In an August 2nd interview with the Washington Post’s Phil Rucker, Donald Trump was asked about his statements that the 2016 presidential election might be rigged.
RUCKER: You said yesterday that you worried the election might be rigged in some way.
TRUMP: Yeah.
RUCKER: What is your worry exactly?
TRUMP: I don’t like what’s going on with voter ID.
RUCKER: It would be what’s happening in the states?
TRUMP: Well, I think it’s ridiculous. I mean the voter ID situation has turned out to be a very unfair development. We may have people vote 10 times.
One has to assume, Trump was referring to recent decisions by federal courts which have struck down voter ID laws in Texas (July 20), North Carolina (July 29), Wisconsin (July 29), Kansas (July 29) and North Dakota (August 1). However, contrary to Trump’s concern, there has not been a single case of multiple voting in states which do not require voter IDs or in the states involved in the court decisions prior to their passage of voter ID laws.
Justin Levitt, a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles has been tracking instances of voter fraud in the United States since 2000. He uncovered 31 documented cases of voter fraud out of more than 1 billion ballots cast. In Texas, the chance of voter fraud was one in 18 million (four cases out of 72 million votes).
How improbable is that? According to the National Weather Service, the chance of being struck by lightning in Texas is only one in 1.35 million. National Geographic calculates the odds of being killed by a meteorite at one in 1.6 million. About the only thing more unlikely than voter fraud is winning the Powerball lottery (odds of one in 292 million). Perhaps that is why former Kansas Lieutenant Governor Gary Sherrer described state lotteries as a “tax on people who failed probability in school.”
As noted in a previous post, Mr. Trump, you are entitled to your opinion that the election is rigged, but you are not entitled to your own facts. Unless the margin of victory in the popular vote or in any state is less than 31 votes (giving you the benefit of the doubt since that number covers 12 years), the outcome is due to something other than the lack of voter ID laws. Take another guess.
For what it’s worth.
Dr. ESP