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CNN
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“Election fraud. I’ve heard of the term,” President Donald Trump told White House reporters Tuesday.
Yes, I’ve heard this term. Over and over again. But we are still looking for evidence.
Trump won two of the presidential elections he was a candidate, but he claims election fraud in all three.
The special committee, which was established to reveal election fraud during his first presidential term, disbanded without revealing conspiracy or extensive evidence of fraud.
During his second presidential term, Trump has not been bothered by attempting to identify election fraud. He is simply moving forward with plans to change the system anyway.
“Fraud” has turned into Trump’s go-to justification, due to his larger design to scale back the federal government, as well as ambiguous and deep-rooted, amending election procedures.
“Not, fraud, abuse”
During the presidential election, Trump promised he would not be touched on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid benefits. But now he argues that “waste, fraud, abuse” requires a strict look at these programs.
Trump and Elon Musk have repeatedly argued that millions of very elderly people may be profiting fraudulently by misrepresenting data in the government database of Social Security Numbers. Don’t worry that a better dataset suggests some issues with its size.
CNN’s Tami Luhby writes that it is a “hunting for fraud” by the Social Security Agency, Musk wrote. His Office of Government Efficiency unleashed the confusion with an agency that benefits 73 million Americans when it announced a new policy requiring in-person visits from people who cannot verify their identity online.
Like most of the federal government, the agency already upset by mask efforts to scale the size of the federal workforce would have been crushed by people appearing at understaffed social security management offices. This week, it announced that it would delay the deployment of the policy until April 14th, limiting the new requirements only to applicants for retirement, survivors, or family benefits.
Preventing fraud was also the reason why the Social Security Administration concluded with those seeking to change their bank account information over the phone. Read Luhby’s full report.
Doge Cuts and “Cheat”
In a speech to Congress last month, Trump said he “discovered hundreds of billions of dollars of fraud” by “intelligent, young people,” Trump said in a speech to Congress last month.
Because Doge works primarily secretly, it is impossible to demonstrate any claims of fraud that have been revealed, and it has been repeatedly shown that claims of savings made on its website double count and mistakenly count the value of the reduction.
More importantly, neither Doge nor White House documents how the program and contract are fraudulent. They were clearly part of a programme opposed by the administration, but the differences in policy are different from fraud and crime. Trump knows this. This is because his company was pleaded guilty to criminal tax fraud in 2022 and was found liable for civil tax fraud in New York last year.
Included among staff at many agencies, reducing programming is a government watchdog such as inspectors, which are extremely shutdowns to prevent fraud. The issue is being rolled out on a massive scale in the IRS, where thousands of workers face layoffs during tax season.
Musk promoted a conspiracy theory that is not supported by the factual evidence that Democrats are using “qualification fraud” as magnets to illegally bring immigrants to the country and turn them into voters. We have previously pointed out many holes in that particular theory, but it is sufficient to say that there is no current viable path to citizenship (and therefore voting) for those who are not documented.
Despite Trump’s never-ending claims, there is no evidence of widespread election fraud yet, but the new executive action “hopefully ends it,” he said.
The order seeks to add proof of citizenship requirements to the federal voter registration template used by states. They are also trying to make mask doges accessible to the state voter role.
Expect a court battle. Critics argue that non-citizen voting is already illegal and has not been shown to be a major issue. They argue that requesting evidence of citizenship is a hindrance to poor and elderly people who may not have access to passports or other specific documents.
While some states already share voter information, streamlining national databases could violate the constitutional guidance that states should risk running their own elections and purging naturalized citizens in particular.
Read more about Trump’s election honest executive order from CNN’s Tierney Sneed and Ethan Cohen.
Even if Trump’s executive order endures the expected court challenge and the new national requirement to provide citizenship documents before registering for the vote, Trump has created an on-stage template for a settling route for future candidates and presidents. You’ll hear the term “election fraud” again.
