At Wednesday’s debate and over several previous weeks — not just coincidentally, corresponding with his downward slide in the polls — Trump has repeatedly suggested that the election results will be less than kosher.
The exact nature of this tref-ness varies. He has argued that an international pan-media-banker-Democratic-FBI-elite alliance is behind unspecified improprieties. At other times he has claimed that Mexican nationals are pouring over the border to illegally cast ballots for Hillary Clinton, and that her most loyal voter base might just be dead people.
Such charges will rile up some of his base, including those who want to “monitor” the polls so they can intimidate anyone resembling, as one acolyte put it, “Mexicans. Syrians. People who can’t speak American.” These hardly seem like idle threats; data from the World Values Survey show a correlation between belief that election officials are unfair and violence at the polls.
But however motivating this rhetoric may be for a handful of die-hard Trump thugs, the larger effect will probably be to depress turnout among more marginal voters — who disproportionately comprise Trump’s base.
Several recent social science studies find that belief in government corruption seems to discourage voting. An Innovations for Poverty Action field experiment in Mexico found that telling residents about the incumbent party’s record of corruption depressed their turnout rates.
“They stayed home because they were fed up with the system,” said Alberto Chong, a Georgia State University professor who co-wrote the paper.
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