President Donald Trump made a bizarre baseless claim alleging that illegal voters dress up in disguise to vote multiple times.
“The Republicans don’t win and that’s because of potentially illegal votes,” Trump claimed to conservative news outlet The Daily Caller. “When people get in line that have absolutely no right to vote and they go around in circles. Sometimes they go to their car, put on a different hat, put on a different shirt, come in and vote again. Nobody takes anything. It’s really a disgrace what’s going on.”
He then bizarrely claimed that people need “a voter ID” to buy a box of cereal. They do not.
“If you buy a box of cereal — you have a voter ID,” Trump said. “They try to shame everybody by calling them racist, or calling them something, anything they can think of, when you say you want voter ID. But voter ID is a very important thing.”
Journalists mock Trump's wild claim:
“If you have ever voted, you know how ridiculous this is,” The Washington Post's Philip Bump wrote. “While you don’t always need a photo ID to vote, you do need to be registered (in nearly every state) and somehow verify your identity, often by matching your signature against one on file. Unless you live in a small community in which two people are identified solely by their hat colors, and unless you convince the person at the polling place to ignore your face and just focus on your hat color and unless there are for some reason no other checks to validate your registration, your hat-switching or shirt-changing strategy isn’t going to work.”
“It’s sort of amazing that the president of the United States doesn’t know this or pretends he doesn’t,” he added.
Trump's DOJ debunked Trump's voter fraud claims:
Trump repeatedly claimed that he lost the popular vote by nearly 3 million because of “millions” of illegal voters. The Department of Justice identified 19 illegal voters in 2016. There were nearly 130 million votes cast for president.
Trump's own voter fraud commission failed to find any evidence of voter fraud.
“[N]o state has uncovered significant evidence to support the president’s claim, and election officials, including many Republicans, have strongly rejected it,” The New York Times reported after the commission was abruptly shut down.
