President Donald Trump returned to a familiar theme last week, delivering a prime-time address on election integrity which implied that many states allow those in the country illegally to vote. He called the system “dishonest” and even singled out Nevada.
Democrats responded that the president was trying to undermine faith in the upcoming midterm results. Where to begin?
It’s worth noting that Mr. Trump never said during his Thursday night speech that he actually won the 2020 election. Instead, his address was intended to pressure Senate Republicans into passing the SAVE Act, a federal election reform bill. Yet the math doesn’t compute. Democrats have the votes to block the measure in the upper chamber unless the GOP kills the filibuster. Such short-sightedness would be a blunder of epic proportion (see: Harry Reid and the nuclear option) that Republicans would soon regret.
The president’s hyperbole aside, you don’t have to be a supporter of the White House or an election conspiracy theorist to acknowledge that ballot harvesting, universal mail ballots, automatic DMV voter registration and other recent innovations carry with them inherent election security problems, particularly when it comes to ensuring proper chain of custody procedures for ballots. The bizarre Democratic resistance to voter ID requirements also runs counter to common sense.
But the Constitution grants the states wide latitude to conduct their own elections. And those who believe that thousands of illegal votes are being counted and influencing the outcome of local and national elections have consistently failed t0 produce evidence to support this proposition. Nor have they prevailed in court when their claims are tested. Yes, there are instances of voter fraud. But confirmed cases are typically small in scope and scale.
Still, Mr. Trump on Thursday alleged that about 250,000 noncitizens were registered to vote in four states, California, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Nevada. The latter, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin maintains, has about 16,000 non-citizens on the voter rolls. But administration officials, CBS News reports, have not made public how these figures were calculated, nor have they claimed that any of these illegal residents actually cast ballots.
Nevada Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar, a Democrat, responded by saying Mr. Trump’s numbers were “wildly speculative, at best.” He’s probably correct. But rather than being uncooperative, Mr. Aguilar would be better off expressing a willingness to review the administration’s evidence. And Mr. Mullin should quickly provide it if he wants these allegations to be seen as anything but sour grapes.
In fact, other state audits have identified very few non-citizens on the voter rolls, CBS reports.
Efforts to ensure the integrity of state voter rolls are worthwhile. But if the White House insists that thousands of people are on the voter rolls illegally in Nevada and elsewhere, it should produce documentation to back up those claims.
