Former President Donald Trump is the likely Republican nominee (again) for the top job in the land. As you are no doubt aware, Trump has never stopped complaining about his belief that the 2020 Presidential election was stolen because of various fact-free allegations about alleged criminal actions that nobody has ever been able to substantiate. We do know, however, that Trump (to one degree or another) engaged in his own efforts to steal the 2020 election — actions that have resulted in federal criminal charges and a separate criminal case in Georgia.
Anyway, Rasmussen Reports recently conducted a gobsmackingly-dumb poll for the right-wing “Heartland Institute” that it released on Tuesday. According to the poll, 1-in-5 “likely U.S. voters” apparently admitted to voter fraud in the 2020 election. Trump took to “Truth Social” for an all-caps screed about how this is THE BIGGEST STORY OF THE YEAR!
Ridiculous “news” outlets such as The Washington Examiner and Fox News ran with these poll results without bothering to take 10 seconds to think about how absurd they truly are. Fox News included a breathless segment this week with the chryon “Americans Admit to Voter Fraud” underneath this stupendous image:
If this poll is to be believed, nearly 1-in-5 Americans cast a ballot in 2020 in a state in which they were no longer a permanent resident. More than 154.6 million people cast ballots in the 2020 election; if 17% of “likey voters” committed voter fraud, that would add up to 26 MILLION AMERICANS breaking election laws in 2020.
If that isn’t enough to make you snort coffee out your nose, consider that this is about the same number of people IN TOTAL who moved from one state to another in 2020. From Pew Research:
Only 8% of Americans – 26.5 million people – moved from one U.S. home to another between March 2020 and March 2021, according to data from the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey. The 2020 rate and number were the lowest since the federal government began reporting data in 1948.
So let’s break this down:
The only way these poll numbers could possibly be accurate is if basically every single person — and not just registered voters — who moved to a different state in 2020 went on to commit voter fraud. That seems…unlikely. If these numbers were even close to being accurate, it shouldn’t be very difficult for Trump and his acolytes to have long ago proven their voter fraud allegations.
Former Republican State Sen. Ted Harvey, the notorious ScamPAC grifter now running for Congress in CO-04, highlighted a different section of the results in his own social media feed:
Obviously this question could mean any number of things.
This Heartland/Rasmussen poll is not entirely useless, however. You can probably assume that anyone who promotes this poll as evidence of voter fraud — including Ted Harvey — is a complete and utter moron.
The more you know…
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They will go wild if they start asking about military voting. Sometimes you are not even in the same country as your home. Evem go on TDY to one location and then TDY from that and vote from another TDY before you ever return to your home base which is not your home state.
Yes, make voting harder for the disabled and the poor who lack transportation means. It's not like voting is a fundamental right enshrined in the Constitution. Oh wait . . .
Voting is in the U.S. Constitution but it is defined more by what is prohibited than by what is guaranteed.
The House of Representatives is the only part of the federal government which was required to be elected by voters until the 17th Amendment came into effect.
Voting cannot be denied on the basis of race, color or previous servitude. (15th Amendment)
Voting cannot be denied on the basis of sex. (19th Amendment)
Voting cannot be denied on the basis of failing to pay a poll tax. (24th Amendment)
Voting cannot be denied to anyone 18 or older on the basis of age. (26th Amendment)
That still leaves a lot of room for mischief.
Lot of room for mischief, but the right to vote is a fundamental constitutional right. And one that has been recognized as such decades longer than the personal right to bear arms, which dates all the way back to DC v. Heller, in 2008 (and a 5-4 decision at that).
Constitution DOES promise: Article IV, Section 4: The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government
Problem is that in Colegrove v. Green, SCOTUS held that state legislative apportionment could not be challenged under the Republican Form of Government Clause, as it was a nonjusticiable political question. Baker v. Carr got around that by treating the issue as an equal protection problem. With this SCOTUS, though, I doubt any effort to bring a suit under Art. IV, sec. 4 would survive. Nothing like 18th century thinking in the 21st century.