President Trump’s recent decree that the states must follow his orders to get rid of voting machines and voting by mail is wrong in every way. It’s wrong on substance, wrong on policy and wrong on the Constitution.

It’s one of the many ways Trump is trying to take power away from voters to maximize his control over the country now and in the future — and that’s wrong, too.

Trump’s obsession with discredited conspiracy theories about mail-in ballots and voting machines is tied up with his refusal to accept that voters rejected him in 2020.

The man who can’t stop talking about a supposedly rigged election wants to rig future elections to give Republicans more power than they deserve. Abusive redistricting is part of that plan. Making it harder for millions of people to vote is another.

The president’s insistence that he can force states to abandon voting systems that have been proven to be safe, accurate and accessible in favor of less accurate and more expensive hand-counting of paper ballots is a sign of how far his vision of a dictatorial presidency has gone to his head.

It is also giving us one more test of Republican lawmakers’ willingness to abandon principle and the rule of law........

© The Hill