I’m not asking you to make up numbers, I’m simply asking if you (well boffking, but you interjected here) believe that the conviction rate of crimes is an accurate representation of their actual incidence rates. Do no criminals ever get away with it? Or are “unsolved crimes” perhaps the only cases of that? Are there crimes that never get reported to the police? Perhaps some that they close the investigation on for lack of evidence? Some where the defendant gets acquitted, not because a criminal act wasn’t committed, but because there was insufficient evidence to convict the accused?
This is a technical question but how do states ensure that someone is a citizen when they register to vote? Are they able to link to the social security database like E-verify?
Good point. I’ve personally committed dozens of murders, and no one has ever suspected.
Yeah, Van Jones on CNN made this point. He also pointed out that anybody who has been active in get-out-the-vote efforts knows how difficult it is to get ELIGIBLE voters to go out and vote. The idea that massive numbers who aren’t eligible would turn out to commit voter fraud (particularly, as you note, in states where the outcome was not in doubt) is a pretty silly hypothesis to begin with.
The evidence says the best estimate is 2.
Could there be more? Sure, there could be 3.
But could there be lots more? Sure, there could be 6.
That’s not enough. Could there be lots and lots and lots and lots more? Sure, but only if you ignore the current evidence.
No amount of sophistry can disguise the fact that Trump is either stupid or lying. Or both.
Maybe we shouldn’t start with “Has it been done?”, but with “Is it even possible?”. How could it be done? Start with money, gonna definitely take some money. All right, lets concede that somehow, lets say that Leader Soros has committed to writing whatever checks are needed. Leap of faith, to be sure, but this conspiracy theory requires more such leaps than a religious fanatic kangaroo…
But onward! Money in hand, we move on to logistics and organization. This isn’t a mere logistical nightmare, this is the one where you wake up screaming and never sleep again! Locate three millon to five million people willing to join the conspiracy, step one. Vet them for reliability and commitment, that they will keep their big fat mouths shut! All of them!
Where do they live? Do they need to be transported elsewhere to be effective? And if so, how? Will they need any documents at all? Even here in Baja Canada, with a very lenient system, you must have some proof of residence, say, a bill from the electric company. Got to ramp up the capacity to forge documents, appropriate to location. Pacific Power and Gas ain’t gonna cut it in Hibbing.
Security. A biggy! One word gets out, and the whole thing comes tumbling down. Keep in mind, the Forces of Darkness already believe, they are already searching for you even before you exist!
So now we got to have three to five million co-conspirators? I trust you see the problem, there. Sure hope so. As Ben Franklin remarked, three people can keep a secret, if two of them are dead. Wait, “dead”! Maybe we could off them afterwards? 'Course, littering the countryside with five million corpses could pose a problem. About, say, five million of them! Need a better option, who’s got one?
So, what have we got, here? A roving caravan of buses stuffed with conspirators, driving from location to location? With mobile forgery labs? How many different polling places could they broach on any given day?
Even if the time spent voting was ten minutes from arrival to departure, you still have drive the buses to the next place. Oh, and not be noticed. There are any number of places where a busload of brown people arriving at the polling place would draw attention. Even suspicion! And three busloads? Five? Fifty?
Enough. It could not be done, not even by lefties, liberals and commies, all working in harmony and mutual accord. Even given our awesome capacity for organized skullduggery. Its absurd on the face of it.
Take Miller’s remark, above, about riding a unicorn. Maybe not, you might think, because unicorns avoid anyone who is not a virgin, and we have some reasonable doubts. Certainly not, because…there are no goddam unicorns!
If any political group had the money, the power and the skills to put together and execute such a conspiracy, we shouldn’t bother to think in terms of thwarting it, we should simply begin negotiations towards our surrender.
Take trump’s claim that illegal voters provided Hillary’s popular margin of “victory”. That’s darned near three million votes. Unless they are able to prosecute three thousand, (That’s one tenth of one percent) it’s pretty clear that trump is talking from an orifice not normally employed for speech.
Democrats should run with this issue. DEMAND investigations and prosecutions.
I think he should also have the FBI investigate the massive conspiracy among climate scientists to convince people that humans are changing the climate.
After all, if this is really a massive fraud, the FBI should find out who’s in on it, what they hope to gain, how it got started, who are the organizers, the ringleaders, the planners? And who’s paying for it all? We deserve to know!
Sorry, ‘4’ was made up a long time ago, but it’s become so well-established that everybody accepts it as truth, along with 1,2,3,5,6,7,…
Zero was a tough sell at first, but people eventually warmed to it, and to the negative numbers as well.
Irrationals and imaginary numbers were a tougher sell, though. Good thing most people don’t know about the first uncountable ordinal, or all those alephs with integer subscripts. 
How does he know how the millions of illegal voters voted?
Regardless, “millions” is, at minimum, one out of every fifty ballots cast being an illegal vote. How Trump can claim to have been elected by anything resembling a fair and Democratic process under those circumstances is outrageous (the fact that he both claims a catastrophic failure of the process during the election while also claiming to have been democratically elected is a special brand of “alternate truthing” that we’re going to have to get used to, I guess).
I would like to see a Democratic coalition put together a proposal to get to the bottom of this crisis of Democracy! Let’s appoint a commission to do some real research into these millions of illegal votes, prove they happened, figure out how to keep 1 out of 50 (or MORE!) of the ballots cast from being cast by illegal immigrants (maybe we can reduce the number to only 200,000 illegal ballots?), and maybe hold an emergency re-election. After all, if 2+% of the ballots are ILLEGAL VOTES, and the election is decided by a margin of within that amount, clearly we can’t call ourselves a Democratic nation if we let CRIMINALS choose who runs the country!?
QFT.
Are there more actual cases of voter fraud than the very, very small number of known cases? Very probably, but even if there are ten such “successful” cases for every one that’s been discovered and convicted, that’s still a very small number. Hell, even if it’s a hundred to one, it’s still a very small number.
For Trump’s claim to be even remotely accurate, you’re looking at many orders of magnitude more cases than have been discovered, as well as a massive, entirely 100% successful cover-up of it, as elucidator describes. I’m sorry, humans just don’t work that way. If 3 to 5 million people participated in a cover-up (and that’s just to the illegal voters, not to mention the people who would have executed the cover-up), someone would have talked.
There isn’t one because there wasn’t massive fraud. I keep hoping that Trump will learn not to make these idiotic claims, such as this and the crowds thing, which are so easily shown to be bogus. But it’s taking longer than I thought.
According to this page, there are 22.359 precincts in California.
That’s 134-223 illegal voters per precinct. 2-4 bus loads each.
Just where I live would require 50-100 buses running around town.
You know, back when the whole Birther nonsense took off in 2008, I repeatedly raised the point that the problem that no one was addressing was not where Obama was born but rather there was no system in place to keep someone not-Constitutionally-eligible from becoming President because it was always someone else’s responsibility.
I see this as a similar sort of scenario: the issue is not are illegals voting or not or if voter ID is needed or oppressive or if people are stealing absentee ballots out of mailboxes… The question is that without requiring someone to prove their identity to vote*, how can we possibly know if fraud is being committed.
*Including returning absentee ballots
If Trump truly believes that there were millions of votes cast illegally, then he should admit that the outcome is illegitimate and he should step down until a thorough investigation sorts this all out.
I know for certain that 3-5 million illegal aliens did not vote in the election, because I asked them if they did and they said no.
Does anyone have cites for voter fraud cases going to trial and being found not guilty for lack of evidence? Or for outstanding warrants for voter fraud?
This particular crime involved people signing their names to ballots. That’s a lot easier to track than all of the jaywalkers or people who happened to go over 55 miles per hour for a brief time.
I think the same problem is likely attached to the emoluments clause of the Constitution, and whether or not the President is complying with it. I suppose the only reasonable thing to do is have an investigation of that, too, since the lawsuit recently filed on the subject probably lacks standing.