So, who's afraid of... gonna get it right this time... v-o-t-e-r f-r-a-u-d. There. I just had to type it carefully. Otherwise, it was going to come out "Virginia Woolf," as long as we're talking about fiction. My question for this brief post is whether or not those making the allegation believe it.
For the most part, yes. Yes they do. As I have written in the past, people need villains to explain their losses because everyone wants to believe that the country is on their side. If so, then any loss requires some nefarious scheme. For the left, that means MONEY!!!! (For all you lefties who think that money is evil and want to purify yourselves, feel free to do so by giving me all of your money. I'll take it off your hands for free. Or rather, for an exorbitant fee, but that fee itself will purify you too! Don't you want to get rid of your evil MONEY?!)
Think about this. How do I know that voter fraud is bullshit? I've read Justin Levitt's work. I have a vague sense that I may have talked to him at one of Dan Lowenstein and Rick Hasen's things at the APSA years ago, but basically, I'm a scholar. I call bullshit on voter fraud for the same reason that I call bullshit on the left's MONEY!!!! fixation. Scholarship. If you are reading this, you probably "know" that voter fraud is bullshit. How do you "know" that? You read stuff like... this. You probably get your news from news sources that tell you that voter fraud is bullshit. Maybe they even reference Justin Levitt!
Do Republicans, in general, read scholarship? No. They pretty much hate my profession. Where do they get their news? Fox and worse. For them, all it takes is one anecdote.
Hmmm... a couple of anecdotes being blown out of proportion to create the impression of a trend which is a massive societal problem by not putting the data on the proper scale... Seems to me that I write about that a lot...
Anyway, scholarship is a good thing. For those who aren't scholars and don't engage directly in scholarship, they just want a convenient villain. For the left? Money. For the right? Voter fraud. Same diff.
What does Trump believe? As I have written many times before, that's never a useful question. His words are not worth examining as indicators of what goes on in his head, so don't even bother to ask.