Catherine McKenzie “Cat”

Trump is ranting about voter fraud. Again. As usual, he offers zero proof for his claims. There’s one thing I know for a fact about voter fraud: There is no voter fraud of any consequence anywhere in the US. And the reason I know that is that the Republican Party has proven it to me. For decades, the Republican Party has been searching high and low, in every corner of our country, for evidence of voter fraud. The GOP has been armed with vast amounts of power and money in this search; it’s one of the most massive efforts to examine voting records in our history: A Presidential Commission under Trump in his first term, well-funded and armed with the power of subpoena, went hunting for voter fraud. The Department of Justice under Trump was given a specific order that every US Attorney in the country look for voter fraud, armed of course with the power of subpoena. Committees of Congress controlled by Republicans, also with subpoena powers, have called witnesses and tried to amass evidence. Republican-controlled state legislatures and regulatory bodies have also looked—also using subpoena powers. Conservative think tanks and academics have trained their analytical tools and joined the search. Fox News and the rest of the Trumpist media have investigated. The result is hilarious. In 2017, the Heritage Foundation set up an “Election Fraud Database” to collect all the data from this enormous effort. Heritage looked at elections going back to the 1970s—that’s billions of American votes. To be fair, they did not look at every single election or every single precinct or every single vote. But they scoured the records in search of “proven cases of election fraud,” and to this day they continue the search. The tally to date: 1600 cases. All that money. All that power. All that time and effort across the country, for decades. And that’s what they’ve got? Yeah, they’ll tell you this paltry number proves their case. That tiny number—among billions of America votes cast—that’s the tip of the iceberg! But that ain’t no iceberg. It’s not even an ice cube. The water isn’t even cold. So I thank the Republican Party for achieving the impossible: They have proved a negative. There is no voter fraud of any consequence anywhere in the United States.