Donald Trump has complained about vote fraud nearly since November 9 and seems to have convinced himself that he lost popular vote because of vote fraud. Now he is making noises like he wants to launch a full-bore investigation.

I will be asking for a major investigation into VOTER FRAUD, including those registered to vote in two states, those who are illegal and….

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 25, 2017

even, those registered to vote who are dead (and many for a long time). Depending on results, we will strengthen up voting procedures!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 25, 2017

Unfortunately, because this is Trump making the proposal, it brings all the worst in people. In fact, a lot of people who used to believe in vote fraud and voter ID laws have suddenly become skeptical of large scale vote fraud. Indeed, the opposition to such an inquiry seems to be directly related to the degree to which the person thinking it is a bad idea also dislikes Trump. Funny how that works out.

Let’s review the bidding.

Two years ago the Elections Director for the State of North Carolina did a quick study. She matched the voter rolls of North Carolina with an online database of 101 million registered voters in 28 states.

The cross-check found listings for 35,570 North Carolina voters whose first names, last names and dates of birth match those of voters who voted in other states.

If the results of that were extrapolated to all 50 states (or 57 states if you are an Obama fan), that would result in about 60K voters in North Carolina who also in at least one other state.We don’t know. Taking a step back and looking at the big picture, if we take the North Carolina sample as an accurate representation of the problem, that comes to well over a million potential instances of people voting in at least two states.

Could this have an impact? Of course, and it could be the margin of victory.

How about illegals?

Again, two years ago a pair of academics did a study on the potential impact of illegal immigrants voting in elections. What did they find?

How many non-citizens participate in U.S. elections? More than 14 percent of non-citizens in both the 2008 and 2010 samples indicated that they were registered to vote. Furthermore, some of these non-citizens voted. Our best guess, based upon extrapolations from the portion of the sample with a verified vote, is that 6.4 percent of non-citizens voted in 2008 and 2.2 percent of non-citizens voted in 2010.

…

Because non-citizens tended to favor Democrats (Obama won more than 80 percent of the votes of non-citizens in the 2008 CCES sample), we find that this participation was large enough to plausibly account for Democratic victories in a few close elections. Non-citizen votes could have given Senate Democrats the pivotal 60th vote needed to overcome filibusters in order to pass health-care reform and other Obama administration priorities in the 111th Congress. Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) won election in 2008 with a victory margin of 312 votes. Votes cast by just 0.65 percent of Minnesota non-citizens could account for this margin. It is also possible that non-citizen votes were responsible for Obama’s 2008 victory in North Carolina. Obama won the state by 14,177 votes, so a turnout by 5.1 percent of North Carolina’s adult non-citizens would have provided this victory margin.

These people are not part of an anti-immigration advocacy group. They are your basic, run of the mill university professors.

The dead? We joke about Democrats using dead voters, in fact, that joke has been around since at least Lyndon Johnson’s first win of his Texas Senate seat. The story is that a guy meets a little boy crying and asks him why. He says he’s sad because his dead father came back yesterday to vote for LBJ but didn’t stop by to visit him and his mother. It is low tech and labor intensive, for sure, but it is very real:

The FBI and local police are investigating how at least 19 dead Virginians were recently re-registered to vote in this critical swing state.

One case came to light after relatives of a deceased man received a note congratulating him for registering, Rockingham County Commonwealth’s Attorney Marsha Garst said Thursday.

“His family members were very distraught,” said Garst, who confirmed the existence of the FBI and police investigation but said she could provide few details because the case is ongoing.

This is at least 19 people in a rural Virginia county. If you assume that rate of fraudulent registrations statewide, you have over 2,000 zombies voting in Virginia and over 80,000 nationwide.

The left’s, and the anti-Trump GOP’s, excuse runs something like this: “right, and they didn’t think to put these people in battleground states, duh?” Much like this stupidity:

Must have been a weird Soros meeting.

“Should we do the fraud in swing states?”

“No! California!” https://t.co/BrOXqAjIQG

— Dave Weigel (@daveweigel) January 25, 2017

This is a non sequitur designed to gaslight the listener. Even were Soros involved, his groups historically give grants to local groups so the vote fraud is not of a strategic but rather generic nature. (In a way, Soros is no different from the Russian meddling in the 2016 election, it is designed to destroy faith in the process as a means to an end.)

Voter fraud happens 99% of the time in jurisdictions that are one-party jurisdictions because no one has an interest in suppressing it. Typically Democrat controlled urban areas. This is why Detroit and Philadelphia and Milwaukee routinely have precincts with more ballots cast than there are registered voters. This was highlighted recently during the post election Michigan recount when numerous Detroit precincts couldn’t be recounted because more ballots were cast than voters passing through the polling place. Most vote fraud is targeted at winning local, or, at the most, Congressional elections. The last time major league vote fraud was alleged in a presidential race was in 1960 when JFK won on the strength of vote fraud in Chicago and West Virginia.

To deny that there are a lot of fraudulent ballots cast is, in my view, to stick your head in the sand or some other dark, moist place.

I can’t see any reason why anyone would oppose Trump’s proposal. Vote fraud is either real or its not. If it is real, we need to get serious about it and stamp it out. If it isn’t real, then I’d think people who don’t like Trump, and the left who are convinced it doesn’t exist, would seize upon any chance to humiliate him. What better way than to have his own investigation show the systems are clean and pristine… just like Detroit’s.