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“Election fraud. You’ve heard the term,” President Donald Trump told reporters at the White House on Tuesday as he signed a new executive order meant to safeguard US elections by requiring proof of citizenship to register to vote in every state.
Yes, we have heard the term. Over and over again. But we’re still looking for the proof.
Trump won two of the presidential elections in which he was a candidate, but he’s alleged election fraud in all three.
A special commission he set up to uncover election fraud during his first presidential term did not uncover any conspiracy or widespread evidence of fraud and was disbanded.
During his second presidential term, Trump isn’t bothering with trying to identify election fraud; he’s simply moving forward with plans to change the system anyway.
“Fraud,” nebulous and unprovable, has turned into Trump’s go-to justification not only for modifying election procedures, but also for his larger designs to shrink the federal government.
‘Waste, fraud and abuse’
Trump promised during his presidential campaign that Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid benefits would not be touched. But now, he argues that “waste, fraud and abuse” require taking a hard look at those programs.
Trump and Elon Musk have both repeatedly argued, by misrepresenting the data in a government database of Social Security numbers, that many millions of very, very old people might be fraudulently getting benefits. Never mind that the more appropriate data set suggested a problem a fraction of that size.
Musk, writes CNN’s Tami Luhby, is “on the hunt for fraud” at the Social Security Administration. His Department of Government Efficiency unleashed chaos at the agency that provides benefits to 73 million Americans when it announced a new policy to require in-person visits from people who could not verify their identity online.
The agency, which like most of the federal government is already reeling from Musk’s efforts to cull the size of the federal workforce, would have been crushed by people showing up at understaffed Social Security Administration Offices. This week, it announced it would delay the policy rollout until April 14 and limit the new requirement to only those filing for retirement, survivors or family benefits.
Preventing fraud was also the stated reason for the Social Security Administration clamping down on those trying to change their bank account information over the phone. Read Luhby’s full report.
DOGE cuts and ‘fraud’
Defending cuts by DOGE, Trump said during his speech to Congress last month that the group, staffed, he said, by “intelligent, mostly young people,” has “found hundreds of billions of dollars of fraud.”
That claim of uncovered fraud has been impossible to substantiate since DOGE has worked largely in secret, and the claims of savings made on its website have been repeatedly shown to double-count and miscount the value of cuts.
More importantly, neither DOGE nor the White House has documented how cut programs and contracts were fraudulent. They were clearly part of programs the administration disagreed with, but a policy difference is a different thing than fraud, which is a crime. Trump knows this because his company was found guilty of criminal tax fraud in 2022 and he was found liable for civil tax fraud in New York last year.
Included in the staff and programming cuts at many agencies have been government watchdogs such as inspectors general, the very stopgaps in place to prevent fraud. This issue is playing out on a larger scale at the IRS, where thousands of workers are facing termination during tax filing season.
Musk has pushed a conspiracy theory, which is not supported by any factual evidence, that Democrats are using “entitlements fraud” as a magnet to bring immigrants into the country illegally and turn them into voters. We’ve previously pointed out the many holes in that particular theory, but suffice it to say there is no current viable path to citizenship (and therefore voting) for the undocumented.
There’s still no evidence of widespread election fraud, despite Trump’s unending claims, but this new executive action, he said, would “end it, hopefully.”
The order seeks to add a proof of citizenship requirement to the federal voter registration template used by states. It also seeks to give Musk’s DOGE access to state voter rolls.
Expect court battles. Critics argue voting by noncitizens is already illegal and has never been shown to be a major problem. Requiring proof of citizenship, they contend, is a hindrance to poor people and the elderly, who might not have access to a passport or other specific document.
Some states already share voter information, but streamlining a national database could violate the Constitution’s guidance that states should run their own elections and run the risk of purging naturalized citizens, in particular.
Read more on Trump’s election integrity executive order from CNN’s Tierney Sneed and Ethan Cohen.
Even if Trump’s executive order withstands an expected court challenge, and even if there ends up being a new nationwide requirement to provide documentation of citizenship before registering to vote, Trump has created an insert-allegation-of-fraud-here template for future candidates and presidents. You will hear the term “election fraud” again.
