Think about what that statement means. What he is saying is that if he wins the election, that's great. But if he loses, it's rigged, because the only way, the only way, he can lose is if it's rigged. And if it's rigged, then he is not leaving office. Heads I win. Tails you lose. In other words, in Trump's mind, there is no conceivable way that he should leave office.
And just last night Donald Trump went even further down the path of authoritarianism by being the first president in the history of this country to refuse to commit to a peaceful transition of power if he loses the election.
When asked by a reporter in the White House briefing room: "Win, lose or draw in this election, will you commit here today for a peaceful transferal of power after the election?" Trump responded:
"We're going to have to see what happens. You know that I've been complaining very strongly about the ballots, and the ballots are a disaster. We want to get rid of the ballots and you'll have a very peaceful there won't be a transfer, frankly. There will be a continuation."
That's not his choice. That's for the American people to determine. Let us be very clear. There is nothing in our constitution or in our laws that give Donald Trump the privilege of deciding whether or not he will step aside if he loses. In the United States the president does not determine who can or cannot vote and what ballots will be counted. That may be what his friend Putin does in Russia. It may be what is done in other authoritarian countries. But it is not and will not be done in America. This is a democracy.
I do understand that Donald Trump is a billionaire, or so he says. I do understand that he was born to a very wealthy family and, from his earliest days, was able to get anything he wanted because his family was rich and his family was powerful. I do understand that when you're rich and you're powerful you don't have to pay taxes like ordinary people and that it's easy for you to avoid the military draft. I do understand that when you're rich and you're powerful you can buy politicians and get hundreds of millions of dollars in corporate welfare for your real estate empire.
But this I also understand. No matter how rich and powerful you may be, no matter how arrogant and narcissistic you may be, no matter how much you think you can get anything you want, let me make this clear to Donald Trump: Too many people have fought and died to defend American democracy. You are not going to destroy it. The American people will not allow that to happen.
Despite all of the evidence, Trump continues to be obsessed with the belief that there is massive voter fraud in this country.
In 2017, after he won the presidency, Trump insisted that he would have won the popular vote, which he lost by 3 million votes, if "millions of illegal votes had not been cast." There is absolutely no evidence of that being true. In fact, it is totally preposterous to believe that millions of votes, or any significant number of votes at all, were cast illegally. This is an assertion supported by no one. Not Democratic officials. Not Republican officials. No one. And yet that is what Trump said after he won.
There have been numerous studies done on the issue of voter fraud in our country. They have all concluded essentially the same thing. Voter fraud in the United States of America is extremely rare.
A study by Dartmouth University found no evidence of widespread voter fraud in the 2016 election.
An article in the New York Times from December 18, 2016 stated: "In an election in which more than 137.7 million Americans cast ballots, election and law enforcement officials in 26 states and the District of Columbia Democratic-leaning, Republican-leaning and in-between said that so far they knew of no credible allegations of fraudulent voting. Officials in another eight states said they knew of only one allegation ... In Georgia, where more than 4.1 million ballots were cast, officials said they had opened 25 inquiries into "suspicious voting or election-related activity." But inquiries to all 50 states (every one but Kansas responded) found no states that reported indications of widespread fraud."
A report by the Brennan Center for Justice reviewed elections that had been meticulously studied for voter fraud, and found incident rates between 0.0003 percent and 0.0025 percent. The report concluded that it is more likely that an American, "will be struck by lightning than that he will impersonate another voter at the polls."
Even the conservative Heritage Foundation, which maintains a database on election fraud, could only find 143 criminal convictions of mail-in voter fraud out of 250 million mail-in votes cast over the past 20 years, a rate of 0.00006 percent.
But you don't have to trust me on this issue. Benjamin Ginsburg, one of the leading Republican experts on elections, a man who served as national counsel to the Bush-Cheney presidential campaign, a man who played a major role for the Republican Party in the 2000 Florida recount, and who co-chaired the bipartisan 2013 Presidential Commission on Election Administration, recently wrote in the Washington Post, "The truth is that after decades of looking for illegal voting, there's no proof of widespread fraud. At most, there are isolated incidents by both Democrats and Republicans. Elections are not rigged."
Let me repeat from one of the Republican Party's leading experts on elections: "The truth is that after decades of looking for illegal voting, there's no proof of widespread fraud. At most, there are isolated incidents by both Democrats and Republicans. Elections are not rigged."
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