Donald Trump will not let up on his claims that the election is rigged. He continued this morning when he tweeted, “Of course there is large scale voter fraud happening on and before election day. Why do Republican leaders deny what is going on? So naive!” The latest tweet is part of a several day long tweetstorm alleging widespread voter fraud in the United States. These statements now have election law expert Rick Hasen, who teaches at the University of California-Irvine, seeing red. Hasen has spent his career studying election law, and issues surrounding voter fraud. And, guess what? He’s found there is no widespread voter fraud problem in this country. He let the Republican presidential candidate have it during his own tweetstorm this morning.
Talk about going full Breitbart. I debunk this in my 2012 book, #TheVotingWars. See also Minnite, Myth of Voter Fraud (1/2) https://t.co/NsYgyJBHpw
— Rick Hasen (@rickhasen) October 17, 2016
.@realDonaldTrump Can’t find a case since at least 1980s where impersonation fraud could have changed election results. (2/?)
— Rick Hasen (@rickhasen) October 17, 2016
.@realDonaldTrump That’s only kind of fraud voter ID laws prevent. We do see absentee ballot fraud each year, a rare and small problem (3/?)
— Rick Hasen (@rickhasen) October 17, 2016
.@realDonaldTrump would take at least tens of thousands of voters voting multiple times to change results *toward Trump* to matter (9/?)
— Rick Hasen (@rickhasen) October 17, 2016
.@realDonaldTrump and I hope this is the last time I have to do a tweetstorm before brushing my teeth (15/15)
— Rick Hasen (@rickhasen) October 17, 2016
We haven’t included the full tweetstorm, because it would take up quite a bit of room. You can read it here. As for voter fraud, Hasen concedes that it does happen, however, the accounts by Trump are exaggerated.
Hasen explained more in an op-ed on TPM
Claims of voter fraud are often exaggerated by orders of magnitude. Consider the claims about non-citizen voting. Matt Drudge recently had a headline stating: “Report: 1,000+ Illegal Voters in Virginia.” And Dan Scavino, Jr. tweeted: “Terrible. We know who the 1,000+ illegal aliens ARE NOT VOTING FOR! A fixed presidential election in the making….will we ever know!?!?” But if you look at the underlying report, they have identified only 31 actual non-citizen voters in Virginia over the last 10 years. No doubt there are some more, as not all the counties have responded yet. But it is not 1,000 plus non-citizens voting in Va. (“In the 8 jurisdictions that provided us with lists of aliens recently removed from their voter rolls, we discovered that 31 non-citizens had cast a total of 186 votes between 2005 and 2015. The most alien votes were cast in 2012 followed by 2008, the year President Obama was elected to his first term.” (emphasis omitted)). Don’t believe all the hype. Non-citizen voting is a real, but pretty small, problem (because the penalties are high and the payoff low).
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