President Trump Takes Aim at Voter Fraud

Democrats and some Republicans are trying to deny or downplay claims that non-citizen voting had an impact on November's election after President Donald Trump told congressional leaders Monday that "illegals" had cost him the popular vote. Trump reignited a claim that has been largely dismissed by independent fact-checkers and became another touch point for those who criticize everything that Trump says or does. • • • ATTACKS ON TRUMP FOR HIS VOTER FRAUD CHARGE. As an example, Representative Tony Cardenas, a California Democrat, told The Hill on Tuesday : "It is a shame when people get elected to office and they use their ideas and their voice with absolutely no facts and they do things as ridiculous as infringing upon the confidence of our democracy." Some top Republicans were just as quick to dismiss the allegations of voter fraud. Speaker Paul Ryan again said that he has seen "no evidence to that effect," and Senator Lindsey Graham asked Trump to show proof of the claims "or please stop saying it." But, some House Republicans used the President's claim to revive their own accusations of widespread voter fraud. Representative Steve King, an Iowa Republican, was asked on MSNBC Tuesday whether he believed Trump's accusation that 3 million to 5 million people had voted illegally. King said he wasn't aware of that figure, but said he had extrapolated a figure based off a study of voter fraud in two Virginia counties : "The number I came up with off of that extrapolation was 2.4 million. So it's plausible -- the number 3 million sounds like it's a plausible number to me." And that was sufficient for House Democrats to attack King, a proponent of restrictive immigration measures, as "paranoid." Representative Zoe Lofgren, another California Democrat, called King's figure estimate incorrect : "That's provably incorrect. But then, that's Steve." And, Democrat Representative Ruben Gallego of Ariwonq went much farther : "Steve King is a paranoid politician that is trying to basically be divisive and disempower all people of color that vote. The fact is that the instances of voter fraud are rare, the incidence among immigrants is rare, and the incidence of undocumented immigrants voting is almost nonexistent." Senator Bernie Sanders also joined in, calling Trump's accusation "delusional" and said "he is sending a message to every Republican governor in this country to go forward with voter suppression." California Secretary of State Alex Padilla, a Democrat who has made voter enfranchisement his signature issue, panned Trump for bringing up the claim again : "By repeating false and unsubstantiated voter fraud allegations as the cause for losing the popular vote, President Trump is dangerously attacking the legitimacy of free and fair elections and the foundation of our democracy. These are not 'alternative facts.' They are corrosive lies without any evidence. Even leaders in the President's own party agree there is no evidence to support his claims since they were irresponsibly made back in November," Padilla told TheHill in an email. • King blamed alleged illegal voting partly on simplified voter registration techniques, such as registration connected to driver's license applications : "They ask them if they want to sign up for under motor voter, register to vote. Maybe they don't understand the language, maybe they understand. They can be signed up anyway. But some of them go in and vote. I'm completely convinced of that. I don't know the number. We need to clean it up. And motor voter is a gateway to illegal voting." Representative Mo Brooks, a Republican of Alabama, said it was impossible to determine how many non-citizens had voted in the past, but said measures should be taken going forward to ensure voters proved their citizenship in the registration and voting process, saying : "There's no proof of substance one way or the other, but there are enough circumstances to cause people to have different opinions on this issue." Brooks cites the elections of Senators Al Franken, a Minnesota Democrat, in 2008 and Maria Cantwell, a Washington Democrat, in 2000 as examples of elections that could have been decided by ineligible voters. Franken beat then-Senator Norm Coleman by 312 votes, and Cantwell beat then-Senator Slade Gorton by 2,229 votes and Brooks said : "That's an example of where illegal votes could have swayed the outcome, and there are any number of House seats that are decided by less than one percentage point." • • • THE MEDIA REJECTS TRUMP'S CHARGES. The Washington Post’s Michelle Ye Hee Lee explains why White House press secretary Sean Spicer’s claims on January 24 about voter fraud in the presidential election don’t add up -- but, frankly, her explanation doesn't add up either. Spicer told the White House press corps that President Trump continues to say he believes that 3 million to 5 million ballots were illegally cast during the election : “The President does believe that. He has stated that before. “ think he stated his concerns, voter fraud and people voting illegally, during the campaign. And he continues to maintain that belief based on studies and evidence that people have presented to him.” Spicer said that a 2008 Pew study “showed 14% of people who have voted are noncitizens.” The explanation Lee gave for Spicer's comment was : "Spicer was likely referring to a study that members of his team frequently cite in trying to back up their claims of voter fraud, the 2012 Pew Center on the States study that looked for ways to make the election system more accurate, cost-effective and efficient, and found that many voter registrations were significantly inaccurate or no longer valid because people moved, had died or were inactive voters -- although they found no evidence that this led to voter fraud. That study did not examine the citizenship of voters." Lee seems to be missing the point that "voter fraud" and "non-citizen" voting are different faces of the same thing and that the Pew study actually points out that 14% of votes could be fraudulent for one reason or another. • The more likely reference point for Trump is a study by Old Dominion University professors about voting participation rates of noncitizens by using data from 2008 and 2010 collected through the Cooperative Congressional Election Studies and concluding that 14% of noncitizens surveyed in 2008 and 2010 said they were registered to vote. The professors warned that “it is impossible to tell for certain whether the noncitizens who responded to the survey were representative of the broader population of noncitizens.” It is this study that yields the "3 to 5 million" number Trump cites. According to sources who talked ot the WP, at a reception for congressional leaders on Monday, Trump claimed that between 3 million and 5 million illegal votes caused him to lose the popular vote to Hillary Clinton. But, according ot the WP : "Analyses of the election found virtually no confirmed cases of voter fraud, let alone millions. Clinton won the popular vote by more than 2.8 million votes." Spicer said : "The comment that he made was, he said 3 to 5 million people could have voted illegally based on the studies that he’s seen. But he’s very clear that he won the election based on the 306 electoral votes that he got....He's very comfortable with the depth and breadth of the support that he got from the American people.” • At one point during the January 24 Spicer briefing, NPR national political correspondent Mara Liasson pressed Spicer on why the administration isn't investigating this fraud if it truly believes it occurred : “If 3 to 5 million people voted illegally, that is a scandal of astronomical proportions. Doesn't he want to restore Americans' faith in their ballot system? Wouldn't he want an investigation of this? I mean, this is a huge, huge scandal.” • • • TRUMP ACTS ON VOTER FRAUD CLAIMS. In repsonse to his critics -- those who call his voter fraud allegations "lies," "delusional," and "false," -- President Trump on Wednesday tweeted that he will launch a 'major' investigation to look into voter fraud in the country : "I will be asking for a major investigation into VOTER FRAUD, including those registered to vote in two states, those who are illegal and....even, those registered to vote who are dead (and many for a long time)....Depending on results, we will strengthen up voting procedures!" So, President Trump is putting his money on the table and we will see where it leads. • • • THE KENNEDY-NIXON ELECTION. It is now widely accepted that Kennedy won the 1960 presidential election because of voter fraud. Here is the Wikipedia account of the 1960 fraud investigation : "Many people believed that Kennedy benefited from vote fraud, especially in Texas, where his running mate Lyndon B. Johnson was Senator, and Illinois, home of Mayor Richard Daley's powerful Chicago political machine. These two states were important because if Nixon had carried both, he would have earned 270 electoral votes, one more than the 269 needed to win the majority in the Electoral College and the presidency. Republican Senators such as Everett Dirksen and Barry Goldwater also thought that vote fraud "played a role in the election," and that Nixon actually won the national popular vote. Republicans tried and failed to overturn the results in both Illinois and Texas at the time -- as well as in nine other states. Some journalists also later claimed that mobster Sam Giancana and his Chicago crime syndicate "played a role" in Kennedy's victory in Illinois. Nixon's campaign staff urged him to pursue recounts and challenge the validity of Kennedy's victory in several states, especially in Illinois, Missouri, and New Jersey, where large majorities in Catholic precincts handed Kennedy the election. However, Nixon gave a speech three days after the election stating that he would not contest the election. The Republican National Chairman, Senator Thruston Ballard Morton of Kentucky, visited Key Biscayne, Florida, where Nixon had taken his family for a vacation, and pushed for a recount. Morton did challenge the results in 11 states, keeping challenges in the courts into the summer of 1961; however, the only result of these challenges was the loss of Hawaii to Kennedy on a recount. Kennedy won Illinois by less than 9,000 votes out of 4.75 million cast, or a margin of 0.2%. However, Nixon carried 92 of the state's 101 counties, and Kennedy's victory in Illinois came from the city of Chicago, where Mayor Richard J. Daley held back much of Chicago's vote until the late morning hours of November 9. The efforts of Daley and the powerful Chicago Democratic organization gave Kennedy an extraordinary Cook County victory margin of 450,000 votes -- more than 10% of Chicago's 1960 population of 3.55 million, although Cook County also includes many suburbs outside of Chicago's borders -- thus barely overcoming the heavy Republican vote in the rest of Illinois. Earl Mazo, a reporter for the pro-Nixon New York Herald Tribune, investigated the voting in Chicago and "claimed to have discovered sufficient evidence of vote fraud to prove that the state was stolen for Kennedy." In Texas, Kennedy defeated Nixon by a narrow 51 to 49% margin, or 46,000 votes. Some Republicans argued that Johnson's formidable political machine had stolen enough votes in counties along the Mexican border to give Kennedy the victory. Kennedy's defenders, such as his speechwriter and special assistant Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., have argued that Kennedy's margin in Texas (46,000 votes) was simply too large for vote fraud to have been a decisive factor. Russell D. Renka, a former political science professor at Southeastern Missouri State University, acknowledged that it was more than likely that Johnson's political machine in the state's lower Rio Grande Valley counties, including the notorious Duval County, could have "managed to produce a significant number of forged votes" for Kennedy. However, Renka also acknowledged that Kennedy's margin in the state's initial tally "made it far too difficult to prove that voter fraud had determined who won Texas" and that "any recount would also have been hard to conduct." Cases of voter fraud were discovered in Texas. For example, Fannin County had only 4,895 registered voters, yet 6,138 votes were cast in that county, three-quarters for Kennedy. In an Angelina County precinct, Kennedy received 187 votes to Nixon's 24, though there were only a total of 86 registered voters in the precinct. When Republicans demanded a statewide recount, they learned that the state Board of Elections, whose members were all Democrats, had already "certified" Kennedy as the official winner in Texas. In Illinois, Schlesinger and others have pointed out that, even if Nixon had carried Illinois, the state alone would not have given him the victory, as Kennedy would still have won 276 electoral votes to Nixon's 246 (with 269 needed to win). More to the point, Illinois was the site of the most extensive challenge process, which fell short despite repeated efforts spearheaded by Cook County state's attorney, Benjamin Adamowski, a Republican, who also lost his re-election bid. Despite demonstrating net errors favoring both Nixon and Adamowski (some precincts -- 40% in Nixon's case -- showed errors favoring them, a factor suggesting error, rather than fraud), the totals found fell short of reversing the results for either candidate. While a Daley-connected circuit judge, Thomas Kluczynski (who would later be appointed a federal judge by Kennedy, at Daley's recommendation), threw out a federal lawsuit "filed to contend" the voting totals, the Republican-dominated State Board of Elections unanimously rejected the challenge to the results. Furthermore, there were signs of possible irregularities in downstate areas controlled by Republicans, which Democrats never seriously pressed, since the Republican challenges went nowhere. More than a month after the election, the Republican National Committee abandoned its Illinois voter fraud claims. However, a special prosecutor assigned to the case brought charges against 650 people, which did not result in convictions. Three Chicago election workers were convicted of voter fraud in 1962 and served short terms in jail. Mazo, the Herald-Tribune reporter, later said that he "found names of the dead who had voted in Chicago, along with 56 people from one house." He found cases of Republican voter fraud in southern Illinois, but said that the totals "did not match the Chicago fraud he found." After Mazo had published four parts of an intended 12-part voter fraud series documenting his findings which was re-published nationally, he said, "Nixon requested his publisher stop the rest of the series so as to prevent a constitutional crisis." Nevertheless, the Chicago Tribune (which routinely endorsed GOP presidential candidates, including Nixon in 1960, 1968 and 1972) wrote that "the election of November 8 was characterized by such gross and palpable fraud as to justify the conclusion that [Nixon] was deprived of victory." Had Nixon won both states, he would have ended up with exactly 270 electoral votes and the presidency, with or without a victory in the popular vote. • • • DEAR READERS, President Trump believes that millions of people voted illegally in the US election based on "studies and evidence," the White House has said. So, in an effort to get to the bottom of the voter fraud problem in America -- including Democrat legal efforts to register people without any proof of identity, opening the door to the registration and voting of illegal and dead voter -- President Trump on Wednesday said he will launch a 'major' investigation to look into voter fraud. Trump said : "I will be asking for a major investigation into VOTER FRAUD, including those registered to vote in two states, those who are illegal and....even, those registered to vote who are dead (and many for a long time)," the president tweeted Wednesday morning. Depending on results, we will strengthen up voting procedures!" • Donald Trump has occasionally made statements that Progressives, Democrats and mainstream media have laughed at, but he has most often been proven to be correct. Let's withhold judgment until we have the results of the investigation. One thing is certain -- there is voter fraud in the United States, the question is how extensive it is.