Widespread voter fraud is a myth.
I was tempted to begin and end this column with only that sentence, but I guess I will expand on this fact since so many people in power are trying to sell their voters extra Kool-Aid lately.
Voter fraud is part of the "us versus them" racist propaganda intended to make older white people scared of minorities. The logic is that people of color not only disagree with their choice of candidate, but they are voting multiple times and illegal immigrants are flooding across the borders to vote for Democrats.
Illegal immigrants do their best to remain invisible. You won’t find one in a voting booth.
Kris Kobach knows this. He has degrees from Harvard, Yale and Oxford for crying out loud.
He is one of the smartest people you will ever meet. He is also one of the people most dedicated to making sure brown people don’t vote because most don’t agree with him.
If you can convince people you lost because someone cheated, you can create laws that make voting more difficult — especially for people who don’t tend to vote the way you want them to.
In Kansas, they were so convinced that Kobach was right about illegal immigrants voting en masse for Democrats (even though Kansas is one of the reddest states in America) that the legislature made the unprecedented move to grant Secretary of State Kobach prosecutorial powers in cases of voter fraud.
Not only would he control the policy, he would be the police and prosecutor to stop illegal voting. In about five years, Kobach has nabbed nine illegal voters. One of them was a college kid who didn’t realize she voted in her home state primary and again in Kansas. She voted for Donald Trump both times, by the way. These are hardly the results Kobach promised when he pulled the wool over the eyes of willfully ignorant legislators who wanted him to be right.
Now they share the egg facial with Kobach.
Like many unproven, outlandish conspiracies, like the guilt of the Central Park Five, Barack Obama’s citizenship, immunizations leading to autism and Saudi Arabia’s royal family not being involved in the murder and dismemberment of a journalist who lived in America, President Donald Trump loved the idea of widespread voter fraud.
Even with the theory being completely unproven and any study supporting the idea being discredited, President Trump stands ready to act.
He tweeted this weekend, "All levels of government and Law Enforcement are watching carefully for VOTER FRAUD, including during EARLY VOTING. Cheat at your own peril. Violators will be subject to maximum penalties, both civil and criminal!"
And all of the villains on Scooby Doo would have gotten away with it if it weren’t for those meddling kids.
President Trump’s supporters don’t want to believe they are falling for a conman. Why does he try to discredit the press? Because they report on all of his improprieties. Why does he love the idea of voter fraud? So he can discredit the midterm elections if they don’t go his way.
It is beyond intellectually dishonest. It is actually dishonest. He knows widespread voter fraud doesn’t exist. He has met with Kobach face to face. He knows if there was any indication, it would have been found and trumpeted across the country.
But it hasn’t been found. It won’t be. You are more likely to find Sasquatch feeding its pet chupacabra before you find a group of illegal voters getting away with it.
Kobach and Trump know this. But they know other people who don’t like the idea of brown people having a say in elections like to hear it too so they keep peddling the lie.
I long for the day when Trump supporters reach the end of their rope. I would love to hear them say, "We supported you through all of these things, but no more."
However, the further we go with this administration, the less faith I have in people seeing the light. True believers will continue to believe even when they find out something isn’t true.
Some studies have dubbed this "the backfire effect" to describe how a person who holds a preference-based belief actually becomes more extreme in those beliefs after being confronted with objective evidence.
The Trump administration is thriving on people who want to believe he is a legitimate president, who want to believe Supreme Court candidates are innocent of charges and want to believe the United States of America isn’t participating in the cover-up of a state-sponsored murder of a U.S. resident who wrote for the Washington Post.
You can add voter fraud to the list of things people want to believe so badly, that no evidence will ever convince them they are on the wrong side of the issue.
Kent Bush is publisher of Shawnee (Oklahoma) News-Star and can be reached at kent.bush@news-star.com.
This article originally appeared on Crestview News Bulletin: President Trump takes a hard line on mythical crime