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As we move closer to mid-term elections, the Trump administration continues to lie about election integrity, sowing the seeds for bullshit “rigged election” claims should the GOP fail to win the elections Trump wants them to win.
There’s another reason this administration lies constantly about elections, voters, and anything related to it: Trump still thinks he won the 2020 election and won’t take facts for an answer. That’s why there have been so many efforts to re-litigate the 2020 election results by Trump and his party members. And this is something that continues despite this supposedly rigged system somehow managing to deliver an election win for Trump in 2024.
It doesn’t matter whether or not anyone believes Trump or his enablers. All that matters is that Trump believes it. And if he does then a whole lot of his voting base will be willing to do anything from raid the Capitol building in DC to ask ICE to engage in voter suppression this November.
Trump is leveraging the bigotry he’s stoked with his anti-migrant efforts and the billions his budget bill has added to the DHS’s bottom line to make the case (without any facts in evidence) that there are hundreds of thousands of non-citizens voting in every election.
So far, the administration has yet to demonstrate that the number of non-citizen voters is enough to be concerned about at all, much less evidence of a deliberately broken system the libs are using to keep the GOP out of office.
When facts aren’t conducive to the preferred narrative, the narrative takes the lead. That’s how things started in Nevada, when the DHS claimed thousands of illegal voters recently participated in elections. Here’s the current DHS boss making outlandish claims on X, which is where this government does most of its social media business:
Of that 250,000 total, Mullin and the DHS claimed more than 190,000 were detected in California. Nevada’s total came in as nearly 16,000 illegal voters, according to the DHS. Things have drastically changed in the last month, as NPR reports, based on public records it has obtained, including a recent video conference involving both DHS and Nevada state officials.
DHS initially announced it had found close to 16,000 noncitizens on Nevada’s voter list. But a DHS official acknowledged in the meeting with Nevada officials that number was “the ceiling” and each voter still had to be manually reviewed. Then, a day later, DHS provided the state with a list of 185 ID numbers pertaining to voters the agency said it was confident were noncitizens.
Holy shit. That’s a false positive rate that puts Flock to shame. That means the DHS is about 99% wrong when it comes to “illegal” voters.
But even after admitting it could possibly only pinpoint 185 of the alleged 16,000 non-citizen voters, the DHS continues to pretend it will somehow get a lot closer to 16k than it is to zero at this point.
Nevada asked for more information on that smaller group of 185 voters, and the data points used to match them to noncitizens. DHS declined to provide that. The agency did say it still had more than 14,000 Nevada voters that “need additional review,” and it also provided the state with a list of more than 6,000 voter IDs the agency said were “higher confidence” matches but had yet to be reviewed.
Read that through carefully. Not only is the DHS continuing to pretend it still needs to re-review 14,000 voters and claiming it may have located another 6,000 voters of dubious citizenship, it won’t even provide Nevada with information pertaining to the 185 voters it insists have actually voted illegally.
And there’s a good chance the DHS will never turn over any information to any of the states it has accused of permitting thousands (or hundreds of thousands) of non-citizens to vote. Doing so would mean undoing Trump’s narrative, so the DHS will maintain the upper hand by regularly “citing” its made-up number (250,000+ “illegal” voters) while stiff-arming, sand-bagging, and stonewalling any requests for data that might support these obvious lies.
What makes this even stupider, more corrupt, and more dangerous is that even if the DHS is right (it fucking isn’t) that there are 16,000 non-citizens casting votes in Nevada (and — in addition — only casting votes for Democrats), it still wouldn’t make up the difference in Trump’s 2020 presidential election loss in that state. He lost that state by more than 35,000 votes in 2020, which means he still would have lost, even if every non-citizen had voted for Joe Biden.
What makes it even stupider is that Nevada flipped in 2024, giving Trump a win by 46,000 votes. Even if we assume — using the same bad faith arguments as Trump uses — that every “illegal” vote was cast against Trump, he still would have won by 30,000 votes.
This bitter husk of man still wants the entire nation to join him in his psychosis and firmly believe, with their entire American hearts, that the 2020 election was rigged, but the two elections he won were fair and square.
What follows from here will just be voter suppression in whatever form this administration thinks it can get away with. By pretending nearly 250,000 illegal voters are on the nation’s rolls, Trump can start prepping ICE deployments to “blue” states — something that’s going to be a lot easier to do since they’ve already been flooded with federal officers and National Guard units.
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