If your Aunt Karen still believes bumbling, stumbling, basement-bound Joe Biden got more population-adjusted votes in 2020 than rock-star Barack Obama got in 2008, I’m afraid I can’t help her.

I’ve tried, but I’ve clearly failed.

But if, in Karen’s sabbatical from reality, she continues to insist that bulk-mail balloting is the best way for a free country to conduct its elections and thereby ensure the governing mandate of the citizenry, well, that’s where I need to disabuse her. Because if she believes that, then she’s cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs.

Donald Trump intends to do something about this. On Monday, Trump took to Truth Social and promised to make changes in the way we conduct our elections:

I am 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.

But that’s where the trouble starts. The Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled for more than a century that presidential electors “are no more officers or agents of the United States than are the members of the state legislatures when acting as electors of federal senators, or the people of the states when acting as electors of representatives in Congress.” Even conservative stalwart Justice Clarence Thomas has said as much in 1995: “The selection of representatives in Congress is indisputably an act of the people of each State. … When the people of Georgia pick their representatives in Congress, they are acting as the people of Georgia, not as the corporate agents for the undifferentiated people of the Nation as a whole.”

In short, the states — not the sitting president — have the constitutional authority to run their elections. So what Trump wants to do is likely unconstitutional, even if his intention is to clean up our grotesquely flawed election system.

Look around. No country worth its salt does mail-in voting. France — France — banned the practice half a century ago because it knew it invited rampant fraud. In 2005, a bipartisan report from the Commission on Federal Election Reform, chaired by former Democrat President Jimmy Carter and former Republican Secretary of State James Baker, concluded the following: “Absentee ballots remain the largest source of potential voter fraud.”

Got that? In 2012, even The New York Times warned us about the risk of fraud with voting by mail.

Heck, even Vladimir Putin understands the risks of mail-in voting.

So what happened since then, since that moment of bipartisan unanimity? Simple: The Democrats figured out how to use this corrupt system to their advantage. Indeed, they used it to deploy a chaotic and largely unregulated bulk-mail ballot fraud scheme in 2020, and the Republicans have been on their heels ever since — or at least they were until last summer.

Remember Swamp the Vote? That was Donald Trump’s grudging but ultimately full-throated endorsement of our flawed election system in the run-up to last year’s presidential election. In the 34-second video, Trump urges Republicans to use “every appropriate tool available to beat the Democrats.” He continued, “Whether you vote early, absentee, by mail, or in-person, we must swamp the radical Democrats with massive turnout. … The way you win is to swamp them. If we swamp them, they can’t cheat.”

As it turns out, Trump was right: The American people swamped the Democrats, and they couldn’t cheat. But that doesn’t mean they won’t be able to cheat in a handful of locally decided congressional elections next year — local elections that will likely decide who controls Congress and whether the Trump agenda will continue or grind to a halt.

To be sure, things have worked out pretty well since The Rigged Election of 2020. Donald Trump didn’t go gentle into that good night. Instead, he raged, raged against the dying of the Right and the corruption of our voting process. At the same time, he allowed his America-hating opposition to notch one own goal after another during the Autopen Presidency. The result? A win for the ages last November 5, a resounding repudiation of the Democrats, and an all-new Trump administration — older, wiser, and more urgently energetic than ever.

Bulk-mail ballots are the real issue because they don’t sufficiently verify on either end — sending or receiving. Here in our shop, we see Georgia as having a better model: Request a ballot using your driver’s license, return it in a set number of days, and it doesn’t get counted after Election Day.

It seems simple: Mail-in voting is likely here to stay, and voters who’ve become accustomed to the convenience may well take it out on Republicans if this “right” is suddenly snatched away from them.

So this isn’t the end of the story. Nor is it the beginning of the end. More likely, this is the end of the beginning. And we’ll all need to stay tuned.