Election Meltdown by Richard L. Hasen

Author:Richard L. Hasen
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780300252866
Publisher: Yale University Press

4

“Stolen”

“So this year, we have an election coming up on November 8th. So important that you get out and vote. So important that you watch other communities, because we don’t want this election stolen from us. We don’t want this election stolen from us. We do not want this election stolen.”1

Donald Trump was speaking to an enthusiastic crowd in Ambridge, Pennsylvania, a town of under eight thousand people outside of Pittsburgh, repeating three times his warning of a stolen election. The rally was in October 2016, the day after Trump’s second debate against his Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton. He was slipping in the polls, and he was warning his mostly white audiences about the supposed dangers of voter fraud coming from “other communities.”2

That evening, at a rally in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, Trump was more explicit about those “other communities”: “Honestly, folks, you know I went to school in Philadelphia and I love Philadelphia. I love Philadelphia and I hope we’re going to do great in Philadelphia. I went to school there. I love the school. I loved everything but I just hear such reports about Philadelphia. And we have to make sure we’re protected. We have to make sure the people of Philadelphia are protected that the vote counts are 100 percent. Everybody wants that, but I hear these horror shows. I hear these horror shows and we have to make sure that this election is not stolen from us and is not taken away from us. And everybody knows what I’m talking about.”3

Trump’s unsubstantiated claims of impending voter fraud in areas with large Democratic constituencies was a constant theme of the campaign. He suggested without evidence that in states without voter ID, many people were impersonating other voters and that “people that have died 10 years ago are still voting.” He frequently claimed that the system was “rigged,” a term he and his supporters applied to everything from supposedly stolen elections to “skewed” voting machines to the media and the Republican Party establishment conspiring against him. But by the end of the campaign, Trump seemed to focus most of his “rigged” comments on the supposed scourge of voter fraud, which he could explain to his audience with not-so-subtle winks and nods. On October 16, 2016, he tweeted, “The election is absolutely being rigged by the dishonest and distorted media pushing Crooked Hillary—but also at many polling places—SAD.”4

Even Republican leaders called out Trump’s outlandish and unsupported voter fraud claims, provoking this tweeted response: “Of course there is large scale voter fraud happening on and before election day. Why do Republican leaders deny what is going on? So naive!” His surrogate campaigner Rudy Giuliani defended this message, telling CNN’s State of the Union program: “I’m sorry, dead people generally vote for Democrats rather than Republicans. . . . You want me to [say] that I think the election in Philadelphia and Chicago is going to be fair? I would have to be a moron to say that.”5

In addition to hyping the supposed dangers of

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