Unraveling Trump's Voter Fraud Conspiracy Theory
Three million more Americans voted for Hillary Clinton than for Donald Trump in 2016. This has long been a sore spot for the president, who has justified the discrepancy by claiming that the election was rigged in Clinton’s favor, that foreign hackers were working to install her in the White House and that widespread voter fraud was taking place at polling stations across the United States. “In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally,” Trump tweeted weeks after winning the election.
There is no evidence of this, although Trump has tried his hardest to find some. Last year, the president commissioned a panel to investigate alleged voter fraud. Despite being led by voter-suppression veteran and current Kansas gubernatorial candidate Kris Kobach, the panel was disbanded in January without having produced any evidence of widespread voter fraud. Lack of data be damned, Trump believes what he believes, and he’s issued several intimidating warnings in the weeks leading up to the midterms.
Link to tweet
Link to tweet
When pressed this week for evidence of voter fraud, Trump told reporters to just take his word for it. “Just take a look, all you’ve got to do is go around, look at what’s happened over the years and you’ll see,” the president said. “My opinion and based on proof.”
There is no proof, though. The panel Trump commissioned specifically to find proof couldn’t even dredge up anything for the administration to spin as such, and any legitimate inquiry into the issue has concluded that voter fraud is extremely rare. Loyola Law School professor and former Justice Department official Justine Levitt told NBC News he found just 45 legitimate cases of voter impersonation — out of literally over a billion votes — between 2000 and 2018. In the weeks following the 2016 election, the Washington Post was only able to uncover four cases of documented voter fraud. Two people voted twice, one woman cast a ballot for her dead husband and another woman bubbled in her choice for mayor on absentee ballots she was hired to open, leading to her arrest. That’s four out of 135 million. Yes, there may have been others, but it’s a pretty safe bet that the exact number of votes by which Trump lost to Clinton weren’t cast illegally for the president’s opponent. Unfortunately, no amount of evidence to the contrary is powerful enough to get the best of Trump’s ego.
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/trump-voter-fraud-conspiracy-752604/
