybe blockchain and AI can solve the security problems. I am far more confident they won’t solve the security concerns. When Trump tried to steal the 2020 election, hordes of grifters and morons insisted that the election was “hacked.” Roger Stone claimed North Korea shipped fake ballots to Maine, which were then seeded across the Eastern seaboard. The Four Seasons Landscaping Super Squad prattled about hacked Italian satellites and Chinese-doctored ballots. How much easier would it be to make equally fraudulent claims when the entire election is on the cloud?

 

Russia and China would have a field day flooding the social media bloodstream with TikTok videos of people claiming their vote was switched on their phones. Let’s assume that would be a lie—who would we rely on to tell us the truth? “The experts”? The experts—pretty much all of them—said the 2020 election wasn’t stolen, and they could point to physical proof like hand recounts and the like. And still tens of millions of people don’t believe them. 

 

This passionate rejection of the truth has many causes. But I think one of them is that people have come to believe that they should get what they want on demand without inconvenience. When they don’t, they think the fault lies in the system or the experts that run it. This Veruca Salt-like demand for instant satisfaction is a cultural and social problem that comes, at least in part, from the ease that wealth and technology bring. The other day on Twitter there were people claiming that concern about crime is stupid because you can just do your shopping online, as if Amazon Prime is the solution to armed robbery or shoplifting.

 

Mobile voting is a civic analogue to this kind of idiocy. It encourages, at a subliminal level, the idea that if we make voting as easy as ordering a six-pack of Starbucks Cold Brew, we’ll also get what we ordered. Voting doesn’t work like that. But thinking that it does—or should—will not improve the health of our democracy or make better citizens.