Jan 28, 2017 5 min read

Sean Spicer, President Trump’s press secretary, maintained last week that the president still believes that more than 3 million “illegals” voted in the 2016 general election, and that accounts for his popular vote loss.

I’m not sure which is more concerning – if Trump is lying about this, or if he actually believes it.

Spicer claimed that Trump had been given studies that showed widespread voter fraud; the Pew Research Center study that purports to show this was actually focused on the antiquated voter registration system, not fraud, and showed that the voting rolls often contained the names of voters who had died or who no longer lived in the state.

Steve Bannon, Trump’s closest adviser, was guilty of this. He was registered in Florida, where he once lived, but voted in New York. Unless he’s accusing Bannon of fraud, the evidence he relies on are signs of an imperfect bureaucracy, not voter fraud. But in Trump’s world, it seems that “alternative facts” prevail.

Hillary Clinton beat Trump by more than 3 million votes in California; Trump argues that this is because massive numbers of undocumented immigrants voted illegally. But there is no evidence to support this claim; it is also unlikely, since the greatest fear of undocumented immigrants is deportation. They typically avoid interactions with governmental authorities; jeopardizing their life in the United States in order to cast a ballot, which in California wouldn’t make a difference anyway, is unlikely.

This raises the point of who should vote? When the Founding Fathers wrote the Constitution, it was not very democratic. Only Congress was elected directly by the voters, and most states limited the vote to property-holding white men. Property restrictions were used to screen voters because property ownership demonstrated two admirable characteristics: First, owners were invested in the community, not transient; Second, property ownership demonstrated a certain amount of proficiency in life, and in a country with abundant natural resources, some argued that not owning property demonstrated a lack of character.

Benjamin Franklin made a convincing counter-argument, using the example of a man who was qualified to vote because he owned a donkey whose worth was sufficient for its owner to vote. But if the donkey died, the owner would be disenfranchised. Franklin pithily asked, “In whom is the right of suffrage? In the man or in the jackass?”

The War of 1812 demonstrated the inherent unfairness of property qualifications, as many soldiers who served in the army were unable to vote. The inability to vote for officials who might send you off to war was also the primary justification for lowering the age limit for voting to 18 during the Vietnam War. Most states removed property qualifications soon after the 1812 war.

Interestingly, many states did not require citizenship to vote, only residency for a specified amount of time, with the intention to become a citizen. The states of the Upper Midwest sought to make themselves attractive to immigrants using this strategy. And historically, how parties viewed citizenship qualifications depended on whether or not those new voters were likely to vote for them. Because Irish and German immigrants tended to support Thomas Jefferson’s Democratic Republicans, the party was in favor of reducing the time required to become a citizen while the Federalists favored keeping it lengthy.

Some people fear that Trump’s claims about voter fraud are a pretext to tighten restrictions on voting, as Republicans have done for the last few years. The problem with “common sense” restrictions, like requiring a photo ID, is that they prevent many eligible voters from voting. Republicans do not see this as a problem, because the voters most likely to not to have the required IDs tend to vote Democratic. Other restrictions Republicans have passed in some states, such as eliminating polling places or restricting early voting, are made ostensibly to save costs, but also lower Democratic turnout. Eliminating Sunday voting hurt turnout from black churches and low-income workers often lack transportation and have less flexible work schedules.

It is important to recognize that no system is ever perfect, so the question is what errors are tolerable? In-person voter fraud is quite rare; ironically, the two best-documented cases in the 2016 election involved two Trump supporters voting twice, in Iowa and Texas. But how many legal votes denied is it worth to deny a fraudulent vote? If restrictions prevent hundreds of thousands of eligible voters from voting, while only preventing a few fraudulent votes, isn’t the cure worse than the disease?

In Trump’s inaugural speech, which supporters say demonstrates his desire to represent all Americans, he claimed he would give the government back to the people. Making sure that as many eligible voters can vote as possible should be an important part of that claim. On the other hand, if Trump uses undocumented claims of voter fraud as an excuse to prevent many eligible voters from voting because it would hurt Democrats, it will be clear that by “the people” he only meant his supporters.

Kent James is an East Washington resident.