President Donald Trump talks with reporters n the Oval Office of the White House on Tuesday. CREDIT: AP Photo/Evan Vucci.
There was no voter fraud. This is simply more smoke out of Donny’s arse, in an attempt to ameliorate his wounded ego over having lost the popular vote. This obsession is unfortunately not slowing down the ongoing shredding of the government, but Donny is prepared to waste a considerable amount of money nursing his fixation.
Two days after he told congressional leaders that he would have won the popular vote if it were not for three to five million illegal votes, President Trump announced on Wednesday morning that he’ll push for a “major investigation into VOTER FRAUD.” [Tweets at the link.]
Trump’s tweets conflate registration lists with fraud. There are innocuous reasons why a state’s voter rolls might be less than totally accurate. People move to another state without informing their former secretary of state’s office, and hence might be registered in more than one place. Others people die but don’t get removed from the rolls. Neither of those occurrences constitute fraud, however. Fraud is casting a ballot illegally either by voting more than once or impersonating another voter.
The notion that voter fraud exists on a significant scale is one of the Trump administration’s “alternative facts.” According to a Washington Post analysis, out of the more than 135 million voters cast in the 2016 presidential election, just four cases of voter fraud were found — and three of the culprits voted Republican.
Trump’s tweets conflate registration lists with fraud. There are innocuous reasons why a state’s voter rolls might be less than totally accurate. People move to another state without informing their former secretary of state’s office, and hence might be registered in more than one place. Others people die but don’t get removed from the rolls. Neither of those occurrences constitute fraud, however. Fraud is casting a ballot illegally either by voting more than once or impersonating another voter.
The notion that voter fraud exists on a significant scale is one of the Trump administration’s “alternative facts.” According to a Washington Post analysis, out of the more than 135 million voters cast in the 2016 presidential election, just four cases of voter fraud were found — and three of the culprits voted Republican.
[…]
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) said:
“I would urge the President to knock this off; this is the greatest democracy on Earth, we’re the leader of the free world, and people are going to start doubting you as a person if you keep making accusations against our electoral system without justification,” Graham said, according to CNN. “This is going to erode his ability to govern this country if he does not stop it.”
Erode his ability to govern? He doesn’t have any ability to govern in the first place. He has no knowledge, is not interested in acquiring any, no attention span, and is mostly concerned with watching television and twitter. His only concern has been, and remains his ego. At the very least, people should be concerned about the mass amounts of money this idiot is going to spend chasing phantoms so he can make himself feel better.
Full story at Think Progress.
In what can only be described as a Trumpian twist, Donny was angrily tweeting about the so-called voter fraud, in which, he specifically called out being registered in more than one location:
I will be asking for a major investigation into VOTER FRAUD, including those registered to vote in two states, those who are illegal and….
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 25, 2017
As it turns out, The Angry Tweeter’s chief nazi, Bannon, is registered to vote in two different places. I guess that will be declared okay now.
Ah, Lindsey Graham. Your party has been blowing that “voter fraud” dog whistle for years now as a way to subvert democracy. You don’t get to suddenly start getting persnickety over unfounded voter fraud accusations.
When I read it on the news, my first thought was “Step 1 towards more voter suppression”.
Of course, if you were really serious about voting you could implement an automatic registration like most civilised countries have…
We’re gradually becoming desensitized to the fact that whenever a news piece publishes a photo of the sensitive orange sexual assaulter in the Oval Office, there’s a god damn Nazi standing there.
Not only that, Saad, but the nazi, the paid liars, and evidence of nepotism are always featured, in favour of the veep.
Steve Bannon is registered to vote in both Florida and New York. Does that mean Trump’s own White House team is composed of vote frauds? Can’t wait to hear how other people being registered to vote in two states is fraud, but how that doesn’t apply to his own staff for some magical reason.
The electoral college is the real voter suppression. The rest is just window-dressing. But the republicans have been negating votes for a long time, I don’t know what’s not “fraudulent” about that!
I guess this is a set up for another purge of the voting rolls… No prizes for guessing what sort of people will be most likely to get purged.
Saad
What’s worse (if possible) is that, at least here, the foreign (i.e. local) press is normalizing and legitimizing his election and his decisions by, essentially, saying that he’s keeping all his campaign promises, as if this was a great good he was doing for the world. So far everything he has signed has been headlined here with a positive, if not downright admiring, spin. And people are eating it up.