Trump wants to focus on the ‘real threat’ to elections: Not Russia, but imaginary voter fraud
At about 8:30 a.m. Wednesday, I went to the website of the California secretary of state and downloaded data on voter registration in each county in that state as of February. Then I went to the Census Bureau website and pulled counts for the total population and the number of adult citizens residing in each. I calculated the percentage of registered voters as a function of those two populations, opened a graphic design program and made the chart you see below.
I was done by about 8:50.n the abstract, the chart probably isn’t particularly eye-opening. In each county in California, the number of voters is a subset of the adult citizen population, which is itself a subset of the total population. Okay. Fine.
The reason I created that graph, though, was because of this April tweet, thrown out into the social-media miasma by the ever-enthusiastic conservative activist Charlie Kirk.As you can see from my chart, none of the numbers offered by Kirk is accurate. In fact, the chart I made is likely inaccurate only in overestimating the density of registered voters, since I’m comparing 2019 registration data with 2017 and 2018 population data. The reason California is solid blue is — get this — because there are 8.6 million registered Democrats and 4.7 million registered Republicans.Given that earlier in the day he had defended accusing a former president of complicity in a death by waving it away as merely a retweet, we should probably not be too surprised that he didn’t put in time to figure out if the often-wrong Kirk had missed the mark before pushing the ol’ retweet button.
By sharing Kirk’s nonsense, Trump was trying to bolster the case for this tweet that he sent immediately prior.
The president has been hammering away at the need for voters to present identification before voting since before he was elected. During the 2016 campaign, he warned that certain areas of Pennsylvania (a reference to heavily black areas of Philadelphia where Mitt Romney did particularly poorly in 2012) were hotbeds of fraud and that his supporters would need to watch the polls closely.