One of Donald Trump’s most frequent talking points on the campaign trail is that the presidential election is somehow “rigged” in Hillary Clinton’s favor. Trump uses the term as shorthand for everything from media bias to voter fraud, and his supporters seem to have taken his claims to heart.
Want to rig the US presidential election? Good luck.
It’s nearly impossible.
Of course there is large scale voter fraud happening on and before election day. Why do Republican leaders deny what is going on? So naive!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 17, 2016
An Iowa woman was arrested and charged with voter fraud after casting two ballots for Trump. She told Iowa Public Radio that she was afraid her first ballot would be changed to a vote for Clinton.
The fact that Iowa election officials caught her almost immediately is a testament to just how difficult it would be to “rig” a US presidential election in favor of one candidate. Our system for casting and counting ballots is so decentralized, and has so many built-in safeguards, that you’d have to rig a whole lot of elections to actually sway the results. From regular maintenance of the voter registration rolls to poll workers overseen by both political parties to voting machines designed to catch anyone who tampers with counts, there are checks at every step of the process to ensure the election’s integrity.
Check out the video above to see how our votes get cast and counted, and why the kind of widespread tampering Trump describes would be nearly impossible to pull off.
