Trump Says Voter Fraud is Rampant. The Evidence Says Otherwise.

“I’m not going to engage in a simple-minded, back-and-forth tug-of-war with you over quibbling over numbers and who’s got the moral high ground on this,” conservative activist J. Christian Adams told our host Al Letson before ending the interview.Stephen Maturen/Getty Get your news from a source that’s not owned and controlled by oligarchs. Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily. If you’ve ever listened to President Trump talk about our elections, you might hear something like this: Voter fraud is rampant. Noncitizens are regularly voting illegally. And our elections are rigged. The president often uses the bully pulpit to repeat these claims despite study after study showing they’re just not true. But it’s not just the president. There are many others at the ground level saying the same things to justify voting restrictions that could disenfranchise legal voters, especially voters of color. https://play.prx.org/e?ge=prx_149_2598ef8a-3035-444f-945a-faf4b1af96f5&uf=https%3A%2F%2Ffeeds.revealradio.org%2Frevealpodcast One of them is J. Christian Adams. An activist and former trial attorney for the US Department of Justice, Adams was named to Trump’s Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity in 2017. Today, he’s the president of Public Interest Legal Foundation, a nonprofit that advocates for stricter voter ID laws and sues states and local governments to remove illegal voters from election rolls. On this week’s “More To The Story,” Adams claims there’s systemic voter fraud in the US before abruptly ending the interview after host Al Letson challenges his assertions. Al then talks with Mother Jones National Voting Rights Correspondent Ari Berman about the lack of evidence from activists like Adams, the claims Adams and PILF have made that noncitizens are illegally voting, and what conservative activists who say election fraud is rampant are really trying to achieve. Find More To The Story on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Pandora, or your favorite podcast app, and don’t forget to subscribe.