Free Republic

The law enforcement arm of the U.S. Postal Service has been quietly running a program that tracks and collects Americans’ social media posts, including those about planned protests, according to a document obtained by Yahoo News.The details of the surveillance effort, known as iCOP, or Internet Covert Operations Program, have not previously been made public. The work involves having analysts trawl through social media sites to look for what the document describes as “inflammatory” postings and then sharing that information across government agencies.

A new report has revealed how vulnerable voting by mail can be. It should alarm all who are pushing for all-mail elections: Based on federal data from the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, millions of mail ballots were never counted as completed votes. According to the commission’s 2016 report, for example, more mail ballots were misdirected and unaccounted for than the margin of votes between Hillary Clinton and Donald J. Trump. She had 2.9 million more votes, yet 6.5 million ballots were misdirected or unaccounted for by the states. In other words, for every vote that Hillary won over the eventual...