One of the challenges in writing about Donald Trump’s strained relationship with facts is that his lies sound vaguely plausible to someone who casually follows the news. Most political observers either know that Trump lies with reckless abandon and either rage in frustration about it or enable it out of political expediency. MAGA partisans are inclined to believe whatever Trump says.
However, for many undecided voters who believe that both parties are dishonest and that the media also lack credibility, it can be challenging to research and determine what’s true. Yes, fact-checkers like Daniel Dale can compile examples of Trump’s dishonesty, but who is fact-checking the fact-checkers? If you know someone like this in your life, or if perhaps you were sent this article by a friend or relative and feel that this describes you, then let’s sit for a quick chat about just one of Trump’s less frequently covered but most important claims about election fraud.
Trump has insisted repeatedly—including most recently in an interview with Dr. Phil and a September 13 news conference—that he would win California if the votes were counted fairly. Yes, California! In his interview with Dr. Phil, he said, “If Jesus Christ came down and was the vote counter, I would win California, OK?…[I] if we had an honest vote counter, I would win California.”
Trump’s “evidence” is that he sees a lot of Trump signs when he goes to rallies and that the Golden State has mail-in voting. Seriously, that’s all he has.
Now, it’s one thing for Trump to claim (again, without evidence) that elections were stolen in tightly contested swing states. It sounds possible, even if it’s not true. But for Trump to claim he would win in California is beyond absurd. You don’t need a fact-checker to know it’s impossible: common sense should be enough for any independent thinker to know that Trump is lying about this.
Start with the fact that registered Democrats outnumber Republicans in California by 22 percent. Republicans make up only 24.7 percent of registered voters in the Golden State, compared to 46.2 percent registered as Democrats. In California, multiple surveys show that independent voters tend to align themselves more with Democrats. There is zero chance that Trump can win the state with those numbers. Mail voting doesn’t explain it, either: no Republican presidential candidate has reached 40 percent of the vote in California in the last 20 years, a time before widespread mail-in voting.
Let’s examine what would be necessary to commit the voter fraud Trump asserts.
Per the official statement of the California vote, Trump lost over 5 million votes. Joe Biden received 11,110,250 votes to Trump’s 6,006,429. So that’s 5,103,821 votes, to be precise. In percentage terms, Trump lost by over 29 percent of the vote. That would be a lot of votes to fabricate somehow, even if you were inclined to believe that widespread voter fraud exists (and again, there is no evidence of it anywhere beyond a few individuals here and there).
There are functionally two ways to commit voter fraud: voter impersonation and old-school ballot stuffing or making up fake votes. Neither is possible at scale without being discovered.
Let’s start with ballot stuffing. This fraud happened long ago in America and still occurs in less developed countries with poorer record keeping. But it is functionally impossible in the modern computerized era. Every county registrar has a precise tally, precinct by precinct, of how many people voted. These tallies are cross-referenced by poll workers, registrars, their employees, and the secretary of state. The campaigns in close local, state, and federal races are keenly aware of how many votes they expect to receive precinct by precinct. This includes Democrat vs Democrat contests in large cities like Los Angeles and San Francisco, as well as Republican campaigns all across the state. There is no way that significant numbers of unexpected votes could be fraudulently added without a massive conspiracy of thousands of government election workers from both parties. Local campaigns would immediately cry foul at the apparent fraud. Finally, fake votes would be impossible without generating statistical improbabilities and anomalies that any competent statistician could easily detect at the precinct level.
But when most Republicans talk about “voter fraud,” they usually mean voter-impersonation fraud. They are hazy on the details, but they generally involve vaguely racist assumptions that non-citizens are taking the place of legally registered citizens and voting on their behalf. This seems perhaps plausible until you think about it for a few seconds.
First, every voter, whether they vote in person or by mail, is hand-verified by signature—either at the polling place or by a county employee. The campaigns can view and verify those signatures in any close election with a recount. Voters who change their signatures frequently or are lazy with signatures often have their ballots rejected due to a failure to match. Any non-citizen impersonating a citizen would need to carefully learn to copy a signature—a very difficult skill.
Second, how would a campaign know which voters didn’t plan to vote? In the old days, cheating campaigns faked the votes of dead people. As you can imagine, however, modern record keeping makes this almost unheard of. The state knows who is dead or alive, and a dead voter voting would raise immediate red flags. Who else would be registered not to vote, such that a non-citizen could impersonate them? How would that even work? Anyone who registers to vote is verified by their driver’s license or Social Security number, so rest assured that there are not millions of fake voters on the rolls.
In any scenario where a non-citizen could plausibly impersonate a citizen, it would be far less complicated and risky to turn that citizen out to vote. From a campaign’s perspective, there is no reason to attempt voter impersonation fraud when voter turnout, even in presidential elections, is low, and maximizing legal turnout is so much easier.
Let’s also consider the difficulty in keeping such a conspiracy secret. In California, you would need a conspiracy of millions of non-citizens impersonating citizens to make up Trump’s deficit. It’s comically absurd. Who would be paying these people? How would you enforce their silence? It doesn’t make any sense.
In addition, Republicans won many races in downballot districts—including among many voters who supported Biden while backing their Republican congressional candidate. If Democrats were committing fraud, why not win in the House districts, too? What kind of fraudulent machine would ramp up millions of votes Biden didn’t need while losing close races that cost Democrats the House of Representatives?
Finally, Republicans frequently complain about Californians moving to red states and bringing their liberal politics with them to places like Austin and Atlanta. If Trump were the legitimate winner in California, would at least half of California expats be conservative?
It doesn’t take believing a fact checker or CNN to know that Trump is lying or delusional about winning California. It’s just apparent by simple common sense. If Jesus or Zeus were counting the votes, the result would still be the same: Trump lost by over five million votes.
And if Trump is lying about something as straightforward as this, what else is he lying about? It’s something to think about if you’re unsure who to trust.
