Sen. Susan Collins

Election Legitimacy (28/30)

Susan Collins has a clean record of accepting and certifying legitimate election outcomes, including one where her own party’s presidential nominee lost. Ahead of the January 6, 2021 count, The Boston Globe reported that Collins said she would certify Joe Biden’s win, and she joined a bipartisan group of senators making that commitment publicly. She has not made unsubstantiated claims disputing any certified election result.

Beyond simply certifying results, Collins took the lead on structural reform to prevent future subversion of certification. She co-authored the Electoral Count Reform and Presidential Transition Improvement Act with Senator Joe Manchin, testifying that “in four of the past six presidential elections, the Electoral Count Act’s process for counting electoral votes has been abused” and that January 6 exposed the need to fix it (Senate Rules Committee testimony). That bill, cosponsored by 39 senators including both party leaders, was signed into law as part of the FY2023 omnibus. This is a substantial, concrete contribution to election legitimacy infrastructure, justifying a near-maximum score.

Voting Rights (7/25)

Collins’s floor record on federal voting-rights legislation is consistently on the restrictive side. She voted against the For the People Act, opposing it on states’-rights grounds — her office argued the bill “would take away the rights of people in each of the 50 states to determine which election rules work best for their citizens” (Collins Senate press release). She also opposed the bipartisan-negotiated Freedom to Vote Act and voted against advancing the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which sought to restore preclearance protections gutted by the Supreme Court’s 2013 Shelby County decision — a vote highlighted in a pointed floor exchange with Senator Jon Ossoff, who noted she had supported the 2006 VRA reauthorization but opposed this update (The Hill). More recently, she announced support for the Republican-backed SAVE Act, a proof-of-citizenship voter registration bill, saying “the law is clear that in this country only American citizens are eligible to vote in federal elections” (NewsCenterMaine). Taken together — repeated opposition to the major Democratic-backed ballot-access and enforcement bills of the last decade, plus support for newer voter-ID/citizenship-verification restrictions — this record scores low, notwithstanding her decades-old vote for the 2006 VRA reauthorization.

Checks and Balances (18/25)

Collins’s record here is mixed but generally favorable to institutional accountability. She voted to convict Donald Trump in his second impeachment trial for incitement of insurrection, one of only seven Republicans to do so, stating her vote “stems from my own oath and duty to defend the Constitution” (Rev transcript); she also voted against the argument that the Senate lacked jurisdiction to try a former president (Collins Senate press release). She previously voted to acquit Trump in his first impeachment trial in 2020 (Axios). On judicial independence, she has been vocal defending the courts from political attack — she called Trump’s comments questioning a judge’s impartiality based on his “Mexican heritage” “absolutely unacceptable” and said they showed “a lack of respect for the judicial system and the principle of separation of powers” (Collins Senate press release), and she voted against a judicial nominee over concerns about impartiality (Collins Senate press release). However, she also opposed President Biden’s 2024 proposals for Supreme Court term limits and an enforceable ethics code, arguing they “would weaken judicial independence” (Maine Public) — a stance that, whatever its merits as constitutional interpretation, cuts against strengthening external accountability over the least-checked branch. This mix of strong action on impeachment/executive accountability but resistance to judicial oversight reforms places her solidly above average but short of top marks.

Conduct in Office (17/20)

No Senate Ethics Committee, GAO, or Inspector General finding of serious misconduct against Collins was identified. A 2020 letter from the partisan American Democracy Legal Fund requested an ethics probe into alleged financial benefits to her husband (Salon), but this was an advocacy-group allegation, not a formal, nonpartisan finding, and is disregarded per the rubric. However, nonpartisan investigative reporting (Maine Monitor/NOTUS, based on official financial-disclosure records) documented that Collins missed the 45-day disclosure deadline required by the STOCK Act — a transparency law she herself helped write — for her husband’s purchase of up to $50,000 in Pfizer bonds; her office confirmed to NOTUS that the filing was “five days behind schedule” due to a delay from a third-party advisor (NOTUS). This is a documented, acknowledged legal-compliance lapse (though minor, with a nominal fine typically waived for delays this short), warranting a small deduction from a perfect score rather than a larger one.

Bipartisan Cooperation (10/10)

Collins has a strong, well-documented record of cross-aisle work on democracy-adjacent legislation, most notably co-authoring the Electoral Count Reform Act with Democrat Joe Manchin, a bill that ultimately drew 39 cosponsors “including Senate Leaders Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and Senate Rules Committee Chairwoman Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) and Ranking Member Roy Blunt (R-MO)” (Collins Senate press release). She has also led bipartisan lobbying and ethics-reform legislation with the late Senator Joseph Lieberman that “was approved by the Senate with a vote of 90 to 8” (Collins Senate press release), plus broader bipartisan efforts like the Gang of 20 infrastructure negotiations and the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act. This pattern of building durable, evenly-split coalitions specifically on election-process and government-integrity legislation earns full marks in this bonus category.