It is generally felt that Trump’s claims of voter fraud, especially, apparently, by illegal aliens — Or some kind of alien, not sure — could be a prelude, or excuse for some kind of widespread voter suppression campaign. In any event, these repeated claims were once thought of as an odd and embarassing bit of yammering by the President elect, but now they have become a keystone of the White House’s current activism, foregrounded by the hapless Sean Spicer, who appears to not believe the claims himself.
From NBC:
The White House doubled down on President Donald Trump’s widely debunked claim that millions of people voted illegally in the 2016 presidential election, costing Trump the popular vote.
“The President does believe that,” White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer told reporters on Tuesday, just one day after pledging to tell the public “the facts as I know them.”…
When pressed for evidence, Spicer said “the president has believed that for a while based on studies and information he has.” Spicer also cited a 2008 Pew study that he said showed 14 percent of people who voted were not citizens.
Those figures appear to come from two different studies.
A 2012 Pew report found millions of invalid voter registrations due to people moving or dying.
But the author of that report, David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research, tweeted back in late November that this isn’t voter fraud….
The second study was a highly criticized work by Old Dominion University professors who found 14 percent of non-citizens said saying they were registered to vote. The study was based on a sample of a few hundred respondents.
During the campaign season, one of the authors said the Trump campaign was exaggerating the study’s findings.
Check out this rather astounding bit of news reporting on CNN:
They’re coming for him.