Reality Check: Voter Fraud In Minnesota
MINNEAPOLIS (WCCO) -- President Donald Trump abolished his controversial "Voter Integrity Commission" to investigate what he calls widespread voter fraud.
Without evidence, the president claimed he lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton because millions of people voted illegally in 2016. But how many illegal votes were actually cast in Minnesota?
President Trump claims 3 million to 5 million people voted illegally in the election that he won, but the arithmetic doesn't support that.
In 2016, election records show 2,968,281 Minnesotans went to the polls. For the president to be right, Minnesota's share of illegal votes would be almost 60,000 -- and all of them would have had to vote for Hillary Clinton.
So were there any actual, voting convictions in Minnesota? You betcha -- 11 of them.
WCCO has been tracking 2016 voter irregularities in Minnesota since May. Court records compiled by the Secretary of State reveal there were only 11 convictions for ineligible voting violations in Crow Wing, Itasca, Kandiyohi, Pope, Ramsey, Scott and Wright Counties.
County Auditors flagged the voters -- most were felons who said they didn't know they weren't allowed to vote. One was a noncitizen who said he he thought he could vote because he had a permanent resident card. All were convicted and sentenced to probation.
President Trump's Voter Integrity Commission investigated widespread fraud that experts say does not exist. Secretaries of State from both parties disputed the fraud claims, and many, like Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon, refused to turn over sensitive voter data.
"There's just nothing there to indicate that kind of thing," Simon said. "Minnesota has a really, really strong history of very clean, very fair, very well run elections."
Disbanding the voter commission, the president again falsely claimed "substantial evidence of voter fraud." Now, he's voicing his frustration on Twitter: