I see various very serious threats to our democracy.  And every time I think it can’t get any worse, another distasteful example of political expediency, corruption, or an overt attempt to thwart the voting process surfaces. The first threat is the willingness of the Trump/Vance ticket to demonize legal immigrants without any evidence of wrongdoing   This is beyond the pale.  The anti-immigrant rhetoric, xenophobic hate and racist stereotypes about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio uttered by Donald Trump and his running mate JD Vance are disgraceful. It is absolutely disgusting that a former President would resort to rumor-mongering to demonize legal immigrants in our country.  But it should not come as a shock: For years Donald Trump has claimed that those crossing the borders are violent criminals or mentally ill people who have been sent to the United States by other countries without any evidence whatsoever to back up that claim. The false claim being made against Haitian immigrants is just the latest example of a demented Donald Trump demeaning and fostering racist stereotypes about Black and brown immigrants.  It is one of many reasons he is totally unfit to lead our country and is a threat to our democracy. The second threat is the unfettered greed of certain individuals who are elected to high political office. An egregious example is, Senator Robert Menendez, who participated with his wife in a scheme in which they received tens of thousands of dollars worth of cash, $100,000 in one-kilo gold bars, payment of a home mortgage, a luxury vehicle and other items of value to “secretly aid the Government of Egypt.” Now we learn that New York City (NYC) Mayor Eric Adams has been indicted on five federal charges related to bribery, wire fraud, conspiracy and soliciting campaign contributions from Turkish government individuals.  The indictment alleges illegal actions stretching back to 2014, from when he was Brooklyn Borough president. Among other things, prosecutors say Adams received free and steeply discounted flight upgrades valued at more than $100,000, free or reduced stays in opulent hotel suites and expensive meals, as well as campaign contributions from straw donors, some of which helped him qualify for more than $10 million in matching public campaign funds. The charges included Adams using his influence to pressure the NYC Fire Department to open a Turkish consular building without a fire inspection. According to the indictment, in order to cover up his misconduct, Adams created and instructed others to make false paper trails indicating he actually paid for these trips in full.  Adams, of course, has denied all of the allegations and has called them “entirely false, based on lies,” called for an immediate trial, and has vowed to fight the charges. In New Jersey, Democrats knew for years that Menendez lacked the high ethical standards needed to serve in the United States Senate.  Their cowardly disregard of his rebuking by the Senate ethics panel was born out of fear of his political retribution and the power of the bosses.  Similarly, in NYC, Eric Adams very narrowly won a multi-candidate primary, but faced no real Republican opposition given the one-party nature of NYC politics. The third threat is the Republican Party’s blatant efforts to suppress voting.  MAGA Republicans have decided that if they can’t achieve the outcome they prefer at the ballot box, they will utilize a variety of voter suppression tactics and promulgate the myth that Democratic voter fraud is common to help them win elections. In a recent article in The New Yorker entitled Voting Deniers by Jonathan Blitzer, he discusses various voter suppression bills across the nation in Republican-dominated states designed “to purge voter rolls and add deliberately burdensome identification requirements to register.  Last year, at the behest of Virginia’s Republican governor, the state removed more than three thousand people from the rolls who were, in fact, legally qualified to vote. (The state later admitted the error.)” In Ohio, five hundred people, some of whom turned out to be naturalized citizens, were removed from the rolls by the secretary of state.  In Texas the legislature passed SB1, a sweeping voter suppression bill that Democrats tried to stop by walking out of the legislature in order to deny the Republicans a quorum.  The Texas measure is a microcosm of voter suppression bills across the nation in Republican-dominated states. It banned mail drop boxes and got rid of drive-through voting and extended hours. And in Georgia, the MAGA controlled election board ruled that all ballots must be manually counted. “On the call , participants [who were county election officials] discussed how poll monitors could try to challenge voters if they, say, spoke shaky English or came with a utility bill, as proof of their address. “People are going to have to be pains in the ass,” former Trump Administration official named John Zadrozny said, according to a leaked recording of the call. “You got to be creative without breaking the law,”’ wrote Blitzer The Supreme Court, in their Shelby County v. Holder decision in 2013, gutted the Voting Rights Act and opened the door, once again, for voter suppression. Since then, Republican controlled-states have made it harder to vote. In the wake of the 2020 election, in which voters handed control of the government to Democrats, Republican-dominated legislatures in at least 19 states passed 34 laws restricting access to voting and those in many other states are considering bills with restrictive provisions that threaten our democracy. Irwin Stoolmacher is president of the Stoolmacher Consulting Group, a fundraising and strategic planning firm that works with nonprofit agencies that serve the truly needy among us.