Trump's Michigan voter fraud comments reveal America's desperate need for reforms

Michigan sends absentee ballot applications to 7.7 million people ahead of Primaries and the General Election.

If you make it easier for more people to vote with absentee and mail-in ballots, Trump said on “Fox & Friends, “you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.”.

In Wisconsin, for example, the Republican state legislature blocked the Democratic governor’s efforts to mail ballots to all voters and the Republican majority on the state Supreme Court overruled his effort to move the April primary to June.

State and local election officials need substantial amounts of federal funds to administer the vastly increased number of mailed-in ballots that will be cast in the November elections in the face of the coronavirus.

This money is needed to pay for crucial additional expenditures — ballot printing, postage, drop boxes for absentee ballots and appropriate security, secure electronic absentee ballot request technology, ballot tracking, improvements to absentee ballot processing, additional facilities for both ballot processing and storage, additional staffing to support absentee ballot processing, polling facilities that meet public health standards and increased poll worker support.

And McConnell has prevented Senate consideration of all legislative efforts in this Congress to protect against foreign interference in our elections.

Assuming the current polls hold up in November, we will face an historic opportunity in 2021 to enact arguably the most transformational reform legislation ever considered by Congress.

It is designed to repair our political system, reform our campaign finance laws and revitalize our democracy.

McConnell, however, has blocked its consideration in the Senate.

H.R 1 has been carefully crafted to obtain the support it needs to pass Congress and cannot become a Christmas tree on which to hang other substantive or systemic reforms without dangerously jeopardizing its enactment.

In contrast to earlier decades of bipartisan support for democracy reforms, congressional Republicans in the last 10 years have almost universally opposed these reforms.

McConnell has now spent decades using either obstructionist filibusters by the minority or his scheduling powers in the majority to block Senate consideration of democracy reforms.

But a new Senate Democratic majority would no longer allow this.

It looks like we are on the cusp of enacting an historic package of democracy reforms to repair our political system and restore our democracy.