Would Keeping Trump Off the Ballot Hurt or Help Democracy?

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

51% : The stakes for the nation were enormous, Hobbs said, because of the damage Trump had already done to faith in the nation's elections.
43% : "The decisions by Colorado's highest court and Maine's secretary of state barring Trump from state primary ballots are on hold for now and are likely to be decided by the U.S. Supreme Court.
42% : "Jena Griswold, Colorado's Democratic secretary of state, said in an interview this past week that she supported decisions by Bellows and the Colorado Supreme Court to remove Trump from the ballot.
39% : While most of the challenges to Trump's candidacy have been proceeding in federal or state courts, Maine's Constitution required the voters seeking to disqualify Trump to file a petition with the secretary of state, putting the politically volatile and hugely consequential decision into the hands of Secretary of State Shenna Bellows, a Democrat.
33% : "This is not a political and electoral system that can deal with ambiguity right now," he said.Trump and his supporters have called the disqualifications in Maine and Colorado partisan ploys that robbed voters of their right to choose candidates.
32% : In Arizona, placing Trump on the ballot was a more cut-and-dry decision, said Adrian Fontes, the Democratic secretary of state.
30% : "In interviews, some voters and experts said it was premature to disqualify Trump because he had not been criminally convicted of insurrection.
26% : They accused Democrats of hypocrisy for trying to bar Trump from the ballot after campaigning in the past two elections as champions of democracy.
26% : "Chris Christie, a former governor of New Jersey and Trump's most ardent critic in the Republican primary, warned that Maine's decision would turn Trump into a "martyr."But other prominent critics of Trump -- many of them anti-Trump Republicans -- said the threat he posed to democracy and his actions surrounding the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol now required an extraordinary intervention, whatever the electoral consequences.
25% : Officials in Maine and Colorado who disqualified Trump from the ballot have written that their decisions stemmed from following the language of the Constitution.
24% : They worried that red-state officials could use the tactic to knock Democratic candidates off future ballots, or that the disqualifications could further poison the country's political divisions while giving Trump a new grievance to rail against.
23% : Persily and other legal experts said they expected the U.S. Supreme Court would ultimately overturn the decisions in Colorado and Maine to keep Trump on the ballot, perhaps sidestepping the question of whether Trump engaged in an insurrection.
23% : In Washington state, Hobbs said he did not believe he had the power as secretary of state to unilaterally remove Trump from the ballot.
22% : But he also worries that recent decisions in Maine and Colorado to bar Trump from presidential primary ballots there could backfire, further eroding Americans' fraying faith in U.S. elections.
22% : After the Colorado Supreme Court ruled that Trump should be removed from the state's primary ballot, Sen. J.D. Vance, R-Ohio, said in a statement: "Apparently democracy is when judges tell people they're not allowed to vote for the candidate leading in the polls?
22% : California's Democratic secretary of state, Shirley Weber, announced Thursday that Trump would remain on the ballot, and Gov. Gavin Newsom dismissed calls by other Democrats to remove him.
19% : "The only way to neutralize the danger posed by authoritarian populists like Donald Trump is to beat them at the ballot box, as decisively as possible and as often as it takes.
13% : Election workers and secretaries of state have increasingly become the targets of conspiracy theorists and violent threats since Trump's refusal to accept his 2020 defeat; Griswold said she had received 64 death threats since the lawsuit seeking to remove Trump from the ballot was filed by six Republican and unaffiliated voters in Colorado.

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