Donald Trump and maga cult are determined to upset the American elections; Where is Senator Susan Collins?

The most dangerous weapon for a democracy to put in control of an aspiring dictator is not necessarily the police or the military.

Echo editorial board opinion published in the Sun Sentinel, a South Florida newspaper.

It’s control over the ballot box, the source of power over everything else.

Our vulnerability is never more obvious than in President Trump’s insistence on dictating how states conduct elections and who can vote. His feverish obsession is a frontal assault on democracy. Nothing could be more important than for Congress and the courts to thwart him.

Trump is so desperate to suppress voting in the midterms that he’s blocking enactment of a critical national security bill, and he refuses to sign overwhelmingly popular bipartisan housing legislation until Congress acts on his voter suppression bill.

Denying women the right to vote

The deceptively named SAVE America Act would impose a proof of citizenship provision that would disenfranchise millions of women whose married names don’t match their birth certificates. It would also largely eliminate voting by mail — the method used by a third of all participating voters in Florida in the last statewide election.

He called off signing the housing bill as sponsors gathered to celebrate it and before a scheduled closed-door luncheon with Senate Republicans — blindsiding members of his own party. Trump is playing the foulest sort of politics with security and with the shelter needs of millions of Americans.

It takes a tyrant with an empty soul to do that.
Asserting election jurisdiction that neither the Constitution nor the Congress gives him, Trump has also signed a breathtaking executive order. Two federal judges have now pronounced it unconstitutional, the latest Thursday (Trump will appeal).

A federal voter dossier

Trump’s order also contemplates the federal government compiling its own state-by state lists of eligible voters. The database Trump would employ is error-prone and so afoul of federal privacy laws that a judge blocked its use.

It should never be the federal government’s business to manage elections, even if a trustworthy president were in office.

The original Constitution (Artcle I, Section 4) left it to states to determine how to elect federal officers. It also authorized the Congress, but not the president, “to make or alter such regulations.”

The Postal Service ploy is deservedly under attack in the courts, where Trump is zero for 10 in lawsuits demanding state voter rolls.

As for the dangeros SAVE Act, Senate Republican leaders don’t have even a majority of votes to pass it, let alone the 60 to break a filibuster.

The Senate should also pass a clean foreign intelligence bill and dare him to veto it. Either he vetoes the housing law or it becomes law in a week or so, without his signature, but the clock doesn’t start until the House sends him the bill. 

Speaker Mike Johnson could show leadership by sending it now.
The voters are watching🗳️👀

The “voter fraud” Trump harps upon exists only in his mind, and only when he or his party loses. If Democrats are so good at cheating, then why did they let Trump narrowly win crucial swing states in 2016, and 2024❓

Making it harder to vote by mail is meant to hurt Democratic candidates because their voters are more likely to cast their ballots that way.

Trump has deluded many Republicans into distrusting our elections, especially mail voting — even though he has voted by mail in Palm Beach County, as recently as March.

By denigrating the foundation of our democracy, Trump is willfully- purposefully- eroding it. Serious inquiries have turned up only vanishingly rare cases of ineligible people voting or of someone voting twice in any election.

What is a legitimate concern are the complaints, hardly from Trump alone, about seemingly interminable vote counts in some states. Prolonged uncertainty feeds conspiracy theories. That’s notably true of California, but the problem is simply that it allows up to 30 days for vote canvassing.

The appropriate remedy is to shorten that, not to make election day the deadline for returning mail ballots. That would put too much trust and power into the hands of a postal service whose legal independence Trump does not respect.

A reasonable compromise on ballots that arrive after the election would be to count them if they were postmarked in advance of election day rather than on election day itself. But that choice belongs to the states — not Trump, whose only interest is in rigging the rules for his party’s benefit.

Trump complains incessantly that if voters elect a Democratic Congress in November, it would begin investigating his administration’s mounting heap of misdeeds, blunders and corruption — as well it should.

Maine Writer P.S.- Maine Senator Susan Collins has 28 years seniority to call for impeachement of Donald John Trump because he is trampling our Constitution, but she does nothing.