Donald Trump is wrong. Rigging an election is almost impossible.

This is how hard it would be to pull off widespread voter fraud.

By Ari Berman August 5

Ari Berman, a senior contributing writer for the Nation, is the author of “Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America.”

In a span of two weeks, federal courts have struck down Republican-backed voting restrictions in six states, including laws that required strict forms of government-issued ID in order to cast a ballot, cut back on early-voting days and made it harder to register. The rulings found that the laws — in Texas, North Carolina, Michigan, North Dakota, Kansas and Wisconsin — violated the Voting Rights Act by discriminating against people of color, sometimes “with almost surgical precision.”

Rather than seeing these rulings as a victory for democracy, Donald Trump says they will lead to a record number of fraudulent votes for Hillary Clinton in November. “The voter-ID situation has turned out to be a very unfair development,” Trump told The Washington Post. “We may have people vote 10 times. .?.?. Why not? If you don’t have voter ID, you can just keep voting and voting and voting.”

Just how easy would it be to rig a Presidential election, as Trump suggests Democrats are preparing to do? How many people would it require, what tactics would they have to use, and how many votes would they need to flip a major contest or state?

The most common schemes to steal elections involve old-fashioned vote buying, using absentee ballots that are cast without the supervision of poll workers. During a 1996 primary election in rural Dodge County, Ga., rival candidates in the sheriff and county commissioner races went so far as to set up vote-buying tables at opposite ends of the county courthouse, offering voters $20 to $60 per ballot. County officials likened it to “an auction” or “a flea market.” One race was decided by nine votes, the other by 31.

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