White House: Trump believes millions voted illegally

[RINO Tom]

Every few days, I start to think I could support a toned down President Trump and probably vote for his re-election ... then he says shlt like this.  Come on, Donald, you won; just govern and do what's best for the country and stop being petty.

[RI]

Your suspicions aside, Trump attached a specific number to his allegation - again, the same number that he lost by - so it certainly is a "lie."  And we do know for sure.  It is statistically impossible that the exact number of votes that Trump lost by is also the same number of "illegal" ballots.  You don't think it's convenient that the states where he alleges this occurred - Virginia, New Hampshire, and California - are all states he lost?  Do you actually think that you can guarantee with 100% certainty who these "illegals" voted for - if they did vote?  Of course you can't.  And you should be aware that there are already plenty of legal mechanisms in place to ensure the validity of ballots cast.  If thousands of citizens get caught up in these bureaucratic hurdles, why would they be missing millions of undocumented, unregistered voters simultaneously?  That's completely ridiculous.  You are playing coy with the idea that because something can't be entirely disproven that it is not necessarily a lie.  Well, two can play that game.  We can't prove that Trump actually pays taxes, or doesn't have loads of STI's, or actually won Wisconsin, either.  I suppose you think all of those claims are perfectly honest?

The valid signal in the noise is the polling demonstrating a Clinton PV margin of about +3, which is exactly what occurred.  Unless you think numerous secretaries of state - many of them Republicans - are working in a concerted effort to systematically allow millions of undocumented people to vote?  The proposition requires that a significant number of undocumented people in the US would be risking being caught, and the associated consequences, just to cast a vote?  Hardly anybody is going to risk deportation to vote in an election where the person with the most votes doesn't even win.  It makes no sense.

I'm not playing coy. I get a bit prickly about this because I feel people have been extremely quick to make the editorial jump to "lie" recently when a lie as I understand it, besides being an act of injustice against human dignity, requires both the underlying factual nature of the statement to be false and the speaker to be aware of this fact. Calling something a "lie" without establishing the underlying truth value with certainty seems brashly irresponsible, especially since we know that our perceptions can be easily out of sync with underlying truth (see the election results vs state polls and conventional wisdom for exhibit A), especially when these perceptions are fueled by or blinded by political motives. We are living in a moment of profound uncertainty regarding the underlying truth values of political claims, both caused by Trump and by the establishment/social-left-leaning mainstream media's willful ignorance of taboo issues.

This expansion of the term "lie" and the presumption of underlying truth values clearly manifests itself in "fact-checking" websites who've decided that opinions, projections, and predictions can somehow be objectively evaluated without the prerequisite knowledge to really do so. They presume, among other things, a much stronger degree of certainty than is exhibited in the real world. They presume the outlandish isn't true despite the fact that it often is.

To this claim specifically, I can not speak to whether X illegal votes were cast vs Y illegal votes without actually attempting to match voter records to citizenship records. I have zero doubt that the number is greater than zero, but whatever the number is, it is the result of either a lack of resources to determine citizenship or a lack of political will to do so; many Democratic SoS's likely wouldn't bother even if they had the means unless they were required to do so as they would gain nothing from doing so. There's no conspiracy, only the confluence of interests producing an outcome. I also have little doubt that the vast majority of illegal votes would've been Clinton votes simply by demographics alone; all is obviously absurd, but 80%+ seems quite reasonable.

On an individual level, it's clearly a matter of risk vs. reward, and here's where the strongest argument against there being a large number of illegal votes lies. Why risk deportation to cast a vote that likely has zero impact on anything? This seems reasonable, but the risk itself is not constant across time and space. The risk is much higher in some places and lower in others, and the perception that illegal votes don't exist only further lowers the risk. The more services which are afforded to illegal immigrants, the more of a stake they have in the determination of those services, thus more incentive to participate in voting for them. On a organizational level, there would be a tremendous incentive for the Democratic Party to try to slide illegal votes through if they could insure the risk of being caught were small, but the consequences of getting caught could be tremendous, unless you could re-frame the matter to paint it as a racial issue, which is exactly what we've seen with voter ID discourse.

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I do not presume that they're honest any more than I'd presume Trump's claims are "honest." The illegal voter hypothesis comes from an observation about the real world, namely that many states aren't as stringent as you imply and that incentives exist which make it plausible enough to warrant testing. While Trump's specifically claims may be nonsense, the underlying claim of significant illegal voting may not be.

I have no idea whether Trump pays his taxes (though I'd hope the IRS would be all over him to a much greater extent than they seem to be if he didn't) or if he has STIs (though I wouldn't be surprised if he did at least at some point). Trump most certainly did win Wisconsin for all intents and purposes given that that's what the WI SoS verified, but if you're referring to claim about hacking, I would likely dismiss the claim do to lack of evidence; claims of hacking in WI do not originate in a real world observation, do not provide a plausible mechanism, and do not identify who would have perpetrated such a hacking, whereas the illegal voter hypothesis has all three. As such, it would be "dishonest" for me to consider these claims in the same category.

[Ebowed]

I'm not playing coy. I get a bit prickly about this because I feel people have been extremely quick to make the editorial jump to "lie" recently when a lie as I understand it, besides being an act of injustice against human dignity, requires both the underlying factual nature of the statement to be false and the speaker to be aware of this fact.

Trump is certainly aware that he is lying.  Before he trotted out his allegation of 'illegal' voters, he was claiming that he would have won the popular vote "if it really mattered" because he would have campaigned differently, i.e. targeting New York and California.  When it was apparent that this line of reasoning wouldn't take, he started a conspiracy theory instead.  If you think that this is somehow out of character, perhaps take a moment to remember his role in the 'birther' movement.  He knows that his claim is dishonest and he is manipulating a Republican fixation with "voter fraud" in order to cast doubt on the legitimacy of the popular vote, while simultaneously expecting that this same count should be treated as valid when used to calculate the electoral college tally.

Calling something a "lie" without establishing the underlying truth value with certainty seems brashly irresponsible

Interesting double standard.  I don't suppose you would consider Trump questioning the underlying truth value of the election he just won as brashly irresponsible- only the refutations of his spurious claim.

This expansion of the term "lie"

No, that's not what is happening here - you and Donald Trump are trying to expand what counts as 'truth'.  Otherwise, there would be no need for 'alternative facts' (falsehoods).

To this claim specifically, I can not speak to whether X illegal votes were cast vs Y illegal votes without actually attempting to match voter records to citizenship records. I have zero doubt that the number is greater than zero, but whatever the number is, it is the result of either a lack of resources to determine citizenship or a lack of political will to do so; many Democratic SoS's likely wouldn't bother even if they had the means unless they were required to do so as they would gain nothing from doing so. There's no conspiracy, only the confluence of interests producing an outcome. I also have little doubt that the vast majority of illegal votes would've been Clinton votes simply by demographics alone; all is obviously absurd, but 80%+ seems quite reasonable.

So, just to get you on record here, you are propagating the claim that despite the number of ballots returned correlating with an entirely reasonable turnout trajectory, that people who would do everything they can to avoid interacting with government institutions would risk deportation in order to influence the election outcome?  It seems that a big part of your problem here is a fundamental ignorance of the way that undocumented people behave.

Trump most certainly did win Wisconsin for all intents and purposes given that that's what the WI SoS verified

You are running around in circles here.  To say that the word of one SoS is more correct than the total summary of all Secretaries seems awfully convenient.  Would you mind pointing out which states had Secretaries of State willing to oblige a conspiracy to let illegal ballots count towards their vote total?

[RI]

Trump is certainly aware that he is lying.  Before he trotted out his allegation of 'illegal' voters, he was claiming that he would have won the popular vote "if it really mattered" because he would have campaigned differently, i.e. targeting New York and California.  When it was apparent that this line of reasoning wouldn't take, he started a conspiracy theory instead.  If you think that this is somehow out of character, perhaps take a moment to remember his role in the 'birther' movement.  He knows that his claim is dishonest and he is manipulating a Republican fixation with "voter fraud" in order to cast doubt on the legitimacy of the popular vote, while simultaneously expecting that this same count should be treated as valid when used to calculate the electoral college tally.

I'm glad you can read Trump's mind. Must clear a lot of things up for you, and you should be able to make a killing in the stock market.

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Trump pushing the "election illegitimacy" narrative (the Dems have pushed variations on this as well) is irresponsible as it damages faith in our electoral institutions, but media pushing to expand the definition of "lie" seems to me both a degradation of the media as a political institution, a partisan-ization of what should IMO be an objective process, and an affront to (or at least a snide dismissal of) the nature of objective reality. Certainly, Trump has told his share of whoppers, but the campaign to brand him as a being defined as a liar above all other politicians is built on as many lies itself as it claims to have revealed.

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I gave explicit examples of what I'm referring to by expanding the definition of a lie. It's not the same as the "alternative facts" idea, though there is some overlap.

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I already discussed the risk-vs.-reward calculation of an illegal immigrant attempting to vote. It's not a simple as you claim, although it's likely you're correct for the vast majority.

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I'm not sure what you're getting at here. I didn't say any SoS's were obliging in a conspiracy. I doubt any SoS would knowingly acquire evidence of illegal votes and do nothing about it. The resources to audit citizenship of votes cast isn't there and there's often no political will for it to be there. After all given that all "good-reasoned" people are of the opinion that illegal voting doesn't occur, why bother checking citizenship if you were an SoS? It isn't a thing, apparently.

[pbrower2a]

He's lying (or acting out a delusion) that isn't even relevant to political life. What matters more is that the Republican Party has nearly totalitarian control over the Federal political process and most state governments. It has almost the sort of power over the political process that the Communist Party has in China, except that it has yet to establish a police state.

What should Republicans concern themselves with for 2018?  Keeping the House and the Senate (which should be easy) and keeping control of key Governorships. Republicans are unlikely to win the Presidency in 2020 as they did in 2020. They will need more votes, because they won the Presidency on the merit of bare wins in three states that they have no cause to count on in 2020. They will need more support.  

Maybe they could try to alter the rules for eligibility for voting, but that ensures an unpopular government that might fall to a coup or revolution.

[Axel Foley]

Losing popular vote literally drives him "mad" and puts in the spotlight his narcissistic personality. Oh, I don't like him but I was part of the crowd that believed in a president Trump different from the candidate.

[Ljube]

Lord Trump is already gearing up for his inevitable life.....I mean re-election campaign in 2020.

LibRep, it's time for you to abandon the dark side and come back to the Republican fold.

[The Other Castro]

Jake Tapper couldn't have said it better: https://twitter.com/yashar/status/824012413615951873

[Ljube]

Jake Tapper couldn't have said it better: https://twitter.com/yashar/status/824012413615951873

Jake Tapper is a condescending fool. Everybody hates him. Nobody takes him seriously.

[Suburbia]

Jake Tapper couldn't have said it better: https://twitter.com/yashar/status/824012413615951873

Jake Tapper is a condescending fool. Everybody hates him. Nobody takes him seriously.

He's a respected journalist.

[Antonio the Sixth]

Someone really just needs to empirically test this and get it over with.

You really think empirical refutation is going to stop T***p and his goons from making up things?

[pikachu]

When was the last time a politician claimed mass voter fraud in an election he won?

[ag]

Every few days, I start to think I could support a toned down President Trump and probably vote for his re-election ... then he says shlt like this.  Come on, Donald, you won; just govern and do what's best for the country and stop being petty.

Get real. There is no way this will be a normal presidency. By sticking to the Blue avatar here you are dishonoring yourself. You can return to being a Republican afterwards, when this nightmare is over. But you have to leave this pigsty ASAP, or you will be morally destroyed.

Get out of there!!

[Axel Foley]

When was the last time a politician claimed mass voter fraud in an election he won?

Berlusconi always claimed it before the election, but after victories he ceased.