Trump shifts blame of 'rigged election' on surprise, surprise... illegal immigrants (and more)
The most accurate description of what's going on right now, tbh
Donald Trump Shifts ‘Rigged’ Talk to Immigrants’ Votes
GREEN BAY, Wis. - Donald Trump expanded his argument that the November election could be rigged against him, saying Monday that votes from immigrants without the right to vote in the U.S. may have played a role in President Barack Obama’s election in 2008.
Mr. Trump pointed to North Carolina, where he said “it is possible” that illegal votes from people who lacked U.S. citizenship could have won Mr. Obama the state.
“It could have provided his margin of victory,” Mr. Trump said at a rally in a ballroom packed with hundreds of supporters. He didn’t mention that Mr. Obama already had enough electoral votes to secure the 2008 election without winning North Carolina, which he won by less than 14,000 votes.
There is no evidence that significant voter fraud was committed in North Carolina in that race, and Mr. Trump cited no new evidence.
Nationwide, from 2002 to 2007, when the Justice Department was giving priority to election-crime enforcement, it obtained 86 total convictions, according to the National Conference on State Legislatures.
Mr. Trump spent much of his speech amplifying his claims that illegal voting and other unspecified interference in the electoral process would rig the election in favor of his opponent. His argument that he may unfairly lose the election has gained traction among his loyal supporters, who were energized by the notion of it.
“It is pitchfork and torches time in America,” Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke said several times before Mr. Trump took the stage. “We are warriors.”
Mr. Trump said voter fraud is “very very common,” that millions of voter registrations in the U.S. are no longer valid and that more than 1.8 million deceased Americans are listed as voters. He also quipped that those voters probably wouldn’t vote for him but if they did maybe they’d be okay.
Mr. Trump cited a 2014 Washington Post story that looked at whether control of the Senate in the midterm elections could “be decided by illegal votes cast by non-citizens” to say that voter fraud has influenced many close elections. “Some argue that incidents of voting by non-citizens are so rare as to be inconsequential … while others define such incidents as a threat to democracy itself,” the article said.
Urging his supporter to ignore polls that show him trailing Mrs. Clinton, Mr. Trump suggested that the data is skewed because those surveyed don’t want to say they’re voting for him.
“There’s a big, big undercurrent out here,” he said.
He blamed the media for trying to “poison the minds of the voters” by reporting on accusations against him of sexual misconduct.
“Remember - we’re competing in a rigged election,” Mr. Trump said.
His supporters responded with chants disparaging the media and Mrs. Clinton. Mr. Trump was interrupted several times by protesters who were escorted out by security.
In a lighter moment as his even wrapped up, Mr. Trump invited two little girls to join him on stage and briefly turned over his microphone to each of them to ask their names and whether they like Wisconsin.
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Donald Trump’s “rigged election” lie is working: 73 percent of GOP voters think election could be stolen
Republican voters are lapping up Donald Trump’s insidious and conspiratorial claims that the presidential election might be rigged, according to new polling.
In his latest attempted pivot, the GOP nominee has sought to deflect mounting allegations of sexual assault by making unprecedented claims attacking the integrity of the electoral process.
Despite having said after the first presidential debate in September that he would “absolutely” accept the November election’s outcome, Trump is now telling his supporters “the election is absolutely being rigged”:
Polls close, but can you believe I lost large numbers of women voters based on made up events THAT NEVER HAPPENED. Media rigging election!
- Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 16, 2016
Election is being rigged by the media, in a coordinated effort with the Clinton campaign, by putting stories that never happened into news!
- Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 16, 2016
The election is absolutely being rigged by the dishonest and distorted media pushing Crooked Hillary - but also at many polling places - SAD
- Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 16, 2016
While his running mate Mike Pence did his best once again to clean up after Trump on Sunday, telling “Meet the Press” that “we will absolutely accept the results of the election,” other prominent Trump surrogates are echoing the “rigged election” claim.
Former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani added his familiar flair for the racial dog whistle when he said that he “would have to be a moron to say” that the election in cities like “Philadelphia and Chicago is going to be fair.”
On CNN’s “State of the Union,” Giuliani said, “I’ve found very few situations where Republicans cheat.” He added, “They don’t control the inner cities the way Democrats do.”
Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke Jr., the Fox News regular contributor who spoke at the RNC this past summer, urged Trump supporters to take up pitchforks and torches:
It's incredible that our institutions of gov, WH, Congress, DOJ, and big media are corrupt & all we do is bitch. Pitchforks and torches time pic.twitter.com/8G5G0daGVN
- David A. Clarke, Jr. (@SheriffClarke) October 15, 2016
Two new polls show that this inflammatory rhetoric is working on Republican voters.
A Politico/Morning Consult poll released on Monday - conducted among 1,999 registered voters Oct. 13 through Oct. 15 - found that 73 percent of the Republicans surveyed said they think the election could be stolen from Trump. And as many as 85 percent of Trump supporters reported not feeling the election could be fair.
And a new Washington Post/ABC News poll has found that half of Trump’s supporters are “not confident” that the “votes for president across the country will be accurately counted this year.” The Post poll also discovered that 69 percent of Trump voters believe that “voter fraud” happens very often or somewhat often.
Of course there is large scale voter fraud happening on and before election day. Why do Republican leaders deny what is going on? So naive!
- Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 17, 2016
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Paul Ryan Rejects Donald Trump’s Claims of ‘Rigged’ Election System
Trump has said the election is "rigged" against him by "globalist elites"
Speaker of the House Paul Ryan issued a rebuke of GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump Saturday, criticizing comments that question the validity of the electoral process.
In a statement, a spokesperson for the highest-ranking elected Republican said Ryan is “fully confident” in the nation’s elections system. It comes on the heels of Trump’s claims that the election is “rigged” against him by “globalist elites,” elements of the federal government, and the press.
“Our democracy relies on confidence in election results, and the speaker is fully confident the states will carry out this election with integrity,” said Ryan spokesperson AshLee Strong.
In recent days Trump has laid out increasingly far-fetched visions of plots to undermine his candidacy. The descent into the realm of conspiracy theories comes as Trump struggles to account for his declining poll numbers and to divert attention from a series of allegations of sexual misconduct against him.
“It’s a rigged system,” he repeated over and again of the election Saturday at a rally in Bangor, Me.
Trump’s attempt to undermine the legitimacy of the Nov. 8 result comes as U.S. government officials believe the Russian government is engaged in a similar effort through its extensive hacking of Democratic Party officials and several state election systems.
In a statement Saturday, Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook fired back at Trump’s allegations that the race would be fixed. “Campaigns should be hard-fought and elections hard-won, but what is fundamental about the American electoral system is that it is free, fair and open to the people,” he said. “This election will have record turnout, because voters see through Donald Trump’s shameful attempts to undermine an election weeks before it happens.”
The Ryan statement marks the latest split between Ryan and Trump. The speaker was slow to endorse Trump on account of his list of controversial comments and unorthodox positions for a Republican nominee. After the release earlier this month of Trump’s lewd comments about women, Ryan told his conference that while he still supports the nominee, he would not campaign on Trump’s behalf. Ryan also signaled that he has little faith in Trump’s ability to win the White House and encouraged his members to do what they need to win the own seats, even if they have to break with Trump. Trump fired back at the Speaker, calling him a “very weak and ineffective leader.”
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The People Who Know How To Actually Rig An Election Say Trump Is Wrong
Allen Raymond wrote the book on rigging elections. Literally.
It’s called How to Rig an Election: Confessions of a Republican Operative. And in it, he explored the dirty tricks that occur in the dark corners of American democracy, including the one he engineered in the 2002 New Hampshire Senate election that landed him in prison for three months. So if anyone knows whether there’s a kernel of truth to Donald Trump’s assertion that the current election is being rigged for Hillary Clinton, he does.
“It’s impossible,” Raymond said of rigging a presidential election. “The stuff he is talking about, it is ridiculous ― if it wasn’t so dangerous.” But Trump’s claims are dangerous: They’re “an existential threat to the republic.”
Mark Braden has worked in the legal trenches during close electoral contests. For a decade, he was chief counsel at the Republican National Committee. He also was chief counsel to the Ohio Elections Commission and election counsel for the Secretary of State in Ohio. So if anyone would know whether Trump has a legal basis for arguing that the election is rigged, he does.
“Nationally to do it, in the sense of trying to do some national conspiracy, is fantasy,” Braden said. “Our system works extremely well, and election fraud, though it occurs, isn’t a significant problem in the United States.”
Braden and Raymond are among a growing number of Republicans who have begun airing concerns with the conspiratorial tone that their party nominee has adopted about the election. It’s a list comprising primarily GOP operatives and lawyers, with only a scattering of lawmakers so far.
Their fear is that Trump’s claims will cause damage that far outlasts his candidacy ― which seems increasingly likely to come to a crashing end on Nov. 8. Trust in the legitimacy of elections is a bedrock of American democracy. What Trump is doing, they fear, is taking a mason’s chipper to it.
“He is doing more damage than he realizes,” said Raymond. “What Donald Trump is doing is he is committing ‘republicide.’ He is killing not just the Republican Party but the republic.”
Braden has a theory on why Trump is going down this road: The real estate mogul has never run for office before. So he is unfamiliar with how elections work and lacks “respect for the system and the institutions.”
To that point, Trump certainly seems to have an antiquated view of what actually happens during elections. Recently, he contradicted his own surrogates ― who have insisted that his talk of a “rigged election” is solely about the overwhelmingly negative media coverage he is facing ― by directly arguing that Democrats will engage in shenanigans “at many polling places.” Before that, he strongly insinuated that voters in inner cities would use illegal methods to get Clinton elected.
“He is in the wrong century,” said Raymond. “This isn’t Boss Tweed. I cut my teeth in New Jersey, and the legends and lore was they would sit back and wait to see what margins they needed in Jersey City and they would make results come in late. ... But that doesn’t happen anymore. It is just not the technology anymore.”
To get a sense of just how hard it would be for a candidate to rig a presidential election, I asked both Braden and Raymond how they would go about it. They came up blank.
As Braden noted, Clinton would have to send a huge number of people to a huge number of counties ― pinpointing in advance where the critical margins might be ― while simultaneously keeping the Trump monitors in the dark and avoiding the type of irregularities that could be detected when the vote was counted. Even then, there could be recourse in the form of a recount.
“The system itself has earned and deserved the trust and belief that it is fair. Because it is. The winners win and the losers usually lose,” Braden said.
Raymond had more of a bare-knuckled operative’s perspective on how an election could be stolen (let’s just say it involved paying people with money and various forms of barter to go and vote). But his advice to Clinton was not to even try, since the votes bought would not be determinative and there were better uses of her cash.
“I would instead just give money to Donald Trump and tell him to tweet more,”Raymond said.
Both men stressed that elections aren’t flawless. There are sporadic errors and attempts at corruption. But those instances happen predominantly at the local level and only rarely have affected state races. Presidential contests in the modern age aren’t the type of thing that can be hacked by one side or the other. And for Trump to argue otherwise is dangerous.
“What I wish is that Donald Trump would focus his campaign on what he is going to do if he gets elected and the bad things that Hillary Clinton would do if she got elected, and not attack the system,” said Braden. “The better angels, I’m hoping, get to his ears about the importance of the system because, in the end, any democratic system is pretty fragile and it is based upon trust.”
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OP Note: There's a lot of news about this 'rigged election' talk, so I thought it might be better to put it in one post.