In 2018 the Los Angeles Times writes in, Deconstructing Trump’s whopper about California voter fraud, “the easy analysis of President Trump’s relentless attacks on California’s 2016 election results is this: Maybe he simply hasn’t gotten over the thumping he took in the Golden State … But there’s more than just Trump’s feelings at stake when he keeps claiming there’s rampant voter fraud here. There’s real civic danger when the president peddles that whopper.”
“In many places, like California, the same person votes many times. You probably heard about that,” he told the crowd. “They always like to say, ‘Oh, that’s a conspiracy theory.’ Not a conspiracy theory, folks. Millions and millions of people.”
Daniel Dale, keeper of Trump Lies who is now reporting for CNN writes, “Since the first week of his presidency, President Donald Trump has falsely claimed that there was mass voter fraud in the 2016 presidential election. He has repeatedly and baselessly singled out California as a supposed center of this fraud.”
He did so again in an interview that aired Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” This time, he added a new false claim to try to support the original false one.
Host Chuck Todd asked Trump if he is bothered by the fact that he lost the popular vote in 2016. Trump responded: “Well, I think it was a — I mean, I’ll say something that, again, is controversial. There were a lot of votes cast that I don’t believe. I look at California.”
He continued: “Take a look at Judicial Watch, take a look at their settlement where California admitted to a million votes. They admitted to a million votes.”
Facts First: California made no such admission. And there is no evidence that there was widespread voter fraud in California in 2016.
Both Trump and his supporters have been repeating versions of this lie since he won on November 8, 2016. Mainly because he lost the popular vote, Politico reported then.
On November 27, 2016, after the Green Party’s Jill Stein challenged the Wisconsin votes Trump hooked into the conspiracy that more than 3 million people committed voter fraud and he felted “piqued” that Hillary Clinton’s campaign participated in the recount so “he hit back.”
An adviser told Politico at that time that “Trump genuinely believes “that the Democratic establishment will try to steal” his victory,” so his goal, they said, was to “hold their feet to the fire.”
That particular lie stated after the conspiracy theory website InfoWars published an article on November 14, 2016 titled, Report: 3 million votes in presidential election cast by illegal aliens, citing a guy named Gregg Phillips who was formerly associated with Newt Gringrich’s Winning Our Future super PAC and claiming he was the creator of an app called VoteStand.
When news outlets contacted Phillips for his source and data material for this assertion, he “declined to provide any evidence,” but said a few days later in a tweet that he would “release a comprehensive research study to the public, Attorney General [nominee Jeff] Sessions and all interested parties.”
At the time, Hillary Clinton was leading 2.2 million in the popular vote.
Trump must still feel piqued, because now his voter fraud story has morphed into 1 million people voted illegally in California as he tortured the information out of a recently settled lawsuit filled 2017 by right-wing Judicial Watch against California.
In January, the conservative group Judicial Watch announced that it had settled its 2017 lawsuit against the state of California and the county of Los Angeles. The settlement required the county to remove the names of inactive voters from its voter lists, and it required the state to direct other counties to remove inactive voters from their own lists.
Trump got the “1 million” figure from Judicial Watch: the group said that as many as 1.5 million registrations would have to be removed in Los Angeles County as a result of the settlement.
But there was no evidence that any of these inactive people voted illegally; Judicial Watch itself said most of them are simply “voters who have moved to another county or state or have passed away.” And California did not admit any wrongdoing as part of the settlement.
CNN – Daniel Dale
“The Judicial Watch settlement provided no evidence of fraud whatsoever,” said Rick Hasen, an expert in elections law and a professor of law and political science at the University of California, Irvine.
“There were 149 cases investigated by state officials in 2016,” the Los Angeles Times said.
“Investigators only found six cases out of 23.1 million votes cast worth sending to local district attorneys” for further investigation.
If Trump or Trump and Republicans really cared about election integrity instead of repeating Trump’s lies, maybe one day they’ll be willing to talk about Republicans’ massive election fraud that occurred in North Carolina‘s Districts 03 and 09.
Stay tuned.