The president’s willingness to dismiss the results depends on his lies about voter fraud.
Donald Trump had a warning that he wanted to shared with the audience. “The only way we can lose, in my opinion,” he said, intently, “… is if cheating goes on. » You’d be forgiven if you assumed that this was Trump speaking at a small rally in Wisconsin on Monday. But there, his warning was different. “Make sure because the only way we’re going to lose this election is if the election is rigged,” the president said. “Remember that. It’s the only way we’re going to lose this election, so we have to be very careful. » The warning about cheating, on the other hand, was offered in Pennsylvania in August 2016, and focused specifically on his purported concerns about that state. When he won Pennsylvania, his allegations that the state was riddled with fraud simply melted away. There was no reason to believe those allegations in the first place. In 2012, the state stipulated in response to a lawsuit that it had identified “no investigations or prosecutions of in-person voter fraud in Pennsylvania.” A 2017 investigation by the state determined that as many as 544 illegal votes might have been cast over 18 years of voting in the state, a period in which more than 93 million votes were submitted. “The illegal ballots were apparently cast by noncitizen immigrants who later reported themselves as having mistakenly registered,” the Associated Press reported. In fact, Trump’s own campaign, in an effort to repel a recount in the Michigan vote four years ago, asserted that « [a]ll available evidence suggests that the 2016 general election was not tainted by fraud or mistake. » This didn’t prevent Trump from lazily alleging that fraud occurred anyway — not in states he won, of course, but in ones he lost. He’s repeatedly made the nonsensical claim that his huge loss in California was a function of fraud, meaning that millions of votes would somehow have been illegally cast without detection. He’s also repeatedly claimed that the results in New Hampshire were tainted by fraud, a claim unsupported by any evidence and which has repeatedly been rejected by officials in the state and by outside analysis of the vote. Why make those claims? Because Trump is embarrassed that he lost the popular vote, obviously. He presents himself as a winner, so he rationalizes his loss. That it doesn’t make sense is beside the point. In focusing so insistently on allegations of fraud, he has convinced many of his supporters that it occurs at significant scale and poses a persistent threat to our electoral system.
