To make it clear, I am not questioning the recent election or the fact that Donald Trump won the Electoral College and is, therefore, our rightful and lawful 45th president.
According to the final official vote counts, Hillary Clinton received 65.84 million or 48.2% of the popular votes. Trump received 62.97 million or 46.1% of the popular votes. That is a 2.87 million vote difference, a little over a 2% delta. This is a substantial margin that Trump does not seem to be able to accept. He still professes that he won by a landslide. That is not true no matter which metric you use.
In order to give some credence to this false claim, the new administration has cooked up this idea that three to five million illegal votes were cast. A convenient range because even on the low end, the three million votes erase Clinton's 2.8 million plurality. We are also supposed to believe that virtually 100% of these fraudulent votes went to Clinton. No cheaters voted for Trump.
To support this view, they spout statistics about massive numbers of errors on the voter registration rolls. These errors include deceased people still on the rolls and people registered in two or more states at the same time. All true. The problem is that Trump is using two unrelated things to prove a point. Errors on the voting rolls are not the same as voter fraud. The first is clerical sloppiness or poor procedures or just time lags. The second is a criminal act. The old apples and oranges trick. Politicians love to do this. Find some marginally related subjects to prove a point or causation. It snowed today so there can't be global warming. Grandpa died last July but was still officially registered to vote so there must be voter fraud.
I can tell you that when my parents died, the first (or last) thing on my to-do list was not to immediately call the voter registrar to remove their names from the voter registration list. Likewise, when I moved from one state to another, I did not notify the registrar in my old state. I bet you didn't either. I will also tell you that I did not use my deceased parents' voter registration card to cast an illegal vote. I also didn't return to my former state to vote.
There have been numerous studies on voter fraud. They have been conducted by news organizations, colleges, the Republicans, the Democrats, and others. None of these studies has found more than a handful of instances of voter fraud. Even then, some of the very few found were simple mistakes rather than malicious intent. If you add up the results of every study, you would not come anywhere near the three to five million that Trump claims. If you are interested, here is a Washington Post link to several of these studies.
This whole issue is another example of the Trump strategy combined with his massive ego. The strategy is to flood the airways with minor issues to deflect from the real ones. It also believes that lies will become truths if you repeat them often enough. His ego kicks in when the facts show that he is not the biggest or the best. Winning the election is not enough, it must be a landslide. Drawing hundreds of thousands of people to his inauguration isn't big enough, it must be the biggest crowd ever. When the facts don't match his perception, he makes up "alternative facts", something most of us would just call lies.
Now Trump promises an investigation into the "voter fraud problem". Seems like a waste of our tax money on a witch hunt.
You won Donny. Accept it. Move on. Stop lying to us. Facts and the truth matter, at least to some of us.
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