Claiming rigged election

Republicans tell Trump to quit claiming rigged election

The struggling GOP nominee is urging supporters to fight the system, and officials nationwide are fuming over it. 

By Darren Samuelsohn

It’s not just the Democrats who are frustrated by Donald Trump’s “rigged election” talk.

Republicans have started warning their increasingly ostracized nominee to stop stoking his supporters with claims that the 2016 election will be stolen, daring him to show proof or put a lid on it.

“Somebody claiming in the election, ‘I was defrauded,’ that isn’t going to cut it,” said former Sen. Kit Bond, a Missouri Republican who earlier in the campaign endorsed Jeb Bush and then Marco Rubio. “They’re going to have to say how, where, why, when.”

“I don’t think leading candidates for the presidency should undercut the process unless you have a really good reason,” Sen. Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican who gained little support for his own 2016 White House run, told POLITICO.

Trump and his running mate, Mike Pence, have been flogging for months the notion that Hillary Clinton supporters could tamper with voting to the point that they win the White House. Their campaign website is recruiting poll watchers, and longtime Trump adviser Roger Stone has been raising unlimited funds from corporations and individuals in a bid to “fight a rigged system” that purportedly benefits the Democrats.

And Monday, at a post-debate rally in crucial Pennsylvania, Trump kept the vote rigging argument alive: “Watch other communities because we don’t want this election stolen from us,” Trump said. “We do not want this election stolen from us.”

Such sustained and supercharged rhetoric, coming on the heels of a heated debate over restrictive voter ID laws across the country and the U.S. government’s Friday announcement accusing Russian hackers, on orders from the Kremlin, of trying to meddle with the election, has raised alarm bells in election offices nationwide.

States already bracing for record turnout in the presidential race are also dealing simultaneously with an unprecedented series of cyberthreats, including what the Homeland Security Department has confirmed as attempted hacks on more than 20 voting registration systems across the country. While the balloting itself is largely seen as safe from cybersleuths because the bulk of the actual voting process takes place offline, the state officials doing the grunt work complain that charges of election rigging, on top of the complaints they hear about ballot security, make their jobs that much tougher.

“I think both sides are being very political,” Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp, a Republican, said in an interview.

Unfounded rumors about vote rigging, spreading in viral speed on the Internet, have even forced state officials to play the role of fact checkers. One fake news article moved so quickly last week that Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted felt compelled to issue a statement attempting to debunk a widely circulated story that purported to show “one dozen black, sealed ballot boxes filled with thousands of Franklin County votes for Hillary Clinton and other Democratic candidates.”

“This post is both false and intentionally misleading,” Husted, a Republican, said of the article posted on christiantimesnewspaper.com. He pointed out that the picture accompanying the story was a “slightly doctored version of a photo used in a 2015 article about election results in the United Kingdom.”

“A Christian myself, I take offense to reading such unbelievable lies from a publication alleging Christian ties,” Husted said. “It was a deliberate attempt to deceive and mislead. We already get enough of that from the candidates.”

Indeed, Husted has said that the presidential campaign rhetoric around vote rigging and other election security matters threatens to undermine whichever candidate wins on Nov. 8.

“I for a long time have been critical of people in both political parties who have tried to undermine public confidence in our election, rather by saying the election is going to be rigged or suggesting that people are being disenfranchised,” Husted said.

Election officials note that widespread voting fraud has been repeatedly debunked, and they point to a series of media accounts and government watchdog reports saying so. Among the most notable: Student journalists at the Carnegie-Knight News21 program found in a 2012 study just 10 cases of voter impersonation dating back to the 2000 election. That’s one example out of every 15 million possible voters. And again in August, the media group released new findings on voter fraud cases in five states — Arizona, Georgia, Kansas, Ohio and Texas — that examined hundreds of allegations and found few actual prosecutions.

One of Trump’s most frequent suggestions surrounds urging his supporters to visit “certain areas” on Election Day as poll watchers to ensure Clinton supporters don’t vote multiple times. He points to the two most recent presidential elections, in which President Barack Obama essentially skunked his GOP rivals in many urban areas.

But the Philadelphia Inquirer, following the 2012 election, reported that Obama’s unanimous victory over Mitt Romney in 59 different majority-minority areas shouldn’t be a surprise considering the demographics of the region and the fact the country’s first black president was running for reelection. Cleveland.com came to a similar conclusion when it studied how Obama won so conclusively in east Cleveland.

In a recent interview, Obama’s 2008 opponent, John McCain marveled at his own challenges when trying to connect with African-American voters.

“I didn’t get a single vote in the whole inner city of Philadelphia,” the Arizona GOP senator told POLITICO. “I thought maybe they could find one.”

But McCain also said he’s far more concerned about a different kind of threat to the security of the presidential election, and it wasn’t Trump’s charge of possible vote rigging. Namely, the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee said he was alarmed about what the Russian hackers might be up to.

“The most disturbing comment I’ve ever heard in recent years was when [NSA Director] Admiral [Michael] Rogers said before our committee, ‘I don’t know what I don’t know.’ So I sure as hell don’t know what capabilities they have,” McCain said.

Obama himself called Trump’s suggestion of a rigged election “ridiculous” in an August news conference. “Of course the elections will not be rigged. What does that mean?” he said.

The president went on to liken the Republican nominee to a sore loser in sports. “I’ve never heard of somebody complaining about being cheated before the game was over, or before the score is even tallied,” Obama said. “So my suggestion would be go out there and try to win the election. If Mr. Trump is up 10 or 15 points on Election Day and ends up losing, then maybe he can raise some questions.”

Trump’s backers, including Stone, were indeed nudging a more vocal set of arguments surrounding vote rigging back during the summer, when polling showed the Republican well within striking distance of Clinton. For his part, Pence has told Trump supporters during public rallies that their concerns about a fraudulent election were “well-founded.”

“People need to be very concerned about voter fraud,” Pence told CNN in late August, noting that in his home state of Indiana there have been voter fraud prosecutions for more than a decade. Poll watching, he added, is a form of “vigilance I think is essential to any kind of vibrant democracy.”

To be sure, Trump has some Republican sympathizers.

“I think anything is possible, especially with electronic voting and everything,” said Sen. Richard Shelby, an Alabama Republican. “We’ve got millions of people voting. And we’ve got a lot on the outcome.”

Lanhee Chen, a former Romney 2012 policy adviser, said he doesn’t dispute the notion that there is some degree of voter fraud that takes place every election cycle across the country. But he argued that such occurrences aren’t so rampant that presidential candidates should be making those charges with what amounts to a bullhorn from the stump.


“Ultimately, is it enough to compromise an election? Probably not,” Chen said, adding: “Credible Republicans have to be a note of sobriety, and we do have to respect the outcome of the election.”