I listened carefully to President Trump’s prime time speech about election fraud.
Apparently, the 2016 and 2024 elections, when Democrats controlled the White House, were clean, but the 2020 election, while he was in charge, wasn’t.
China, he said, hacked our voting systems in 2020. However, he’s still hosting Xi Jinping in Washington, D.C., next month, so apparently, he’s not all that upset with China. (The “tranche” of documents released by the administration showed that China bought publicly available voter information and didn’t use it to change any votes.)
Yet, the president kept referring to that “stolen” 2020 election. He’s been in office for a year and a half, but proof of election fraud has not appeared. As 60-plus judges, many appointed by Trump himself, pointed out, allegations without evidence aren’t proof.
The president continually accuses Democrats of stealing the 2020 election on his social media platform. Apparently, Democrats are so diabolically clever that they developed a secret way to steal the 2020 election, but forgot to deploy it in 2024 and let the Republicans win the presidency, the House and the Senate.
Instead, they reserved their secret weapon to win mayoral elections in New York and Los Angeles, two of the bluest cities in America. Is he serious?
The president’s own Justice Department touts the Heritage Foundation’s analysis of voting fraud accusations to justify attacks on voting. They found that over a span of 20 years, 68 votes were cast by non-citizens: a number so miniscule that it could not have swayed any election.
Does that seem like a valid reason to make anyone who wants to vote show proof that their name matches the one on their birth certificate? That’s what the SAVE Act, just passed through the House of Representatives with Marie Gluesenkamp Perez’s support, requires.
How many people reading this know where their birth certificate is?
How many married women who took their husband’s name would need to get a passport to verify their identity? By the time they learn this would be necessary, would they have time to get one?
It took three months to renew my passport under Biden — before DOGE slashed the federal workforce. Earlier this year, I assembled a 300-plus-piece cardboard replica of the Iron Throne while on hold with Social Security. Good luck with that passport application.
Is it reasonable to force married women who took their husbands’ name to pay extra for the right to vote? Passport applications cost $165, plus photos. Expediting costs $60-$90, and if you don’t have your birth certificate, that means more money, and time, to get a certified copy from your birth city.
The president also wants to end voting by mail and require in-person voting on one day. Good luck if you happen to live in Randle, but work in Centralia, or if you can’t get time off work to vote. Or work two jobs.
Given that he’s offered no evidence that the 2020 election was stolen, nor that the upcoming election is at risk, why this relentless assault on voting?
Susanne Weil
Onalaska
