As is all too often the case, there are again too many interesting things appearing in Colorado Politics for me to comment on all of them. So let me tell you what I won’t be talking about before I get to the good stuff.

I’m not going to talk about Victor Marx’s remarkably and surprisingly cogent speech at a recent meeting of the Colorado Water Congress. I’ve been involved in water issues for a long time and am a senior research fellow at a couple of Washington, D.C. think-tanks on water and other environmental issues, though I must confess I’m basically retired from that work. They do flatter me by continuing to carry my name on their list of experts.

Marx recently spoke to the Water Congress, apparently between doing phone-in exorcisms and called for increased storage of water during wet years. Now, that’s basic common sense, and I suspect you would have to look high and low for some time before you found anyone against saving water, but it appears Marx has at least some advisers who are counseling common sense. We’ll see how long it lasts.

I’m also not going to talk about another CoPo story, in which we learn election officials have confirmed enough signatures were collected to put yet another voter initiative on the November ballot. This one would cap Colorado’s state income tax at current levels.

Now, I’m tempted to yet again leap atop my rickety soapbox to decry the very existence of voter initiatives on a statewide ballot, but given how often I’ve done so in the past, I think I won’t press my luck with my kindly and oft-forgiving editors by doing that yet again. I will just say when we have, say, a highly technical issue with our hearts, we defer to the expertise of cardiologists. Perhaps before we meddle with a highly complex tax code by voter initiative, we should let the elected folks who are far more expert in the area give it a shot. I admit to being rather agnostic on this issue, in that perhaps capping tax rates isn’t a bad idea, but only at a rate that ensures we can fund things like, oh, I dunno, education and health?

What I will talk about today is a recent CoPo story about voting by mail. The U.S. Postal Service is, for all its faults, a remarkable achievement in governance. For the price of a stamp, you can send, say, a birthday card to any address in the country and it will arrive at that distant location. If you think back over world history, that is a truly remarkable achievement.

And here is a short quiz for you: What do all of these items have in common? Utility bills, credit cards and credit card statements, tax returns and tax refund checks, royalty payments, lease agreements, court summons and subpoenas, mortgage paperwork, vehicle titles, prescription medications and President Donald Trump’s own ballot?

I’m sure you guessed each is an example of a vital document, safely and routinely sent through the U.S. mail system. Oh, and President Donald Trump did, in fact, fill out his most recent ballot and return it, via the U.S. postal system!

Did you also know you can legally send raw potatoes, unwrapped coconuts and live bees and chickens through the mail? That has little to do with my arguments here, but I think that’s neat.

Oh, and I should include on that list all Colorado ballots!

We have voted by mail safely and securely for years. And, dear readers, there simply isn’t any significant voter fraud here or anywhere in the U.S., despite the lies the president and his lackeys spew continuously.

I recall a few years ago, I was talking with the then-Colorado Secretary of State and I asked him about the number of “fraudulent votes” his office had detected. That year, he said, there were exactly 12 fraudulent votes. Each and every one of them was an elderly Republican woman who moved from Colorado to either Florida or Arizona in retirement and registered to vote in their new states without canceling their Colorado registrations. As a result, these 12 ladies were sent two ballots and they returned both. So, with more than 3 million votes cast in the most recent presidential election here in Colorado, if we do the math, the “fraud rate” would be about 0.00000376%, but they were all caught and voided, so even at that tiny number, voter fraud was simply nonexistent.

I mention all this because another CoPo story noted how, yet again, a federal judge blocked the effort by the Trump administration to save the midterms for Republicans by suppressing the vote. The administration is demanding all states turn over their voter rolls to the DOJ, or the USPS won’t deliver any mailed ballots.

Clearly, the president nor any of his minions have read the Constitution recently. In particular, Article 1, Section 4, states: “The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing Senators.” So, the Constitution explicitly gives states the power to run elections, unless the Congress passes a law removing that power, which the Congress has not done. States, dear readers, get to run elections.

I think it is very interesting to compare the two major parties on this issue. Dems want to maximize the opportunity for any legal voter to cast a ballot, while Trumpicans want to suppress as much vote as possible from areas they deem anti-Trump. I’m pretty sure the good people of Mississippi and Oklahoma will get their mailed ballots without too much trouble. Oh, and I won’t call these people “Republicans” because that is or at least was, an honorable party with which I usually disagreed. These Trumpicans are only interested in getting and keeping power, while enriching themselves as much as possible at the public trough.

I admit with the Supreme Court now just another partisan branch of the government, I do worry a bit about whether they might actually rule Trump really does get to decide who votes and who doesn’t. But with a handful of states already sending out early ballots, hopefully there just isn’t enough time for Trump’s team to truly suppress the vote in any meaningful way. It is a tad ironic these early ballots, that Trumpicans would like to cancel, often go to military folks overseas, a group that trends strongly GOP.

I, for one, am looking forward to Nov. 4. We’ll stop seeing endless political advertisements and the several per day texts asking for donations will end, at least for a while. And I hope, on that day roughly two months away, everyone’s legal ballot has been cast, mailed, opened and counted.

Fingers crossed.

Hal Bidlack is a retired professor of political science and a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel who taught more than 17 years at the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs.