Donald Trump is insisting that there is wide-scale voter fraud in US election. It’s part of a barrage of tweets planting the seed that Americans elections are rigged:
The Trump family loves Skittles analogies. So we used one to explain voter fraud to them.
But here’s the thing: Voter fraud is exceedingly rare.
Loyola Law School’s Justin Levitt did a deep dive into every credible allegation of voter fraud from 2000 to 2014. This includes general, primary, special, and municipal elections.
He told Vox’s German Lopez that he only found 35 cases, even though 834 million ballots were cast in national general elections, and hundreds of millions more in primary, special, and municipal elections, among others.
So what’s the mean in Skittles terms?
Since Trump’s son, Donald Jr., already provided a good metaphor for putting things into perspective — albeit incorrectly — we’re just going to borrow it.
It’s like Donald Trump bought a massive bag of Skittles with 834 million pieces in it, and he’s complaining that it’s not a legitimate bag of Skittles because there are so many M&Ms mixed in.
Except we only have evidence that there are 35 M&Ms in the Skittles bag. This is what we’re dealing with here:
And this is only considering national general elections.
You be the judge. Is that a legitimate bag of Skittles, or are we being fooled because there are too many M&Ms ruining the bag?
But by saying it is fraudulent on a “large scale,” without any type of data or evidence, Trump is able to cast doubt on whether we can really trust that there are Skittles in the bag.
Note: In our methodology, we calculated each Skittle as 0.25 cubic centimeters.
