Trump's 'rigged' election

A guide to Donald Trump's 'rigged' election

Zombie Democrats, colluding reporters and backstabbing Republicans.

By Darren Samuelsohn

Dead Democrats who “absolutely vote.” “Phony” polling and the colluding media “refusing” to report on his imminent victory. Paul Ryan’s backstabbing “months-long campaign” to get Hillary Clinton elected president. Donald Trump and his supporters keep adding to their list of the dubious ways they’ve been boxed out from winning the White House.

And with Election Day now just 13 days away, these claims will take center stage.

Like any compelling conspiracy theory, there are some kernels of truth. The country’s voting system is indeed disparate and clunky, and it’s not uncommon for the recently deceased to linger on registration rolls. Rid of context, some of John Podesta’s hacked emails look fishy. Hackers have even demonstrated they’re capable of messing with electronic voting machines.

But many of these suspicions, while popular in Trump’s social media circle, are half baked. And that’s bothersome to leaders from both parties who fret the consequences every time the GOP presidential nominee riles up his supporters.

“It’s irresponsible and it’s ignorant at best,” Utah Lt. Gov. Spencer Cox, a Republican and a lead election official in his state, told POLITICO. “It’s very troublesome and I can assure you there is no deep-rooted conspiracy here in the state of Utah to have a rigged election.”

Added President Barack Obama: “You are much likelier to be struck by lightning than have somebody next to you commit voter fraud.”

A decisive Clinton win in less than two weeks would render Trump’s assertions moot. But it’s another story if the presidential election becomes a squeaker, where the difference in one or two swing states sends the election into an overtime recount. Then the “rigged” rallying cry Trump has been using for months to excite his base would matter a great deal during the standoff. Only a few of Trump’s claims would actually be relevant to any legal challenges, but they’d be especially potent pieces in the corresponding PR war that could go a long way toward delegitimizing a new Clinton administration.

With Trump threatening to withhold his concession unless he wins, it’s time for a POLITICO guide to the rigged election:

Look out! Zombie voters!

If Trump loses, he says it won’t be because of legitimate voters. Instead, he’ll lose because of dead ones.

“You have 1.8 million people who are dead, who are registered to vote, and some of them absolutely vote. Now, tell me how they do that,” Trump told Sean Hannity last week during an interview on Fox News.

Trump has expanded his argument with the claim Clinton will win thanks to the 2.5 million people in the country who are actually registered to vote in two different states. “That means they’re voting twice,” he declared.

The Republican’s statistics are pretty much spot on. They come from a 2012 report by the Pew Center on the States that he name-checked during last week’s final debate in Las Vegas.

But here’s the problem with Trump’s argument: There’s no evidence that either of the two problems he’s flagging happen at any size or scale.

For starters, the Pew report was written at the time to explain how voter registration dates to the 19th century and is very much out of step with modern technology and Americans’ mobile lifestyles. It had nothing to do with the idea that people were actually voting in two separate states in the same election, a scenario that the report’s co-author said has resulted in just a “handful” of prosecutions in recent election cycles. Instead, the report was trying to highlight a problem states face keeping tabs on their transitory residents as they move from one place to another without also updating their voter registration data.

Pew also offered no finding on Trump’s claim that people are showing up to vote using the name of someone who had died. The suggestion that the country is plagued with a herd of zombie voters just hasn’t been born out in any kind of serious official investigation or criminal prosecutions.

“To commit voter fraud like this, someone would have to show their face before witnesses in order to cast a single ballot in an election where there might be 140 million ballots. It doesn’t make much sense to do that,” explained David Becker, the former Pew official who co-authored the report Trump has been citing. “It’s a felony with hardly any payoff. It’s not the crime of the century.”

Trump’s own exit pollsters

Trump and his supporters aren’t letting go of the claim there’ll be Election Day fraud. Indeed, his campaign for months has been using its website — “Help Me Stop Crooked Hillary From Rigging This Election!” — to recruit volunteers who will be sent to churches, schools and other local polling places across the country in search of evidence of wrongdoing.

While Trump officials didn’t respond to requests for comment about how many people it expects to deploy for its poll-watching efforts, traces of a game plan are starting to turn up around the country.

The San Antonio Express News reported last week on a spike in GOP volunteers who have signed up through their local county party offices to be volunteer monitors. In Ohio, Trump supporters from rural counties told The Columbus Dispatch they’ll be driving into urban precincts to watch the polls, a plan that’s raised alarm among Democrats and local officials concerned about voter intimidation.

Trump’s allies are also going to be on the ground searching for evidence of vote rigging in several key swing-state metro areas, including Cleveland; Charlotte and Fayetteville, North Carolina; Detroit; Miami-Fort Lauderdale; Milwaukee; Philadelphia; Richmond, Virginia; and Las Vegas. Those urban spots weren’t picked at random. They are where Democrats hold many of the key local levers of power, and longtime Trump confidant Roger Stone said it’s where he’s most suspicious of Clinton supporters running up her totals by ballot stuffing or hacking into the voting machines.

Stone’s plan, mounted through a non-profit group named “Stop the Steal,” will involve sending 1,300 volunteers to conduct exit polls to check whether the percent of survey respondents interviewed after they’ve voted match up with the vote totals released by local and state officials. In an interview, Stone said he’d make his exit polls public if they show a difference that’s greater than 2 percent, a variance that he said would suggest something suspicious has happened.

The aim, Stone explained, is to produce “solid evidence” of a rigged election that the Trump campaign could use in court.

“If there’s real evidence of electoral fraud then it’d be un-American of him to not challenge the results,” Stone said.

Dishonest polls and a colluding media

The latest data coming in both nationally and in swing states has been anything but good for Trump’s campaign, and that’s led to the latest pivot in the Republican’s “rigged” election message: a full-bore attack on the polls themselves and the media that he’s long courted (but also loathed) for reporting on them.

“Major story that the Dems are making up phony polls in order to suppress the the [sic] Trump,” he posted Monday morning on Twitter, not long before a visit to a South Florida pumpkin patch where he complained about the “phony, disgusting, dishonest papers” that were reporting him as lagging behind Clinton in the polls.

Trump’s surrogates have been fanning the flames, dubious of polls and news reports that show Republicans bolting their nominee. “Something about it is just, I don’t know, strange. It’s all confusing out there,” Rush Limbaugh wrote last week on his Facebook page. “If you’re supporting Trump, a political novice who has no experience whatsoever and who has entered the race with specific objectives, how in the world could you be talked out of that and persuaded to vote for the exact opposite of why you supported Trump in the first place?”

Attacking the polls themselves has also become a prominent part of Trump’s social media circle. An email released Sunday as part of the Podesta WikiLeaks trove prompted an online outcry as the Republican’s supporters claimed they had found evidence of the way Democrats cook surveys to dampen their opponent’s support. Their object of concern: An8-year-old message written by Tom Matzzie, a longtime Democratic operative, who was asking his colleagues for some help to “recommend oversamples” for an upcoming poll.

Matzzie, however, offered up a much simpler explanation. He wrote in an email to POLITICO that he was using common statistical lingo, which is how pollsters get a better understanding of the views from a specific demographic group. “If you want to know what unmarried women think in a more statistically significant way you might add 200 surveys of unmarried women to an 800 survey poll,” he wrote.

The viral hoax

Trump’s “rigged” election narrative is getting help from the same social media universe that helped fuel his rise. And in many cases, the claims being made online are anything but true.

A spate of fake news stories and hoax tweets have been spreading daily that have only incited Trump’s backers, who increasingly are seeing a race that they always thought was stacked against him in the GOP primaries as now somehow even less legit.

A recent example of the viral fare: a fake news article published last month on christiantimesnewspaper.com describing cases of extra ballots marked for Clinton that were being kept in an Ohio warehouse. Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted, a Republican, was so disturbed by the false account that he felt compelled to issue his own statement calling the article “both false and intentionally misleading.”

Another example of the slippery slope of fake media: A tweet Friday posted by a Portland man included a picture of a ballot that didn’t even have Trump’s name on it, though it did have Clinton’s printed twice. After more than 1,000 retweets, the author posted an explanation that the whole thing was a Photoshop hoax.

“My apologies that I left it up so long. I shouldn’t have let this experiment go on. Go vote. Fact check. Pass things on responsibly,” the man, John Lussier, wrote on his Twitter page. He also marveled at how quick the picture spread and suggested renaming Trump’s supporters “’the Gullibles’ not the ‘Deplorables.’”

Fairleigh Dickinson University political science professor Dan Cassino said such examples of misinformation would only grow as the “rigged” election narrative clashes with the conclusion of the campaign and a frenetic social media environment.

“After the election, there are going to be people tweeting and posting ‘evidence’ of all of this (along with early exit polls showing [Trump] doing better than he winds up doing, because that's how exit polls work),” he said.

“And unless [Trump campaign manager Kellyanne] Conway can pull his phone from his hand, I can easily see Trump re-tweeting and amplifying the messages. None of it is evidence of anything, of course, but it's impossible to prove the absence of something, and when people are motivated to believe it, they will.”

Republicans were never there for him anyway

Trump has always been an outsider in the presidential race. Now that he’s on the ropes, he’s turning his fire back on the GOP.

During an interview last week on "Good Morning America," Trump took a swipe at House Speaker Paul Ryan when asked if he believed the Wisconsin lawmaker wanted him to beat Clinton. “Well, maybe not, because maybe he wants to run in four years or maybe he doesn’t know how to win,” Trump said.

Soon after that interview, Breitbart — the far-right media outlet previously run by Trump campaign CEO Stephen Bannon — published a story under the headline “He’s with her: Inside Paul Ryan’s months-long campaign to elect Hillary Clinton president.”

The article offered a point-by-point rundown of the different reasons Ryan would rather see Clinton win the White House, noting the two “share a progressive, globalist worldview, which is at odds with Trump’s ‘America first’ approach.” It also ticked through recent examples in which Ryan undercut the campaign’s message by stating he wouldn’t defend his party’s presidential nominee.

Trump’s assault on Republicans has also extended to their reluctance to go along with his claim that the election was rigged against him.

“Of course there is large scale voter fraud happening on and before election day. Why do Republican leaders deny what is going on? So naïve,” Trump tweeted last week.

But try telling that to the Republicans across the country who are responsible for Election Day mechanics and logistics. “Mr. Trump, I’d just say, rest assured we’re going to do our job,” said Paul Pate, the Republican secretary of state in Iowa.