The argument over whether or not there is voter fraud will rage on, in part because the Obama administration has spent eight years blocking states from gaining access to federal lists of non-citizen and other possibly illegal voters. Even so, there is abundant evidence that voter fraud is easy to commit. The Heritage Foundation’s website contains hundreds of recent examples of people convicted of stealing votes.
.. But Obama’s first statement, that the U.S. is unique in trying to enforce ballot integrity, is demonstrably false.
.. All industrialized democracies — and most that are not — require voters to prove their identity before voting. Britain was a holdout, but last month it announced that persistent examples of voter fraud will require officials to see passports or other documentation from voters in areas prone to corruption.
.. The Post also asked whether respondents thought that the supporters and opponents of voter ID were acting out of genuine concern for fair elections or were instead trying to gain partisan advantage. Respondents replied that voter-ID opponents were acting more out of partisanship than supporters were
.. “It’s not. It’s simply a good-government issue.”
.. Which is precisely why it’s so disappointing to see Barack Obama use it to raise baseless fears that voter ID is a racist form of voter suppression. Even as he leaves office, the president who promised to unify us is continuing his level best to polarize and divide us.
Donald Trump Dismisses Latest Accuser: ‘Oh, I’m Sure She’s Never Been Grabbed Before’
Donald J. Trump on Monday disparaged the latest woman to accuse him of touching her inappropriately, dismissing her as a “porn star” and saying sarcastically, “Oh, I’m sure she’s never been grabbed before.”
The comment was a response to the accuser, Jessica Drake, who over the weekend accused Mr. Trump of groping and kissing her without her permission in 2006. He also, she said, offered her $10,000 to go to his hotel room.
.. said the polls themselves were biased, all of it, he said, amounting to voter suppression.
“It’s called voter suppression because people will say, ‘Oh, gee, Trump’s down,’” Mr. Trump told the crowd, before reminding it, “Well, folks, we’re winning.”
.. Toward that end, Mr. Trump’s campaign will begin airing its own form of programming on Facebook Live, offering daily reports from campaign officials on what it says is the real state of the race.
.. “There’s no way any of those polls are real,” said Bill Stelling, 44, a real estate agent from Jacksonville, Fla. “If you’ve gone around throughout the country and seen what’s going on, you go through any neighborhood and see how many Trump signs there are and how many Hillary signs there are, and I guarantee you it’s not even going to be close. It’s not even going to be close.”
Trump misrepresents Democratic oversampling as “Voter Suppression”
At both rallies, Trump also referenced — and wrongly interpreted —another item in the news, an email, publicized by WikiLeaks, in which a Democratic operative asked the campaign’s internal pollster to over-sample Democrats in a survey so to provide more useful feedback about how to better target minority voters.
“WikiLeaks also shows how John Podesta rigged the polls by oversampling Democrats, a voter suppression technique, and that’s happening to me all the time,” Trump said in St. Augustine even though the email wasn’t sent by Podesta and offered no correlation to current polling of the presidential race.
Podesta did not write anything in the 2008 email chain Trump referenced, in which Tom Matzzie wrote that he would like “Atlas folks to recommend oversamples for our polling before we start in February” to “maximize what we get out of our media polling.” (If Podesta replied, his response is not included in the emails published by WikiLeaks.)
According to Pew Research Center, oversampling is sometimes used to ensure that there are enough members of a particular subgroup within a population to reduce the margin of error. That nuance, however, was neglected by Trump as he argued — falsely — that the email somehow offered evidence that professional pollsters are biased against him and oversampling Democrats.
“When the polls are even, when they leave them alone and do them properly, I’m leading,” Trump claimed. “But you see these polls, where they’re polling Democrats — ‘How’s Trump doing? Oh, he’s down’ — they’re polling Democrats.”
“In an email, Podesta says that he wants oversamples for our polling in order to maximize what we get out of our media polling,” Trump stated incorrectly. “It’s called voter suppression because people will say, ‘Oh, gee, Trump’s down.’ Folks, we’re winning. We’re winning. We’re winning.”
To many of his supporters, however, the word of Trump, however fungible it may be, holds more sway than any media attempt to correct it.
.. For more than a year, the former reality TV star has sought to inoculate himself against the media’s fact-checking and the political establishment’s pointed criticism with claims that both entities are inherently corrupt
Trump puts a boiling battleground in play
In pivotal North Carolina, two contentious local issues are overshadowing almost everything else.
Unlike the presidential contest in nearly every other swing state, North Carolina’s is framed this year by two local battles overshadowing almost everything else.
Story Continued BelowThere is House Bill 2 — the so-called bathroom bill which has energized young liberals and older conservatives in what’s viewed by many as a battle for the soul of the state. Then there is the furor over voting rights, which has provided Democrats with a major organizational and energy boost among African-Americans.
“The intensity that you see on the national level is on steroids in North Carolina, because not only do you have this presidential race where they’re both here all the time, you also have a highly-charged governor’s race and Senate race with the issues of HB2 and voting rights litigation all rolled up into one,.. There cannot be another state that has that kind of intensity. It comes up in every conversation. It’s not just the insiders talking about it. It comes up on the sidelines of my daughter’s field hockey games.”