The intent of the letter Attorney General Pam Bondi sent Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz on Saturday could not have been more obvious if it had been cobbled together from letters clipped from newspapers and magazines. If Walz and his constituents didn’t like federal agents prowling the streets of Minneapolis, all they had to do was give the Trump administration data on its aid programs and registered voters, and end its policies protecting immigrants in the state.
If anything, the country’s top law enforcement official should have been writing to assure the governor that a federal officer killing a resident of his state would be the focus of a robust, objective investigation. But as attorney general, Bondi has always seen herself first as a player on President Donald Trump’s team, rather than as an advocate for the public. So she defended Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem instead of Alex Pretti and sent Walz a list of demands.
The country’s top law enforcement official should have been writing to assure the governor of a robust, objective investigation.
As you probably figured out, the administration wants data on aid programs because it’s pretending there’s evidence Walz and other Democratic officials have engaged in rampant fraud. The reason they want Minnesota to repeal its policies protecting immigrants is clear. But the voter rolls? Who would believe there’s something suspicious in how Minnesota voted?
The answer, of course, is Donald Trump. Speaking after an immigration officer killed Renee Good this month, Trump insisted, “I feel that I won Minnesota. I think I won it all three times.”
He didn’t. He lost Minnesota three times, by 2, 7 and 4 percentage points.
Seeing Trump say he won a state he lost while his flunkies nod along barely raises eyebrows anymore. But it should. As I’ll explain, what Bondi is doing is much more sinister than simply keeping Trump happy.
A bit of history is useful here. For decades, Republicans (and conservatives more broadly) have wrongly tried to convince the public that rampant voter fraud exists. The right-wing Heritage Foundation put together a database of criminal charges related to voter fraud in 2017, and (mostly) Republican-controlled state legislatures pushed for rules that would require identification for in-person voting.
As has been pointed out ad nauseum, there’s almost no actual fraud. Brookings looked at the Heritage Foundation’s own database of “fraud,” finding that in seven swing states Heritage itself identified only 252 cases of fraud across 408,000,000 cast ballots. That’s like finding one bad penny in a pile of 1.6 million of them. Other analyses have shown in-person fraud of the kind that would be addressed by voter ID is even less common. Every claim about systemic fraud has crumbled into dust.
Every claim about systemic fraud has crumbled into dust.
Regardless, by the time Trump first ran for president, the Republican base had already been primed to believe that rampant fraud existed, and he quickly put that false belief to work for his own purposes, claiming in 2016 that he won the popular vote when he didn’t and, in 2020, that he really won but votes were stolen from him. Not only has no significant fraud been uncovered, the 2020 election result has remained unscathed despite the most exhaustive effort to undermine an outcome in American history.
What we saw in the weeks leading up to Jan. 6, 2021, remains true today: The claim of fraud, rather than any fraud in itself, is the threat to American democracy.
Philip Bump is a data journalist and MS NOW contributor.
