December 14, 2023 12:55 PM UTC

Somehow, Election Fraud Claims Have Gotten Even Dumber

• 6 Comments
• by: Colorado Pols

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.

• Did you assist a relative or neighbor who has trouble reading fine print? Voter fraud!
• Did you help friends or family members who had questions about a particular issue or candidate on the ballot in 2020? Voter fraud!
• Did you provide your spouse with the pen that he or she used to fill out a ballot in 2020? Voter fraud!

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…