It is hard to grasp President Trump’s fondness for Russian President Putin. They come from completely different backgrounds and yet they share contempt for the democratic ideal of expanding voter participation.
Putin owes his power to restricting his political opposition through fear and strongman executive authority. Few dare resist his iron-fisted governance system at the ballot box. Or even care to show up since the outcome is predetermined.
Trump similarly seeks to create an electoral system that will ensure his imperious brand of politics succeeds in elections now and far into the future. His ambition is to repress Democrats and other rivals.
There’s ample evidence of Trump’s intention to broaden the executive authority of the presidency so he and like-minded successors can rule with a more centralized style of government.
It appears to motivate Trump’s vow to eliminate mail-in voting and electronic voting machines prior to the mid-term congressional elections next year. The aim is to retain – and even grow – Republican majorities in the Senate and House.
That’s also why he’s pressuring Republicans to reset congressional districts in GOP-controlled states to disadvantage the few Democratic seats. It’s called gerrymandering, a partisan rigging process that usually occurs with both parties after the decennial census, not five years before it.
And if those tactics don’t move the needle, there’s the ongoing effort to purge voter registration files, tighten registration policies, shorten early voting time, and require strict in-person voter ID rules.
Already several GOP-controlled states have made it harder to vote in federal and state elections, especially for the disabled, seniors without birth certificates or other forms of official ID, citizens living abroad and low-income voters.
To achieve his goal, Trump needs a subordinate Congress and a pliant Supreme Court. They are the historic check-and-balance against authoritarian tendencies of American presidents.
The Constitution’s opening words define “We the People” – not the president – as the ultimate political power in our representative form of democracy. Voters exercise their authority in elections. They can believe Trump’s fairy tale that our current election system is corrupt or they can demand evidence to prove widespread fraud rather than his damning rhetoric.
Turnout in the last two presidential elections rated the highest in more than a century – 66 percent of eligible voters in 2020 and 64 percent in 2024. The 2016 election drew 60 percent of qualified voters.
Mail-in ballots account for the greater participation. Impartial investigations into allegations of serious fraud have been debunked. Fox News and Newsmax paid more than $850 million to settle 2016 election lies that electronic voting machines rigged votes.
The vast majority of electronic voting machines tabulate mail-in and in-person paper ballots that remain as evidence of voter choices. In contested elections, they can be hand-counted – as they were in the several states at Trump’s insistence after he lost the 2020 election.
The manual recount did not change the results, though Trump tried unsuccessfully to convince Georgia’s Republican election officials to find sufficient votes to make him the victor in that battleground state.
He was more persuasive in convincing loyalists that the election was stolen from him, resulting in the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot aimed at overturning Democrat Joe Biden’s victory. He granted clemency to the hundreds of rioters early in his second term, calling them “patriots.”
That’s a description Putin applies when talking about his popularity in Russia. He doesn’t worry about elections, having held power for a quarter century, exiling to Siberia his only real recent opposition politician, Alexei Navalny, who died in prison in February of 2024.
Trump and Putin discussed presidential elections at their recent Alaska summit, with the Russian leader quoted by Trump as saying he lost the 2020 election to rigged mail-in voting. “No country has all-in voting,” Putin told Trump. “It’s impossible to have mail-in voting and have honest elections.”
Trump later repeated Putin’s false claim that America is the lone country in the world to permit mail-in voting.
Several countries allow it for some or all voters, according to the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance. Canada, Germany, South Korea and nine other smaller nations authorize all voters to vote by mail in national elections. Eight U.S. states do likewise: Hawaii, Washington, Oregon, California, Nevada, Utah, Colorado and New Hampshire.
Stark choices lie ahead for you, the voters, on whether to expand or restrict voter participation.
Trump has set the agenda.