Trump Rehashes His Insane Voter Fraud Conspiracy Theories & Adds a New One

Donald Trump is starting to rehash his plethora of much-debunked voter fraud conspiracy theories as the 2020 election approaches, claiming in the last few weeks that he actually won the state of New Hampshire in 2016, and that undocumented immigrants are voting numerous times in states like California where he said recently the vote was "rigged."

Appearing at a conference of Trump-supporting students at Turning Point USA’s Teen Student Action Summit, the President went on quite a rant about voter fraud. He has never quite gotten over losing the popular vote to Hillary Clinton and so he has to explain it away as "fraudulent."

Washington Post: “Those numbers in California and numerous other states, they’re rigged. They’ve got people voting that shouldn’t be voting. They vote many times, not just twice, not just three times. It’s like a circle. They come back, they put a new hat on. They come back, they put a new shirt on. And in many cases, they don’t even do that. You know what’s going on. It’s a rigged deal.”

Just to be clear, the President appeared before a group of students and told them that America's democracy is corrupt and that the system is rigged. No one should be OK with that, especially since it's a bald-face lie.

Fact-checkers across the country called him out [again] on his increasing ridiculous voter fraud claims, but that didn't deter our President. Last week in New Hampshire he claimed that he actually won the state in 2016, telling supporters at a campaign rally that "It was taken away from us."

Ellen Weintraub, the chairwoman of the Federal Election Commission, decided Trump had crossed a line in New Hampshire and fired back at the President.

Politico: “People have studied this. Academics have studied this. Lawyers have studied this. The government has studied this. Democrats have studied this. Republicans have studied this,” she continued. “And no one can find any evidence of rampant voter fraud either historically or particularly in the 2016 elections.”

We have been following voter fraud research for decades and Trump's assertions are a lie, but not just a lie; such theories are meant to create a basis for Republican state legislatures to create new obstacles to voting.

Illuminate: "Republicans need their base to believe that voter fraud is a crisis in order to pass state laws making it more difficult to register and vote. Why would anyone want to make it harder to vote? Republicans realized quickly that state measures enacted in the last few decades to making registering and voting easier such as automatic registration, same-day registrations, early voting, and mail-in voting encouraged minorities and the poor to vote. That was a problem for Republicans so they needed a reason to reverse the tide by enacting voter suppression laws."

New York Times Editorial Board: "It’s become an accepted truth of modern politics that Republican electoral prospects go up as the number of voters goes down. Conservatives have known this for a long time, which helps explain their intensifying efforts to make it harder to vote, or to eliminate large numbers of people from political representation entirely."

President Trump added a new voting conspiracy theory yesterday tweeting, "Google manipulated from 2.6 million to 16 million votes for Hillary Clinton in 2016 Election!"

CNBC: "Trump’s tweet appears to refer to documents leaked to conservative group Project Veritas, but the documents do not appear to contain any outright allegation of vote manipulation or attempts to bias the election."

Hillary Clinton couldn't contain herself. Trump's drumbeat of attacks on her popular vote victory probably both irks and amuses her.

Twitter: Hillary Clinton fired back at Trump: “The debunked study you’re referring to was based on 21 undecided voters. For context that’s about half the number of people associated with your campaign who have been indicted.”

And today, to add insult to injury, even the study's author, Robert Epstein, says Trump mischaracterized his findings.

Politifact: "I have never said that Google deliberately manipulated the 2016 election."

Then, for good measure, Politifact went on to catalog the myriad weaknesses researchers have found in Epstein's study.

None of this will stop the President from using this at his next rally as another example of voter fraud and voter manipulation. And, if he loses in 2020, expect him to offer up quite a menu of such conspiracy theories.

#voterfraud #Trump #news

By: Don Lam & Curated Content