Here’s How to Fake Evidence of Voter Fraud

Somewhere, in a cubicle in Washington, a data analyst is panicking. She has just been asked by the Trump administration to show how 3 million people (or, preferably, more) voted illegally. Deep down, she knows that this is a ridiculous request. But she’s a team player.

She will first try to identify specific cases of clear voter fraud. The goal will be to collate these clear cases into a list of names and addresses. A list with three million entries. How hard could it be?

She’ll start with the low-hanging fruit. She’ll cross-reference voting lists (not registration lists) to the National Death Index. She needs to look at real voting lists since dead people may still be on the registration lists without actually voting. She’ll find a few matches but, unfortunately, they will all prove to be false positives. People with the same name, people who didn’t really die, people who didn’t actually vote.

She’ll then try to figure out if illegal immigrants voted by cross-referencing voter lists with e-verify (https://www.uscis.gov/e-verify), the government’s electronic employment verification tool. She’ll get a few hits, but, again, they will all prove to be false positives. People with the same name, people who actually are citizens but aren’t in the system, and so on.

And that’s where the investigation will end, right? Wrong. Given what we have seen in the first seven days of the presidency, President Trump has shown us that he is never wrong, and must prove it despite…