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More: The 80-year-old president issued dark warnings at this week's GOP midterm convention about the nation's future if Republicans lost the November elections, and he even asked his followers to pledge to cheat if necessary or risk hellfire, and politics and history professor Alan Elrod published a column for Liberal Currents offered a disturbing theory about his plans.

"Trump's speech came off more like a sermon from Jonestown, and observers noticed," Elrod wrote. "My own overriding thought was: 'This speech was like some sort of performance art piece of a live entombing of a mad king and his most loyal followers.'"

--

"My colleague Samantha Hancox-Li has an elegantly simple theory for why Trump has become even more obsessed with legacy and with slapping his name on buildings and projects than he already was over his lifelong career as a shameless self-promoter: fear of death," Elrod wrote.

"As she put it: 'My current theory of Donald Trump is that he is utterly gripped by the terror of death, and is desperately attempting to leave some mark on the world that history cannot erase " this is the point of the wars, the annexation threats, the D.C. vandalism. I think right now he is genuinely fixated on adding new American territory as the brass ring, the thing they'll never be able to take away from his memory.'"

Elrod found himself inclined to agree as he watched the president's rambling, self-aggrandizing speech.

"It's a macabre but convincing psychological assessment," he wrote. "Rather than making America great again, Trump is inflicting grievous harm on it with tariffs, now upgraded to import bans against select Canadian goods; an illegal war; and a total ransacking of our public and private sectors for the enrichment of his courtiers and his family. And he is going to bury us all with him in a tomb of his own design " a ballroom."

... Saudi Arabia has increasingly relied on the Red Sea and Bab al-Mandab to export its crude since Iran has been targeting vessels in the strait of HormUz. ...

The Saudi east-west oil pipeline and its facilities, used to transport oil to the Red Sea, may have been hit by the Houthis.

Houthi attacks on Saudi Arabia ignite fires at oil facilities and wound 73 people
apnews.com

... Weeks of clashes have added pressure to limited global oil supplies as the Houthis target a shipping route Saudi Arabia has used to transport oil to world markets while the Strait of Hormuz is throttled due to the U.S.-Iran war. Tuesday's attacks hit Saudi oil facilities connected to an alternative route, the Bab el-Mandeb, a strategic waterway off the southern tip of the Arabian Peninsula that connects the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden. ...

American elections are a system

A system of voting

No system is ever perfect.

Literally no system

Errors in the voting system can be either an invalid vote is counted (generally considered voter fraud) OR an eligible voter's vote is not counted (generally considered voter suppression).

It is an irrefutable truth that the ability to have invalid votes count on a significant basis approaches nil

As an aside, even if invalid voting occurs the system does not prevent either side from using this highly inefficient method of voter fraud, thereby, inherently, there is partial balance in how actual voter fraud would play out. IOW, since both sides of the election can insert invalid votes there is a natural way of these countering each other, making the impact of inserting invalid votes as even less effective.

That is because sufficient invalid votes need to be inserted into the vote tally that would a. change the results of the vote and b. offset any counterbalancing invalid votes. This is an incredibly high hurdle to get over.

Consider that in general the entity committing voter fraud will have imperfect knowledge of how many invalid votes are required or will prevent suspicion. Too few and the results do not change, too many and red flags appear due to polling and voter turnout numbers.

It approaches an impossibility to insert sufficient invalid votes in an election on a meaningful basis.

Therefore, the incentive to insert invalid votes simply is negligible.

The capacity for the system to REJECT or DENY valid votes is infinitely greater that it is to insert invalid votes

To insert an invalid vote, one has to create a voter OR to change a vote OR to impact individual voters.

That is a far more difficult task than to PREVENT a voter from casting their vote.

All one has to do is to place regulatory hurdles in the path of voting or make voting onerous or limit access to the voting process or categorize certain voters as ineligible at the time of voting (assuring the process to validate a vote is onerous) thus denying their votes are tallied or scare voters from the election process.

So, I ask the basic question.

Which is a bigger danger to the democratic process-voter fraud or voter suppression?

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