Ritchie is a former Minnesota secretary of state and serves on the board of the U.S. Vote Foundation. Dzieduszycka-Suinat is the foundation’s president and CEO.
A handful of companies are pushing hard to overturn long-standing, and much needed, prohibitions against online voting. While most voters have no access to online voting, some 25 states currently allow military and overseas voters to vote online. This very limited – and still problematic – access accorded to relatively few voters is being used by online voting advocates as a wedge to pry open access for the broader voting population.
This is a dangerous idea that must be stopped. Despite an onslaught of misinformation that pretends online voting is totally safe, the opposite is true: Internet-based voting is fraught with danger for our already threatened democracy. Green-lighting online voting is a grave threat that needs to be contained before we hand the enemies of democracy another powerful tool with which to accomplish their goals.
The threat is real and ongoing: Online voting proponents have been working hard, and spending hard, on pursuing their vision despite ample evidence that it is fundamentally unsafe. Proponents have even resorted to clandestine tactics: In the run-up to the 2020 election, the U.S. Postal Service secretly pursued an online-voting experiment, without the oversight of Federal agencies that have direct knowledge about how elections work. The project was abandoned after a test of the system showed it to be exceptionally vulnerable to hacking.
While a growing chorus of election experts oppose the expansion of online voting, efforts continue by a number of well-funded online voting proponents to promote this dangerous concept. Recently, these proponents have convinced San Francisco’s Elections Commission to consider conducting an online voting pilot. Despite ample evidence that online voting makes hacking an election easy and risk-free, the newly signed https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/4350/text contains provisions for yet another study of online voting.
The consensus against online voting is broad and authoritative, and the risks have been well-documented since our organization published a seminal study in 2013. More recently, the Department of Homeland Security, the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology advised that voting online was “high-risk even with [risk-management] controls in place.” Online voting, the multi-agency report concluded, “creates significant security risks to the confidentiality of ballot and voter data (e.g., voter privacy and ballot secrecy), integrity of the voted ballot, and availability of the system.”
Voices in Congress have also risen up against online voting. Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden or Oregon, debating the safety of mobile voting last year, called online voting “ about the worst thing you can do in terms of election security in America, short of putting American ballot boxes on a Moscow street.”
Endemic low voter turnout is the most commonly used excuse for promoting online voting, and as former and current elections administrators and services providers, we agree that the problem of low turnout needs to be addressed. But rather than focus on a solution that increases the vulnerability of our democracy, we should start by applying reforms and practices that we know can work to enhance turnout for voters here and those serving in the military or living overseas.
Automatic voter registration – for all citizens, including uniformed services members — would have a huge impact on turnout. Automatically mailing ballots to all registered voters, and making it free to return them once a vote has been cast, would also improve turnout. Ballot tracking services and extended deadlines for the return of military and overseas citizens’ ballots, for example, would further help ensure that ballots arrive on time. These practices, moreover, have proved to be cost-effective and relatively simple to implement.
As it stands, our elections systems require a $53 billion infusion to update equipment, registration practices and cybersecurity. Funding these well-known requirements should be our priority, rather than funding yet another vanity pilot project that will showcase an approach that has proved to be dangerously ineffective many times over. Sometimes the simplest solution is the best one. Let’s start there — and avoid opening a Pandora's box before the next election. There’s simply too much on the line to risk threatening our democracy any further.
A golden tray sits on the Resolute Desk as President Donald Trump speaks during an announcement on American nuclear innovation in the Oval Office at the White House on July 24, 2026, in Washington, D.C. Trump is signing multiple executive orders targeting the nuclear energy sector and easing rules for new reactors and nuclear fuel supply chains.
Trump’s hubris rivals the fallen heroes of ancient Greek mythology
In January, the New York Times asked President Donald Trump if there were any limits on his global powers.
“Yeah,” the president responded, “there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”
That was eight months ago, but fortunately Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster adaptation of “The Odyssey” has made ancient Greek literature newly relevant. Before that window closes, I’d like to talk about hubris.
Today, the term mostly means excessive pride or arrogance. That’s part of what the Greeks meant by it too, but the meaning was a bit richer and more specific. Hubris was an insolent or outrageous act that offended the gods, often because the transgressor was claiming abilities or authorities that solely belonged to supreme beings.
Nolan renamed and slightly modified the concept of xenia for the film, calling it “Zeus’ law.” In the director’s telling, mortals should follow the rules laid out by the gods, specifically the requirement to treat strangers with respect lest they be gods in disguise.
In a sense, hubris is the opposite, or at least the rejection, of xenia. The hubris of the suitors, and at times Odysseus himself, invites punishment by the gods and their mortal instruments.
Which brings me back to Donald Trump. His claim that there are no constraints on his personal power to dictate events on the global stage was one of the greatest expressions of hubris ever uttered by a political leader.
Trump’s claim was obviously false when he made it.
He vowed that he could end the Russia-Ukraine war in 24 hours. He’s proved powerless to make that happen. If he had divine powers to work his will, why would he have balked at implementing his tariffs so often that Wall Street adopted the “TACO trade” term for his deals? “TACO” stands for “Trump always chickens out.”
And why would Trump have made so many embarrassing concessions to China — from rescinding tariffs on Chinese goods to allowing them to buy crucial and incredibly valuable computer chips?
But Trump saw his success at capturing Venezuelan strongman Nicolas Maduro as proof of his ability to launch missiles to the same effect as Zeus’ lightning bolts. Trump believed he was the most powerful man who ever lived.
This is no exaggeration. In March, when the Iran invasion seemed successful, Trump gave a document penned by“Presidential Historian David King” to New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan purporting to prove that Trump was “the most powerful person to have EVER walked this planet.” King was, in fact, a businessman and occasional caddy for legendary golfer Gary Player.
King compared Trump favorably to many of history’s most powerful, and often heinous, figures: Alexander the Great, Attila the Hun, William the Conqueror, Napoleon Bonaparte, Joseph Stalin, Genghis Khan, Mao Tse Tung, Adolf Hitler and Vladimir Lenin. Many of these men thought they were the most powerful person in the world, too. And many were defeated precisely because they believed it.
At least Napoleon and Hitler had a string of truly impressive victories before they learned the folly of hubris. The limits on Trump’s power have been exposed by far less august forces than the combined might of the allies in World War II or the fearsome Russian winter.
Iran is a comparatively middling power. But the regime’s ability to absorb punishment while imposing its will on the Strait of Hormuz has proved to be a greater constraint on Trump’s power than his morality or mind. We should note that, at least rhetorically, his morality has not proved much of a constraint. He has repeatedly promised to destroy Iranian “civilization” if the regime refuses to capitulate.
But they haven’t — and won’t anytime soon — because the regime’s tolerance for pain far outstrips Trump’s. The combined fear of skyrocketing oil prices, outrage of Gulf state potentates, diminishing weapon supplies and domestic unpopularity is doing the work that international law, congressional oversight and the collective opinion of foreign policy experts can’t or won’t do.
If I considered Trump more heroic than reason and facts could allow, I would say his Sisyphean predicament has the whiff of Greek tragedy to it. Trump is vexed by the fact that the Iranians won’t honor deals or ratify his countless premature claims of victory — giving new meaning to his vow that his presidency would make people tired of winning. It’s almost like they’re out-Trumping Trump.
Things might have gone better if he’d heeded that great Greek tragedian Sophocles: “For Zeus utterly abhors the boasts of a proud tongue.”
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Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.