No Voter Fraud, No Understanding, No Leadership

  On Wednesday, we spoke about how important it is to remember that Hillary Clinton won the popular vote. This was a bad fact for Trump and thus important to highlight for keeping our movement going.  It has become very clear that this is a fact Trump hates. Hillary Clinton got more votes. Donald Trump hates this fact, and, as with all facts he hates, he has begun a systematic effort to make it not true.  This pattern began with his very first loss in the Iowa Caucuses, and he does it with all electoral defeats.  There is a potential method to this madness, in that his attacks on the voting system even in victory will potentially allow him to spin any subsequent electoral weakness as fraud and thus undermine the very pillars of democracy.  This approach might well be a systematic attack, or it could also be Trump’s psychological lashing out. Both are troubling.

But for today we are going to focus on a slightly different arena, and one that has sweeping implications for what we face.   Trump now makes the wholly unsubstantiated accusation that there were millions of illegal votes despite his winning.  What this shows without a shadow of a doubt is that he does not have the slightest idea of how voting in America works.  In all but one state, we have voter registration. At the time of voter registration, you have a responsibility to show documentation proving who you are, and you have to swear under penalty of perjury that you are an American citizen.  The people who run elections are constantly checking and rechecking for a voter’s eligibility and as a consequence of this entire system, almost no one who is here illegally successfully casts a ballot.

This does not mean there are absolutely no unlawful voters, but there are so close to none as to render it basically a non-issue. It is disconcerting that the President-Elect does not seem to know this very basic fact about how our democracy works. Instead he wants to believe the delusions of those who suggest millions of people would commit a serious crime, in order to vote in an election, and yet that they would do so in a way which would not even guarantee the person they were voting for a victory.  This is just kind of nutty.  

While it could be the case that this is all political posturing, it is worth stressing repeatedly how important it is to understand how things work if you are going to be in charge of them.  This is not simply about voting either.  While the country clearly has problems, and critics can point to lots and lots of examples of things not working, on the whole in the United States of America things work. They can be made to work better. They can be made to include more people. They could be more efficient.  They could be more humane.   But the basic systems we have work. To lack an understanding of how they work is to be unable to govern.