Donald Trump, on the hunt for “electoral fraud”

An obsession has accompanied Donald Trump during his ten years dedicated to politics: the existence in one form or another of “fraud” to blame for his electoral setbacks, to direct discredit towards democracy, to justify a greater concentration of power around his figure, as well as measures against irregular immigration.

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When he lost the popular vote in 2016, he claimed the reason was that immigrants had been “voting illegally,” despite the lack of evidence. Four years later, he was narrowly defeated in the presidential election by Joe Biden and justified it by also claiming, without proof, that Democratic states had sent millions of ballots to undocumented immigrants and sowed doubts about mail-in voting and counting machines.

When the Republicans’ results in the 2022 midterm elections were worse than expected, Trump reminded his voters that “there will never be free and fair elections as long as there is mail-in voting,” a method he himself has historically used to exercise the right. Two years later, the same complaints were present throughout the presidential campaign but faded after his victory in the popular vote and the electoral college.

With two months left before the midterm legislative elections in his second term, in which Republicans risk losing control of both chambers of Congress, Trump has renewed his offensive against the democratic process. Hundreds of federal agents from the Department of Homeland Security have been suddenly assigned to a job aimed at finding non-citizens registered to vote.

Although most independent investigations agree that undocumented voting is very rare – even a database from the conservative Heritage Foundation, which lists 100 cases in 25 years – and, in any case, is prosecuted by the justice system, the White House is trying to portray it as a widespread crime driven by the Democrats.

According to an investigation by The New York Times, agents are scrutinizing state voter rolls and using voters’ personal identification information, including their Social Security numbers, to search for them in those rolls. In fact, investigators, assigned to the new job for several weeks, are using that data to log into voter registration websites and check if undocumented immigrants are on the list.

In recent history, there are few cases of electoral fraud, but the evidence about these is so minimal that it has never influenced any results. This year, New Jersey announced that a computer error had led to 6,600 non-citizens being automatically registered to vote in the last elections, although about 400 ended up voting. While the justice system already pursues these types of errors and crimes, the White House overstates it to generate panic among voters.

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“Well, you saw what happened: they discovered thousands of votes in New Jersey where undocumented immigrants were allowed to vote,” Trump said the day after New Jersey’s Democratic governor, Mikie Sherrill, announced they had discovered the error. “Thousands and thousands of votes. They voted in favor of genital mutilation of their children to turn them into transsexuals and in favor of men competing in women’s sports. Isn’t that wonderful?” the president exaggerated.

The so-called Illegal Voter Initiative is just the latest measure by Trump to generate distrust about elections and control their conduct. The president also signed an executive order this year aimed at restricting and controlling mail-in voting at the federal level, despite the Constitution stating that elections must be administered by the states.

According to the decree, the Department of Homeland Security must prepare, with state collaboration, lists of citizens considered eligible to vote in federal elections. The order establishes that the Postal Service must deliver ballots only to voters listed on the approved lists. Thus, if a state does not provide the corresponding list, or a person does not appear on it, the ballot might not be delivered.

The judiciary has blocked the decree twice for being unconstitutional, but the legal battle continues in the Supreme Court, generating uncertainty, as in some states the period for voters to start receiving their mail-in ballots has already begun.

In his speech against election integrity, Trump announced in July the declassification of “verified” U.S. intelligence documents about alleged Chinese interference in the 2020 elections, which had been “hidden” by a “deep state.” Among other accusations, he said Beijing had carried out the largest infiltration of electoral data in history, allowing the illicit acquisition of 220 million U.S. voter records.”

In the same speech, Trump claimed there are about 278,000 non-citizens registered to vote with the connivance of the Democrats, a figure for which he gave no evidence and which supposedly comes from a study commissioned by his Administration to a private company, but contradicts studies published by major independent research centers.

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