Fox News host Tucker Carlson called out the Democratic Party on Tuesday for its position on voter ID laws and says he believes Democrats “encourage” voter fraud in order to win elections.
Carlson jumped into the voter fraud debate after describing the litany of new legislation recently signed into law by Democratic Gov. Ralph Northam, whom Carlson refers to as “Governor Klanrobes” due to the embarrassing admission the governor made last year, in the middle of the coronavirus epidemic.
“With his signature, Klanrobes eliminated all of Virginia’s voter ID laws,” Carlson reported. “He signed legislation that allows residents to vote up to 45 days before an election for any reason. There’s also automatic voter registration for anyone using the state’s DMV, including those who do it online. Now, those are big changes, unprecedented changes, but Governor Klanrobes is not the only one pushing them. So-called election reform is a coordinated effort, and that should not surprise you.”
Carlson went on to show video clips of prominent Democratic figures such as Michelle Obama, Joe Biden, and Kamala Harris claiming that racist “voter suppression” is the motivation behind voter ID laws and even invoking Jim Crow laws, in the case of Biden.
“Jim crow? Voter suppression? The right to vote in peril? What century is this?” Carlson asked.
“Government IDs are not racist,” Carlson said. “They’re mandatory. You can’t live here without one. … Pretty much every person in America has a government ID,” he added before citing a Harvard and University of Bologna study that concluded there is no evidence of voter ID laws suppressing any subgroups or minority groups.
“So why are they continuing to say it?” Carlson continued. “Because voter ID laws stop voter fraud. Democrats encourage voter fraud because it helps them win elections.”
Carlson went on to mention the controversial voting method of “ballot harvesting” in California, which he argued played a significant role in flipping the GOP stronghold of Orange County blue.
“In Orange County, California, during the last election cycle, 62% of all ballots were absentee,” he said. “A huge percentage of those ballots were late arrivals, meaning they got to the state after Election Day. A quarter-million of them were supposedly cast by inactive voters — that means people who hadn’t voted in the past four years. Some significant number of those were fraudulent. The Institute for Fair Elections found at least 20 voters whose registered address was a local dog park. Seventy-one are registered to a Starbucks. Under California law, and this is by design, there is virtually no way to distinguish a fraudulent vote from a real one.”
The Fox News host pointed out that most people chalked up the historic performance by Democrats in Orange County to the result of changing demographics.
“People watching said, ‘Oh, the demographics have changed.’ No, the rules have changed. In other words, the plan worked perfectly.”
Carlson then had a conversation with Fox News colleague Jeanine Pirro about the many questions that have been raised about mail-in ballots.
A report this week stated that more than 28 million mail-in ballots were unaccounted for in the last 10 years, and a Heritage Foundation study from last year found over 1,000 documented cases of voter fraud that yielded over 900 convictions in 47 states.
A Google search of the phrase “voter fraud myth” yields thousands of results downplaying the existence of voter fraud, including a headline from CNN in 2018 that reads, “Donald Trump warns of nonexistent voter fraud.”
