Taking election advice from Vladimir Putin

If you're going to take advice on how to run free and fair elections, Vladimir Putin is the last person you should be looking to.

Of course, Donald Trump was more than happy last week to echo Putin's criticisms of mail-in voting – and then call for a nationwide ban on it.

I'm not about to let Trump infringe upon the secure and accessible means of voting that Oregonians have enjoyed for nearly three decades. We have the highest rate of voter participation of any U.S. state, and – contrary to what Putin and Trump say – it has nothing to do with "fraud."

Trump knows he can't defend his increasingly unpopular agenda, so he's turning to any means he can to shift the electoral playing field in his party's favor. It began with his calls for Republicans to gerrymander additional Congressional seats, and now he's continuing with attacks on mail-in voting.

He has zero legal means of making it impossible to vote by mail – but if there's anything we know about Trump, it's that he believes the law doesn't apply to him. So we need to proactively defend voting access heading into 2026 and make it impossible for Trump to sneak anything by the American people.

We need a majority in Congress that's going to actually stick up for our democracy when the President lies and parrots the talking points of an autocrat and war criminal.

More soon,

Ron