Trump Still Can’t Find the Millions of Illegal Votes

We all know that Donald Trump lies all the time about almost everything. But just for fun, it can be interesting to imagine he is telling the truth. Trump keeps repeating the claim that millions, maybe even tens of millions, of undocumented immigrants are brought into the country to cast votes for Democratic candidates. His incredibly rich friend — and occasional sidekick — Elon Musk has made the same claim.

It’s worth sitting back and thinking about this one for a moment. According to the Trump-Musk hypothesis, there is a network, presumably funded by rich Democrats (we know what the anti-Semites are thinking), that goes to countries like Haiti, Venezuela, Somalia and elsewhere and brings back millions — or even tens of millions — of people and pays them to vote Democratic in elections.

Let’s start by asking what this network would have to look like. If it brought back, say 5-10 million immigrants, and let’s say the transporters averaged 100 each, that would mean that 50,000-100,000 people worked in this huge network. At the high end that would be two and a half times as many people as are employed in the coal mining industry.

So, there is this massive industry of people involved in recruiting immigrants and smuggling them across the border, but Donald Trump and Elon Musk could not find even one person involved in the process. And this is despite the fact that Donald Trump commanded the full power of the federal government for five of the last nine years.

And it is not just a question of catching someone in the act. Wouldn’t any of these tens of thousands of people feel some remorse and be prepared to come forward and confess their sins? The mafia would be happy to have such loyalty. But Trump, Musk, and the rest of the crew yelling about millions of “illegals” have not been able to produce a single person involved in this massive network.

Then there is the act of voting itself. It is of course illegal everywhere for non-citizens to vote in federal elections. Republicans for some reason feel a great urge to pass a measure making it illegal for non-citizens to vote, but that has always been the law.

Anyhow, the Trump-Musk claim is that millions of undocumented immigrants have been consistently ignoring the law and voting anyhow. Here again we have to ask how incompetent the Trump gang could possibly be? It would be understandable if a few hundred, maybe even a few thousand, non-citizens could vote and slip under the radar, but millions?

How could we have millions of non-citizens voting, but Team Trump is too inept to find any of them. Apart from catching them at the polls, wouldn’t we think that at least a few of these non-citizens would spill the beans, either from a guilty conscious or maybe in search of a nice meal at Mar-a-Lago.

Even if none of these millions of scam voters are self-starters, some of them will surely be involved in some sort of crime, just as would be the case with millions of citizens. If one of these illegal voters was picked up for shoplifting or drunk driving, wouldn’t it be reasonable to expect that they would admit their offense and talk about their co-conspirators in an effort to get more lenient treatment?

Again, Trump and Musk insist there are millions of them. One of them surely would end up in this situation. But nope, we have nothing, even though Trump and Musk tell us the scam has been going on for years.

When there have been serious efforts to find non-citizen voters they all come up almost completely empty-handed. An extensive audit by the state of Utah of more than 2 million voters came up with one non-citizen, who apparently never voted. Florida found 144 non-citizens among the 13.6 million people on its voter rolls, or 0.001 percent. Texas reported that there may have been 1,930 votes cast by non-citizens among more than 18 million votes cast, which comes to 0.01 percent.

Even these numbers are likely to be overstatements. Florida doesn’t know how many of the non-citizens on its rolls voted and the votes cast in Texas were by people that they could not identify as citizens. This could be in error due to spelling mistakes, or a name change from marriage or some other reason.

If people want to buy the Trump-Musk story of a massive conspiracy to get millions of illegal votes cast for Democrats by immigrants, they must think this duo is pretty damn incompetent since they can find no evidence after years of trying. It’s hard to believe that we can have someone this incompetent in the White House. It’s maybe even harder to believe that people would freely choose to invest their money with someone as apparently incompetent as Elon Musk.

Okay, but we all know they are just lying.

This first appeared on Dean Baker’s Beat the Press blog.

The post Trump Still Can’t Find the Millions of Illegal Votes appeared first on CounterPunch.org.