Donald Trump has been claiming for years that all elections he hasn’t (or won’t) win are rigged. This also goes for mid-terms — especially this one — where Republicans seem likely to lose seats to Democratic Party members. We won’t know if Trump will try to become President For Life until 2028, but it seems immediately clear he won’t leave anything to chance. And by “chance,” I mean a “fair democratic process unimpeded or derailed by Donald J. Trump.”
The administration continues to make wild, baseless claims about “illegal” votes being cast by non-citizens. This dovetails nicely with the administration’s “remove all the (non-white) foreigners” operations, which shifted from merely overenthusiastic to the defining feature of the second Trump administration.
This form of voter fraud is almost nonexistent. And there’s good reason to believe most of the extremely few “illegal” votes being cast are a mistake, rather than acts of people hoping to sway an election with their ill-gotten democratic processes. States have combined processes for voter registration and drivers licenses/identification cards in hopes of increasing participation in the democratic process. Unfortunately, this may lead a few non-citizens to believe obtaining an ID card also gives them the right to vote.
Instances of actual voter fraud by non-citizens are so rare as to be less than a rounding error when it comes to total votes. Nevertheless, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) (for some fucking reason) is taking the lead in Trump’s voter suppression efforts and its principal officials continue to make outlandish claims about voter fraud while simultaneously making outlandish (and likely illegal) demands for states’ voter data.
Nevada — a state that swings towards Trump except where it matters most, the cities with the largest populations — is one of Trump’s primary targets as he advances his lies about rigged elections and widespread voter fraud.
DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin kissed the ring and delivered the message, claiming without any facts in evidence that nearly 16,000 non-citizens were registered to vote in Nevada. Note that this is not the same thing as claiming these 16,000 people had actually ever voted. But the DHS encouraged the MAGA faithful to believe it was the same thing because Trump himself appeared to believe it was the same thing.
The state of Nevada pushed back against this claim (as well as the DHS’s demand for state voters’ identifying info). That pushback forced the DHS to walk back its previous, social media-broadcasted claims. In a telephonic meeting a few days later, DHS officials actually admitted the number of voters they suspected to be registered illegally was less than 200.
Even with this reduction, the DHS refused to turn over the information it possessed that it claimed supported its accusations against 185 Nevada voters. The state continued to press the DHS for more info, pointing out that it couldn’t do anything on its own end if it was only given “voter case” numbers generated by the DHS.
The DHS still continued to claim more than 6,000 residents might be registered illegally, but said its internal vetting had only “confirmed” the 185 “voter cases” it was willing to share with Nevada officials.
That number is even lower now. In fact, it’s one of the lowest numbers you can use when you’re counting entire human beings, as the New York Times reports:
When the Department of Homeland Security sent Nevada a list of 185 names last month that it claimed identified noncitizens who had been improperly allowed to register to vote, state election officials got to work.
On Tuesday, the state sent a strongly worded rebuke to the federal government: Every single person on the list was a lawful citizen.
“As for the 185 individuals, our records indicate that they were citizens,” Greg D. Ott, a deputy attorney general in Nevada, wrote, according to a copy of a letter sent to Department of Homeland Security officials obtained through open records requests. “You have provided nothing of substance to suggest otherwise.”
Trump and his DHS hyped the alleged discovery of nearly 300,000 “illegal” voters across four states where Trump did less business than he had hoped during the past two elections. What’s been exposed in Nevada is sure to be echoed in other states the administration claims are letting non-citizens vote.
It took less than a month to whittle down the DHS’s bullshit claims from nearly-16,000 to zero. This won’t be an anomaly. Voter fraud by non-citizens happens roughly 0% of the time anywhere during any election. Just like every other criminal act, immigrants commit voter fraud far less often than actual citizens do.
The administration is throwing people, time, and money at this attempt to suppress voter participation and it still can’t come up with anything that demonstrates it’s worth the resources being expended. But proving this isn’t the point. Generating a culture of distrust in local elections is the real game, which will allow Trump to pretend any election result he doesn’t like was the result of criminal activity.