TRUMP’S LATEST CLAIM OF VOTER FRAUD IS AN ASSAULT ON DEMOCRACY
President Trump on Wednesday shut down his bogus White House commission investigating voter fraud.
The commission just couldn’t find much fraud.
But Trump continued to charge, all the same, that our nation’s elections are “rigged,” which is nothing more than a lie that undermines public confidence in our democratic process.
So, as we say goodbye to the Presidential Advisory Committee on Election Integrity, let’s set the record straight: There is zero evidence that millions of illegal voters went to the polls in 2016, costing Trump a popular- vote victory in the presidential election.
Not a single state has uncovered evidence of significant fraud by noncitizens or anybody else — nothing enough to alter an election for dog catcher. Republican state election officials have found no such evidence, either in 2016 or in the past, and federal investigators, including the Justice Department under President George W. Bush, have struck out, too.
Claims of widespread voter fraud are nothing more than a way to stoke fear of immigrants and justify efforts to suppress legal voting by anybody who’s not a Republican.
It annoys Trump to no end that he won the presidency in the Electoral College but the popular vote went to his rival, Hillary Clinton. And it offends officials in many Republi- can- controlled states that voters who are most likely to vote Democratic — such as younger Americans, immigrants and AfricanAmericans — don’t have to jump through more hoops to exercise that right.
The bugaboo of widespread voter fraud has been an excuse by red states to push through unjustified new voter identification laws.
Trump says this isn’t over. The commission failed to find fraud, he said, only because many states refused to share their election data. Now, he said, the Department of Homeland Security will take up the cause.
But it is over. Because there is no widespread fraud.
And if millions of noncitizens ever do try to vote, crowding into polling places, it won’t take a White House commission to figure it out.