So why would the president make this easily debunked claim that there was widespread voter fraud?
First, he faces a legitimacy problem. I’m not talking about rigged or hacked voting machines. The Rust Belt recounts show only that our voting systems score high on integrity. Sure, voting machines can always use improvements, and meltdowns have happened (see Florida, 2000). But, despite unsubstantiated concerns raised by Jill Stein and others, there is no evidence of large-scale fraud or miscounting — certainly nothing that could tip multiple states by tens of thousands of votes. The truth is that Mr. Trump won critical battleground states and the Electoral College with 304 votes. And that’s why he’s the president….
Second, there’s a more insidious longer-term purpose here as well. Propaganda about illegal voting has been used — throughout history and in modern times — to justify unnecessary restrictions on voting. Unpopular incumbents like Mr. Trump can help their odds of re-election with measures that make it harder for people to vote.
Judging by the people with whom the president surrounds himself, such restrictions may be in the cards, starting with a clearer path for states to enact restrictive identification requirements. The president’s nominee for attorney general, Jeff Sessions, was infamous in the 1980s for a failed voter fraud prosecution against three civil rights activists, one of whom was a close aide of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. That incident helped doom his nomination for a federal judgeship.
And just a few days ago, Mr. Sessions declined to commit to continuing the Department of Justice’s litigation against voter suppression laws in Texas and North Carolina — the latter of which was described by the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit as targeting African-American voters “with almost surgical precision.” Ominously, the Justice Department recently asked for a postponement of a hearing in the Texas case, which might herald a switch in sides — and a transformation of the department from a reliable defender of voting rights into an enabler of state-mandated voting restrictions.
The next step might be forcing voters to submit documents proving that they’re citizens. The source of Mr. Trump’s professed beliefs about illegal voting is apparently Kris Kobach, the Kansas secretary of state, who supported a law that has prevented tens of thousands of Kansans from registering to vote. Last year, in a case brought by the A.C.L.U., the United States Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit blocked the law, ruling that Kansas can’t require citizenship papers from voters who register at the D.M.V. In an opinion by a George W. Bush appointee, Judge Jerome Holmes, the court warned that the Kansas law risked “mass denial of a fundamental constitutional right,” and called Mr. Kobach’s assertions about widespread noncitizen voting “pure speculation.”