By Philip Bump:
The day before, Trump met with congressional leaders and reiterated a claim that millions of people had voted illegally for his opponent. In fact, he upped his estimate from 3 million to as many as 5 million — 3.6 percent of all votes cast in the election.
There are various levels at which this is total unsubstantiated nonsense — a claim even more nonsensical than his assertion that 1.5 million people attended his inauguration. The idea that millions of people voted illegally stems most immediately from one tweet from one guy in Texas that was picked up by the conspiracy-hawking site InfoWars. Repeatedly asked for proof of his claim that millions had voted illegally, that guy, Gregg Phillips (who is associated with a group called True the Vote), repeatedly declined to do so. There’s simply no available evidence that Phillips’s claim was true. (True the Vote also declined to substantiate his claims.)
What’s more, Phillips himself admits that the 3-million-vote number he threw out doesn’t necessarily mean that all of these alleged illegal voters backed Hillary Clinton. So Trump took that number, added a possible 2 million more and asserted that all of those ballots were cast in opposition to him. Why? Probably for the same reason that he lied about the turnout at his inauguration: to make himself look better. If 3 million people voted illegally for Clinton, that would mean that he won the popular vote after all. They didn’t; he didn’t. But that clearly stings.
Another likely reason, raised by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) in a statement, is that Trump was “sending a message to every Republican governor in this country to go forward with voter suppression.” In other words, by making the case for rampant fraud, the case for anti-fraud measures is bolstered. Those measures often disproportionately filter Democrats and people of color out of the voting pool, to Republicans’ advantage.
The Full Story (January 24, 2017)
No comments:
Post a Comment