President Donald Trump continues to repeat the claim that undocumented people are being allowed into the U.S. to vote illegally.
During a panel discussion on CNN Saturday, host Abby Phillip reported that Trump’s apparent hunt for evidence is coming up empty.
"The New York Times reports that a review shows no widespread fraud," she read. "Of the nearly 50 million registrations checked, just 10,000 cases were opened. Now, that is 0.02 percent. And by open, that might not even be evidence of fraud. It could be that the system that they use mistakenly flagged people who are citizens."
Phillip cited one Florida case in which a woman submitted more than 100 names she claimed were fraudulent voters.
"Turned out it was less than a handful that were actually legitimately people who may not have been, may not have been citizens," Phillips said. "There's nothing there.'"
A fight quickly broke out between a conservative commentator and a columnist after the former, Joe Borelli, asked why, if the states have nothing to hide, they aren’t just handing over all of their data. Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Solomon Jones explained that it is unconstitutional and that the U.S. Constitution gives the states full control over elections.
"I think that you're talking about things that could happen, things that might happen, things that people have proposed as opposed to what's happening right now," said Jones. "And the evidence says that there aren't people who are undocumented immigrants voting, in these elections in any way that could actually impact the election. That's been a myth that the Republicans have pushed for years."
Commentator Chuck Rocha explained that he was once an election judge in East Texas, and that there have been municipalities where legal immigrants who pay taxes and participate in the community were the subject of ballot measures asking whether citizens agreed they could vote in local elections. He said that some of those small municipal elections, immigrants have been allowed to vote. No immigrants have been given the right to vote in a federal election.
