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Notes -
Supreme Court roundup thread? They dropped four opinions today that have some pretty wide ranging implications. Some more than others.
In Chatrie v. United States a 5-4 court (with Roberts and Barrett joining Kagan, Sotomayor, and Jackson) holds that geofence warrants constitute a "search" under the 4th amendment. This does not necessarily resolve the case in favor of Chatrie, though. The government did have a warrant in this case, although it's not clear whether the warrant was "reasonable." SCOTUS here is mostly pushing back on the holding by the Fourth Circuit panel that a search had not even occurred under the fourth amendment, due to the third party doctrine.
In Watson v. Republican National Committee a 5-4 court (with Roberts and Barrett joining Kagan, Sotomayor, and Jackson) the court holds that federal laws specifying an election day do not pre-empt state laws that permit counting ballots received after that day, so long as the ballots are sent by that day.
In Trump v. Slaughter a 6-3 court holds that the "for-cause" removal provision for FTC commissioners is unconstitutional, overruling Humphrey's Executor. This was pretty widely anticipated, since the Supreme Court has gradually been expanding the President's power to remove officials since Trump's re-election.
In Trump v. Cook a 5-4 court (Roberts and Kavanaugh joining Kagan, Sotomayor, and Jackson) holds that the President may not fire members of the Federal Reserve Board of Governor's at-will. The for-cause provision regarding firing members of the Feds BoG is constitutional and sets a "substantial threshold" for what constitutes cause.
Most online discussion I've seen has been focused on the latter two decisions and their apparent inconsistency. Apparently, Congress can only insulate executive branch employees from Presidential termination some of the time and those circumstances do not depend on the wording of the statute or anything else Congress has any control over. Roberts is the author of both opinions and he tries to square the circle by arguing that the United States has a long history of independent central banking but I don't think he's very convincing. The Federal Reserve itself is a mere 1 year older than the FTC (founded in 1913 vs 1914) so Roberts tries to reach back to the First and Second Bank of the United States and nevermind the fact there was an 80 year period where the United States had no central bank between the Second Bank of the United States and the Federal Reserve. Some of the syllabus even, in my view, departs from anything that could be called a legal argument to argue that this is good policy:
The court has also said tomorrow will be the last opinion day, in which we will presumably get the four remaining opinions (including birthright citizenship) so maybe I'll have to do another one tomorrow.
Watson is pretty terrible; it allows bad actors to keep adding backdated votes after election day until they get the result they want. Vastly increases the ease of such fraud.
I don't feel like this is viable, you basically need to enlist an entire post office as your accomplice when you get them to put a false date in their post-marking machine and run a bunch of ballots through it for you, and post offices have security cameras.
How hard would it really be to fake a postmark?
high-res photo of a bunch of stamps on mail
3d-model the stamp's shape
3d-print the stamp in a rubbery material with a resin printer, so no layer lines.
gently weather/age the stamp.
...would be one obvious and probably undetectable method. You could use this to match an existing stamp's "unique" flaws/weathering, or use it to create a plausible stamp that doesn't match known stamps, whichever is more useful.
I go into more detail in another comment but this falls apart if it turns out the post office that you are pretending to have mailed this from turns out not to have handled nearly enough mail that day to account for all the ballots that were supposedly mailed through it.
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