As Donald Trump continues to bleat about the election being stolen from him by crooked voters, the man who based a political career on racism and opposition to immigrants (before Trump ever thought to) is backing, at least in part, Trump's worry about those voters. Yes, it’s Rep. Steve King.
The Iowa conservative said that allegations of a grand conspiracy theory are likely blown out of proportion, but he added that swinging the election could require only a handful of votes in certain states.
“I wouldn't say it's completely unsubstantiated. Partially unsubstantiated, I would agree with that,” King said.
Because, he said, back in 2000 the state of Florida was decided by only 500 or so votes. So see there? It could happen! It never has before, and in practice even swinging the tightest of elections would require tens of thousands of fake votes in multiple states, since it's impossible to guess which of those states will truly be close. And oh by the way, an organized national effort to do such a thing would be all but impossible in our current system, but Republicans have been very concerned about the "wrong" people voting since the Jim Crow era and they're not about to back down now. Though maybe we should give King a bit of credit for being not nearly as unhinged on the subject as rabid Trump surrogates Rudy Giuliani and Newt Gingrich.
There's in fact a much easier way to rig a national election, and it’s one that doesn't require a conspiracy among tens of thousands in multiple states. You don't need to invent tens of thousands of fake votes: you only have to prevent tens of thousands of legitimate voters from casting their votes at all.
Perhaps you know that certain groups of people disproportionately vote for your opponents ... so you close or move their polling places, forcing them to travel farther away. Perhaps you require new paperwork that your voters are likely to have, but which the voters you're targeting will find more difficult to get. Perhaps you comb through the voting rolls looking for the wrong sort of voters, then challenge their legitimacy on a person-by-person basis—it would be relatively simple for each voter to respond to your challenge, but a great many will not know how, or not be able to respond in time.
Or perhaps you scream to the heavens that illegal voters will be at the polls, and ask your own partisans to go stand in front of the polling places to watch for "them", and challenge "them", based on their gut feeling of which voters do or don't belong there.
That would be how you would swing an election. Just keep a few tens of thousands of people from voting in each state according to how you think they might vote. Nobody ever goes to jail for that.