In a rather bizarre claim, Kris Kobach, the head of President Donald Trump's new commission on voter fraud, said on MSNBC Tuesday that "we may never know" if Hillary Clinton won the popular vote. Kobach alleged that there was widespread fraud and scores of ineligible voters who may have cast votes for Clinton.
The head of Trump's voter fraud commission: "We may never know" if Clinton won the popular vote
— BuzzFeed News (@BuzzFeedNews) July 19, 2017
(She did, by about 3 million votes) pic.twitter.com/5xpruyB69l
This, of course, is nonsense. We know who won the popular vote. Clinton won the popular vote by about three million votes. But, why does that fact matter? The United States doesn't elect its president via the popular vote--it uses the Electoral College. Which Trump won. By a significant margin. Both candidates agreed going into the election that the winner would be whoever received over 270 votes in the Electoral College, not whoever received the most votes in the popular vote. The popular vote means nothing in terms of the actual election, nor does it actually matter who wins it.
Voter fraud is bad. This is not a disputable fact. Voter fraud should be prevented, and if people are caught committing voter fraud, they should be punished. Only people who are eligible to vote in elections should be voting, and each person should be voting exactly one (1) time for one (1) candidate per election. Were some votes improperly cast in the 2016 election? By all likelihood, yes. A country of 300 million people is bound to have some less-than-honest people. But to suggest that there were potentially three million improperly-cast votes flies in the face of all evidence to the contrary.