Over the weekend, President-elect Donald Trump tweeted “I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.” As you can imagine, lots of people were outraged by this insane claim. But I don’t know which is more insane: Trump’s assertion of millions of fraudulent votes or the response to it. If the clichéd definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result, the media are certainly acting insane.
The headline in the New York Times today is “Trump Claims, With No Evidence, That ‘Millions of People’ Voted Illegally.” This headline is accurate, but their coverage quickly highlights how the default media coverage of voter fraud is woefully inaccurate overall. The Times doesn’t actually discuss facts surrounding voter fraud in a meaningful way, and instead takes for granted the claims of voter fraud as a politically motivated smear: “Claims of wide-scale voter fraud have been advanced for years by Republicans, though virtually no evidence of such improprieties has been discovered — especially on the scale of ‘millions’ that Mr. Trump claimed.”
The problem with the assertion by the Times is that claims denying the existence of voter fraud can be politically motivated in their own right. The default position for much of the media is that voter fraud is a “myth,” and claims that it is nonexistent are largely used to pushback on voter ID laws. Just Google “voter fraud” and “myth”, but here’s just a sampling of headlines I collected earlier this year:
It simply stands to reason that voter fraud is a problem on some level. Al Franken, who became the deciding vote on Obamacare, was elected a senator by 312 votes in an election where 1,099 felons apparently voted illegally, for example. Based on the numbers that are kicked about, let’s say the number of illegal immigrants of voting age is around 8 million. It stands to reason the number of them that are voting is greater than zero, especially with 37 percent of illegal immigrants living in jurisdictions where they can get driver’s licenses. One study published in the journal Electoral Studies found that 14 percent of non-citizens* are registered to vote.
There’s been a lot of academic debate over that study, which was headed up by Old Dominion University professors Jesse Richman and David Earnest. But the fact is that we don’t have much concrete evidence at all as to what extent voter fraud is or isn’t a problem. Nearly all of the studies or news reports claiming voter fraud is a myth fall back on the lack of documented claims of voter fraud. The problem here is that there’s no institutional incentive in much of the country for Democratic authorities to rigorously root out voter fraud, particularly with the perception that Democrats benefit from it. The lack of prosecutions by people who might otherwise be incentivized to encourage or look the other way when it happens is not much of an argument against its existence.
Nonetheless, Trump’s claim that millions voted illegally certainly isn’t backed by available evidence, and just looking at the numbers, it seems near impossible that, say, nearly 40 percent of illegal aliens voted, or enough to deny him a popular vote victory. But the claim that voter fraud is nonexistent, or that it doesn’t have the potential to affect non-national elections, isn’t much less ridiculous—and yet the media have had no problem presenting that as a legitimate viewpoint and using it as a cudgel to try and discredit the entire Republican party.
The general lack of interest in doing actual reporting or otherwise studying the problem of voter fraud in a reasonable way is creating a vacuum where Trump’s outrageous claims can get purchase. The proper response to Trump’s claim is not to turn it up to 11 when you call him a liar. The media have done this a lot, and it just hasn’t worked. If you want to convince people, you need to provide them with actual facts and arguments opposing him that don’t seem obviously tendentious in their own right.
The honest response to Trump’s tweet is something along these lines: “The available evidence shows [INSERT DISCUSSION OF EVIDENCE HERE], and therefore Trump’s claim simply isn’t believable. We must admit that there’s a lack of measurable evidence regarding voter fraud overall, and we need to do a better job of ascertaining to what extent it is and is not a problem. But that should not be used to lend credence to Trump’s particularly outlandish claim.”
That, however, would require some honest backpedalling from the media regarding how they have covered claims of voter fraud as being motivated almost solely by partisanship. If the media and their fellow Democrats don’t want to change their approach to covering Trump, that’s their prerogative. But so far what we’ve seen is that they’ve refused to give up an inch of their own misleading liberal pieties on issues such as immigration and voter fraud, and Trump has responded by taking a mile. This is an unhealthy state of affairs for everyone. While Trump deserves lots and lots of criticism for saying untrue things, the media are adding to the problem by refusing to acknowledge how myopic and ideological their coverage of issues of importance to Trump voters has been.
*Correction: The original post incorrectly stated the Electoral Studies report discovered 14 percent of illegal immigrants are registered to vote. The study found that percentage of non-citizens, some of whom could be illegal immigrants, were registered to vote.
