President Trump Makes New Baseless Claims About Voter Fraud In California

During a tax reform roundtable in West Virginia yesterday, President Donald Trump began speaking about immigration and voter fraud, saying people in California sometimes vote twice.

“They always like to say, ‘Oh, that’s a conspiracy theory,’” Trump said. “Not a conspiracy theory, folks. Millions and millions of people. And it’s very hard because the state guards their records. They don’t want to see it.”

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However, the President’s claims have little basis in fact. According to the New York Times, a five-year-long investigation by the Justice Department yielded little evidence of any organized effort to commit voter fraud, and most of the issues involved mistakes with registration forms or eligibility rules.

In a series of tweets, California’s Secretary of State Alex Padilla responded to Trump’s statements, saying the only fraud is in the Oval Office.

“Trump’s dishonesty and baseless rants about ‘widespread’ voter fraud dishonor the thousands of local elections officials and volunteers in California who work hard to administer our elections with integrity,” Padilla wrote on Twitter.

Padilla pointed out that Trump had to dissolve his election commission last year, and he called it a “massive waste of taxpayer dollars” that “failed to provide a shred of evidence to support his voter fraud lies.”

“Today’s comments are just another distraction from the very real issues facing our democracy,” Padilla later wrote on Twitter. “Trump has repeatedly failed to acknowledge Russia’s attempts to interfere with our elections. He’s wasted valuable time & resources that could have gone to securing our election systems.”