About those millions of illegal votes. Sorry, four. About those four illegal votes.

Rss@dailykos.com (laura Clawson) · Thursday, December 01, 2016, 8:05 pm

Popular vote loser Donald Trump may just be soothing his wounded ego when he talks about “millions of people who voted illegally,” or he may be soothing his wounded ego and laying the groundwork to disenfranchise millions of people, but either way, he has injected the false claim that there were millions of illegal votes into the public conversation. How false a claim is this? Philip Bump rounded up the documented cases of voter fraud from 2016 and chances are, you can count them on the fingers of one hand.

A woman in Iowa who voted twice. Terri Lynn Rote had the enormous misfortune of bad timing. Right as the candidate she supported, Trump, was drawing attention to fraud cases, Rote decided to try to vote twice in Des Moines, and got caught. The case made national headlines simply by virtue of the fact that it happened when it did, and that she voted for who she voted for. [...]

A man in Texas who voted twice. Phillip Cook was arrested on Election Day after voting twice. He claimed to be an employee of Trump's campaign who was testing the security of the electoral system. He wasn't an employee of the campaign — and the polling location's security worked perfectly well, it seems.

A woman who cast a ballot for her dead husband. Audrey Cook is a Republican election judge in Illinois. She and her husband applied for absentee ballots because he was ill. He died before completing his, so she filled it out for him and sent it in. The ballot will not be counted.

A woman in Florida who marked absentee ballots. Gladys Coego was hired to open absentee ballots in Miami-Dade County. One of her co-workers noticed that she was going a step further, filling in the bubble for a mayoral candidate with a pen she had in her purse. She was caught in the act and arrested. There's no evidence she changed any presidential votes.

There are a few other maybes out there still being investigated, but suffice it to say, this is not the kind of thing that’s changing election outcomes. Or making Donald Trump anything but the popular vote loser, despite his having benefited from major, documented vote suppression in key states.

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