GREEN BAY, Wis/WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump yesterday cited studies he said showed rampant voter fraud, saying the November 8 election was “rigged” against him even as Republican lawyers called his allegations unfounded.
Trump, a New York businessman making his first run for public office, has sought to raise fears of a flawed election as he has fallen in opinion polls against Democrat Hillary Clinton.
“They even want to try to rig the election at the polling place,” Trump told a rally in Green Bay, Wisconsin. “So many cities are corrupt and voter fraud is very, very common.”
Trump cited Pew Trusts research from 2012 that called for updates to the voter registration system because about 24 million registrations were inaccurate.
He also referred to a 2014 article by two political scientists in the Washington Post that said non-citizens who voted could have accounted for Democratic victories in a few close elections in 2008, although the authors acknowledged the sample size of their study was small.
Numerous studies have shown that voter fraud in US elections is very rare.
Republican campaign lawyer Chris Ashby said Trump’s charges could foment unrest and were “unfounded” and “dangerous.”
“When you say an election is rigged, you’re telling voters, your supporters, their votes do not matter,” Ashby said in an interview. “I think some of Donald Trump’s comments could cause unrest at the polls.”
Some Republicans have urged Trump to drop the assertions. Early voting and voting by mail have already begun in many states.
Mark Braden, partner at Baker and Hostetler and former chief counsel for the Republican National Committee, said that any sort of election rigging at the national level “just is impossible,” citing the various systems in place that would make such an endeavor complicated and unfeasible.
“Our system is principally a system based upon each side watching the other side,” Braden said in an interview. “Our system is dependent on local volunteer participation. Our system has worked very well because we have people who get involved in the process and perform these functions.”
Trump also pounced on the release yesterday of Federal Bureau of Investigation documents that he alleged showed “felony corruption.”
The documents cited an FBI official as saying a senior State Department official sought to pressure the bureau in 2015 to drop its insistence that an email from Clinton’s private server contained classified information.
Clinton’s decision to use a private server while secretary of state from 2009 to 2013 has drawn criticism that she was careless with national security.
“This is worse than Watergate, what’s going on with this,” said Trump.
He also proposed a package of ethics reforms, saying that if elected he would ban his administration officials from lobbying government for five years after leaving government.
Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook said Trump’s assault on the voting system was an act of desperation.
“He knows he’s losing and is trying to blame that on the system. This is what losers do,” Mook told reporters.
The RealClearPolitics average of national opinion polls shows Clinton currently leading Trump by 7.1 percentage points, at 46 per cent to 38.9 per cent.
The country’s top elected Republican, House of Representatives Speaker Paul Ryan, tried to counter Trump’s message about election fraud.
Spokeswoman AshLee Strong said Ryan “is fully confident the states will carry out this election with integrity.”
In the traditionally hard-fought state of Ohio, the top elections official, a Republican, said concerns about widespread voter fraud were simply not justified.
