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"All levels of government and law enforcement closely monitor voting fraud, including early voting"
Trump tweeted. "Cheating at your own risk." Violators will be subject to maximum civil and criminal penalties! "
Sounds serious, right? Here is the thing: there is simply no significant evidence of deliberate electoral fraud on a scale close to the scale evoked by Trump and his allies. Has never been.
There are studies after study that make this fact clear.
How many examples has he found? Exactly 31 – over more than one billion instances. 31! (This is an infinitely small number.) This does not mean that each of these 31 attempts at voter fraud does not deserve an investigation. We do not want electoral fraud. But that means that 31 cases out of over a billion are in no way equated with widespread election fraud.
The Levitt study is far from the only one to draw such a conclusion. A five-year study on election fraud commissioned by George W. Bush – a Republican – came to the same conclusion as Levitt. At the time, the New York Times wrote: "The Department of Justice has presented virtually no evidence of any organized effort to distort the federal election."
In the 2016 election, during which over 135 million votes were cast, there were a total of four documented cases of election fraud, according to the Washington Post's Philip Bump.
There are many other studies that show the same thing. Yes, there are times when people use the identity of someone else intentionally at the urn. But these are rare. And, yes, there are times when the same person votes – or tries to vote – twice. But it is almost always involuntary.
It is not clear if Trump a) knows all this and chooses not to worry about it or b) is not aware of the mountain of data that suggests fraud fraud claims election.
Whatever the case may be, it has a long tradition in favor of the idea that there is a sort of widespread attempt – by the Democrats – to deceive the system by electoral fraud. Following his victory in the 2016 election, Trump insisted that he had lost the popular vote in favor of Hillary Clinton (nearly 3 million votes) because of alleged illegal votes. "In addition to winning the Electoral College after a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally," Trump said in late November 2016.
Shortly after being sworn in, Trump created the Presidential Electoral Integrity Advisory Board, which aimed to detect and eliminate these vast attempts at electoral fraud. Less than a year after its formation, the Commission was dissolved by Trump. He blamed this decision on the Democrats. "Many states, mostly Democrats, have refused to pass the 2016 election data to the Election Fraud Commission," Trump tweeted in January 2018. "They fought hard for the Commission to see not their background or their methods because they know that many people are voting illegally.The system is rigged, must go to the voter ID "
And now, just 15 days before the mid-term elections, Trump is again raising the specter of widespread election fraud – without providing any proof of its existence. Because, of course, this evidence simply does not exist.
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