This is what happens when Donald Trump becomes president and makes up lies about “illegals” voting, because Iowa Republican representative Steve King gets more national media time and proceeds to blatantly lie to support Trump’s lie.
In case you missed it Tuesday morning on MSNBC, here is what King said:
“There is sample data from two counties in Virginia and other counties scattered around the country and I took that article when I first saw it come out… and did an extrapolation calculation on how many illegals could have or could be voting in the United States The number I came up with off of that extrapolation is 2.4 million. So it’s plausible. 3 million sounds like a plausible number to me.”
Are you f-ing kidding us? A few things: King’s Virginia article was referring to this, which has already been refuted by this.
But just in case you need to be reminded, this from the LA Times:
Trump has cited one study by three Virginia academics that estimated that more than 6% of noncitizens illegally voted in 2008 — enough to sway a close election, like the Senate race in Minnesota that year in which Al Franken was elected by a 312-vote margin.
The study arrived at the result by considering responses from a survey of voters, some of whom said they were not citizens. But the findings have been attacked by other researchers, who say they found evidence that many people gave wrong answers to the citizenship question — and that therefore the correct number of noncitizens who voted was probably zero.
In any case, experts say, it’s unlikely that anyone could find enough noncitizens on the voter rolls to challenge the results in a typical presidential election. In 2012, President Obama won Pennsylvania by 310,000 votes and Virginia by 149,000. The closest margin was in Florida, where Obama won by 74,000 votes.
For the record, President Trump is lying and so is Steve King. The 3 million number is fiction. And this shit just needs to stop.
Because now this is happening:
(Video clip via TPM.)
