In a private meeting yesterday, President Donald Trump apparently repeated an allegation he has already made publicly: more than 3.5 million voters in the recent presidential election are not U.S. citizens, and as such voted illegally, presumably almost entirely for Hillary Clinton. The implication of the statement is that Trump would have won a plurality of the popular vote if voter fraud had been prevented, while official tallies show him trailing Clinton by more than 2.9 million votes, a statistic that is widely used to portray Trump as an illegitimate President, although a President may be legitimately elected without winning the popular vote as George Bush was in 2000.
Much of the mainstream media is taking a tough line against President Trump, to put it mildly: they are loudly calling him a liar, typically within the headline of the story itself, and this story is no exception. Most of the major outlets covering this story call Trump a liar, saying that there is no way that 3.5 million people could have voted illegally.
I believe that is correct – it is unlikely so many voters could have got away with it. However, they then mostly go on to take it one step further, by baldly claiming that voter fraud is utterly unheard of, never happens, or has less chance of happening than you have of being struck by lightning.
Typically, any claim of voter fraud is reacted to with absolute fury and denial. The best example I could find of this is an item in the (ironically reliably pro-Democrat and Anti-Trump) Washington Post, which published an academic study which suggested that 6.4% of non-Citizens voted in the 2008 Presidential election. If this were accurate, considering that the United States Department of Homeland Security estimated that approximately 12 million non-Citizens were present in the United States illegally at the time, it would suggest that there were approximately 768,000 fraudulent votes in that Presidential election. The study was strongly attacked, as is indicated at the start of the article, partly due to its relatively small sample size.
Trump’s claim must be hugely off the mark, yet the insistence of most of the media that voter fraud is virtually non-existent in the U.S.A. seems to me to be more a product of wishful thinking than evidence. The issue requires further and more serious study by people without any axe to grind.
Trumponomics
President Trump also found the time yesterday to implement one of his key campaign promises in the economic field: he killed off any prospect of American joining the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement.
