Donald Trump is doubling down with the “rigged election” claims. Rather than walk back his past statement, or claim he was being sarcastic, the Republican presidential candidate straight out told supporters on Friday that there’s only one possible explanation if he ends up losing the crucial state of Pennsylvania: through cheating. “The only way we can lose, in my opinion—I really mean this, Pennsylvania—is if cheating goes on,” he said late Friday. Nevermind that the Real Clear Politics polling average notes Hillary Clinton has a 9.2-point advantage over Trump in recent surveys. “We’re going to have unbelievable turnout, but we don’t want to see people voting five times, folks,” the Republican presidential nominee said.
Particularly concerning about his warnings was how he noted that he’d “heard some stories about certain parts of the state, and we have to be very careful.” Trump added that there would be a lot of people watching on Election Day. “We have to call up law enforcement, and we have to have the sheriffs and the police chiefs and everybody watching,” he said.
But law enforcement won’t be enough, he warned, and called on supporters to help detect any voting irregularities, expressing shock at the lack of voter ID requirements. “I hope you people can sort of not just vote on the eighth, go around and look and watch other polling places and make sure that it’s 100 percent fine, because without voter identification—which is shocking, shocking that you don’t have it,” he said. Civil rights groups have long said that efforts to institute voter ID laws are really just thinly veiled efforts to prevent minority voters from casting a ballot.
The line was hardly off-the-cuff. In what appeared to be a new section of his website, Trump’s campaign is now seeking to sign up volunteers to be “Trump election observers,” noting he needs help to “stop crooked Hillary from rigging this election!”
This increasing talk of voter fraud and rigged elections is raising fears that Trump supporters could go out in large numbers to try to intimidate minority voters, notes the Los Angeles Times. Particularly concerning was how Trump called for stringent monitoring of “certain areas.” “That kind of rhetoric can be used to keep lots of legitimate people from voting,” Wendy Weiser, director of the Democracy Program at the New York University School of Law’s Brennan Center for Justice, said. “This has happened a lot through our history, and it’s been happening a lot lately.”
