You will be shocked to learn that Donald Trump's claims of widespread voter fraud are not true

By Katie McDonough  |  December 19, 2016 | 3:01pm
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Donald Trump has said more false things than he has said true things in the nearly two years since he first declared his candidacy for president.

This tweet, from late November, was yet another lie:

Trump has offered some variation on this false claim several times over in the weeks since he won the electoral college, but The New York Times made inquiries about voter fraud to all 50 states—Kansas was the only state that did not respond to the request—and “found no states that reported indications of widespread fraud.”

“Nothing at all, really,” the assistant executive director of the Illinois State Board of Elections told the Times.

“We only had one,” said Nebraska’s assistant secretary of state. “It hasn’t been confirmed.”

“We haven’t received any complaints to our office or any word of suspicious activity, and we would definitely hear it,” according to Arizona’s secretary of state.

But the Times report is only the latest to debunk Trump’s lie about the legitimacy of the election that put him nearly 3 million behind Hillary Clinton in the popular vote. (To say nothing of the longstanding evidence that voter fraud of the sort that Trump describes—voting illegally or voting multiple times—just doesn’t really happen in the United States.)

The Washington Post debunked this false claim the same day the president-elect made it.

Politifact, the nonpartisan fact-checking website, also ranked this claim—and his subsequent tweets that there was “serious voter fraud” in California, Virginia, and New Hampshire—as “pants on fire,” the most severe ranking a false statement can receive on the site.

All told, 18% of Donald Trump’s statements have received this designation, while 33% have been rated plain old “false,” and another 18% were found to be “mostly false.” That means that 69% of Trump’s total statements have been some kind of a lie, with nearly 20% of the those statements being of the Ted Cruz’s father may have helped assassinate John F. Kennedy variety.

Sixty-nine percent. It’s too depressing for a nice.

 
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