Such a strange country we live in now:
- Trump claims widespread election fraud so we can't trust the results of the upcoming election
- Trump narrowly wins, claims historic mandate and totally no voter fraud
- Press focuses on Trump's loss by millions in the popular vote
- Trump unilaterally tweets that millions of fraudulent votes were cast, all for Hillary
That's the basis for this inquiry. Not a rational belief or evidence that there actually is widespread voter fraud. The basis for spending millions of dollars on something is the President's ego.
Fine, that's where we start. But what do we know about actual voter fraud?
Many who have studied the issue have concluded that there
is zero evidence that widespread voter fraud had an impact on the election. We know of
four actual cases of voter fraud in the 2016 election. Out of 135,000,000 votes, 4. There are another half dozen suspected cases. Here are the 4 reported cases:
1. Because Trump said the polls were all rigged, a lady in Des Moines tried to level the playing field by voting twice for Trump (and was caught),
2. A man in Texas voted twice, was caught, and claim he was an employee of the Trump Campaign testing the integrity of the voting system,
3. A Republican election judge in Illinois voted on behalf of her dead husband by absentee ballot, and
4. A mail clerk in Florida was filling in blanks on absentee ballots.
That's not to say that ineligible voting isn't a potential problem we need to keep an eye on. But even
when newspapers set out to report on voter fraud they find a handful of actual incidents and several more instances of people who are registered improperly (such as automatically being registered to vote when getting a license, even if ineligible. But that isn't evidence that they actually voted, let alone fraudulently). Surely we can improve the system, but the constant drum beat that there is widespread voter fraud is propagating a myth that undermines our democracy (and seems to actually encourage some people to engage in voter fraud).
And that's ignoring the fact that the inquiry is a massive federal attempt to mine personal data using states as proxies. Your voter information is as precious as what firearms you own, can you imagine the conservative outrage if the Feds asked states to collect firearms data on every American and turn it over to Uncle Sam?
Instead of focusing on a handful of people who may try to vote twice for Trump's reelection, why not focus on making the process more efficient and other actual existential threats to the integrity of our Republic? But no,
we actually cut funding for programs designed to keep the election process secure. Back to the witch hunt!