As the presidential 2016 election wound down, a low rumble formed. Should Donald Trump lose the race, people wondered, would he accept the election results? Or, instead, would the country be ripped apart by a candidate and his fervent base of support refusing to accept what actually happened? In the third and final debate, Trump demurred on a question centered on that issue.
“I will look at it at the time,” he said of accepting the election results. He added that “what I’ve seen is so bad,” what with the media being “dishonest and so corrupt” and with the existence of “millions of people that are registered to vote that shouldn’t be registered to vote.”
This wasn’t a new claim by Trump. He seized upon a 2012 report from the Pew Center on the States that noted that state voter rolls often included people who’d died or moved because registrars were slow to update their records. As we reported at the time that Trump made this claim, there was no evidence that votes were actually cast on behalf of many — or, really, any — of these dead people. (An author of the report made the rounds after Trump’s comments to note that there was no suggestion of fraud in his work.) The report simply served as a comfortable sort of gray area into which Trump could slot suggestions about how the system was stacked against him.
View the complete June 24 article by Philip Bump on The Washington Post website here.