The challenges from this year's surge of mail voting continue to mount.
At least 130,000 primary ballots across the country have arrived too late to be counted, while tens of thousands more have been tossed because of missing signatures or other flaws — a 1 percent overall rejection rate in primaries so far that, while relatively small, could still prove decisive in a close election.
And then there are the envelopes that arrive on time and are completed correctly, but somehow don't get tabulated, leaving elections in limbo and local clerks embarrassed, although free of accusations of fraud. That's now happened twice this month alone — just in towns along Interstate 90 in the Northeast.
First was the local tax referendum in Grafton, 50 miles west of Boston, which took more than a week to conclude as officials haggled over the handling of 202 mailed-in envelopes discovered in the town clerk's vault after the initial count. (The final result improved the tax increase's margin of victory by four votes.)
Now, there's the case of the once-tied Republican primary for an opening on the bench that handles divorces and child custody disputes in Herkimer County, a rural and deeply wooded sliver of upstate New York halfway between Albany and Syracuse.
Three weeks after the initial count showed 2,291 votes for both would-be Family Court judges, attorney Thad Luke is claiming victory by five votes. His win was sealed after county election officials realized they had never seen any absentee votes from the hamlets of Norway and Russia (really) — and eventually located a cache of 30 ballots.
They were at the county courthouse, in "the secure room where the ballots were stored under a dual control lock system," the board said Friday. "The uncast ballots were still in their envelopes in the tray. These absentee ballot envelopes that had been cut open, but the ballots themselves had not been removed from the envelopes and counted."
The loser, municipal Judge Mark Rose, was as gracious as he could be about the oversight — which he described as understandable given the influx of mailed ballots in the June 23 primary because of the coronavirus pandemic. But he nonetheless said he would consider suing to seek a recanvassing of the result.
"They're very hardworking people in the Board of Elections and this was thrown on them," he said. "In a democracy such as the United States, when there is such a small margin, there should be an automatic recount."
At least 65,000 absentee or mail-in ballots have been rejected because they arrived past the deadline in 17 presidential primaries so far, NPR calculated this week, with rejection rates ranging from 2 tenths of 1 percent in Mississippi to nearly 6 percent in Virginia.
That report did not include California, where state records showed 70,330 ballots were rejected either because they were postmarked after primary day or arrived more than three days later. The Associated Press reported that the overall rejection rate was 1.5 percent, the highest in a statewide election since 2010, once ballots tossed for missing or indecipherable signatures or other problems were added to the total.
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.