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NEW YORK — Three days into President Donald J. Trump’s action-packed first week in office, he promised “a major investigation into VOTER FRAUD,” as he explained Wednesday morning, via Twitter. This will include “those registered to vote in two states, those who are illegal and even those registered to vote who are dead (and many for a long time). Depending on results, we will strengthen up voting procedures!”

This impending probe follows Trump’s private remarks to congressional leaders Monday night that some 3 to 5 million illegal ballots cost him the popular vote last November 8.

Democrats, in response, are foaming at their mouths, although one wonders if they have any foam left. How odd. They should welcome this examination. If voter fraud really is a fevered, baseless, Right-wing fantasy, as they reliably insist, this investigation will vindicate them and make Trump look like a cranky, paranoid conspiracist. Liberals should smile and egg Trump on.

Instead, Rep. Adam Schiff (D–CA) warns, “Our new president is doing deep damage to himself and to our country.” Regarding Trump’s plan, U.S. Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN) insists: “Fight it NOW!”

Democrats and their sentinels in the Old Guard media unconvincingly argue that Trump offers “no evidence” of voter fraud, so don’t investigate. This total non-sequitur is akin to a doctor looking into a patient’s eyes and saying, “I see no evidence of lung cancer, so let’s skip that chest x-ray.”

In their hearts, the Left knows Trump is right, at least on the existence of voter fraud. And that’s what terrifies them. His investigation will highlight the fraud that exists and, furthermore, show whether these problems are as pervasive as Trump believes.

Indeed, registration irregularities are disturbingly routine. According to a 2012 Pew Center for the States report, 1.8 million dead Americans were registered to vote. Also, 2.75 million Americans were enrolled in two states each, while 68,725 were enrolled in three. Indeed, Pew found, “24 million — one of every eight — active voter registrations in the United States are no longer valid or are significantly inaccurate.”

And, yes, Virginia. Voter fraud happens.

CBS2 Los Angeles found 265 dead voters in southern California last May. Many cast ballots “year after year.”

Ohio Democrats cheered Melowese Richardson at a May 2014 Cincinnati-area rally, as Townhall’s Guy Benson recalls. Richardson was convicted of voting twice in 2012 and casting ballots in three earlier elections on behalf of her comatose sister.

North Carolina announced in April 2014 that 13,416 dead voters were registered, of whom 81 recently had voted. Among 35,750 North Carolinians also registered in other states, 765 voted in the 2012 general election both inside and outside the Tarheel State.

South Carolina’s attorney general determined in January 2012 that 953 people “were deceased at the time of their participation in recent elections.”

In Fairfax County, Virginia, Heritage Foundation scholar Hans von Spakovsky discovered 278 non-citizens registered to vote in 2011, of whom 117 had voted in state and federal elections.

If these five examples seem paltry, check out the Heritage Foundation’s non-exhaustive sample of 742 criminal convictions for vote-fraud.

Media Matters ridiculed vote fraud concerns as “a series of myths that right-wing media have pushed for years.” And yet it keeps taking place.

It would help if Democrats, Left-wing activists, and the hyenas in America’s newsrooms explained just how “widespread” voter fraud must become before they consider it an injustice. Every ballot cast by a cadaver or an illegal alien negates a ballot completed by a legitimate voter. How many such genuine votes is it OK for fraud to obviate? Is it 100? How about 1,000? Maybe 10,000 — or ten times that figure?

How many on the Left who attack Trump on this issue would sign up to have their votes erased by invalid ballots? Every Leftist who screamed, “Count every vote!” during the 2000 Florida Bush v. Gore meltdown should empathize with the Right’s parallel imperative: “Protect every vote!”

While the world patiently awaits that development, America’s 45th president may pursue this issue as energetically as his predecessor concealed it.

“President Trump’s decision to renew the federal government’s interest in enforcing laws against election fraud and the procedures that work to prevent such activities is important,” said J. Christian Adams, president of the Public Interest Legal Foundation and former federal prosecutor in the Justice Department’s Voting Division. “The Obama Administration had the tools to fight voter fraud but let them gather dust. Because of that neglect of their duties, aliens got on the rolls, people voted multiple times, and lawlessness took hold of our elections.”

In Injustice: Exposing the Racial Agenda of the Obama Justice Department, Adams chronicles the mercifully departed Obama Administration’s hostility to ballot-integrity laws. Indeed, former attorney general Eric Holder sued Florida in 2012 when state officials tried to remove 51,308 dead people and other ineligibles from voter rolls, as required by the federal Help America Vote Act of 2002 and the federal National Voter Registration Act of 1993, signed by President Bill Clinton!

Adams recommends a machete that would help Trump chop quickly to the center of much of this fraud.

The Homeland Security Department’s Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) database lists all non-citizens in America. These include green card holders, foreign tourists, exchange students, and those on work visas as well as illegals who have broken the law or otherwise surfaced on Uncle Sam's radar. Adams tells me: “This is the ultimate alien database.”

Comparing SAVE’s names with registered and actual voters should demonstrate, rather swiftly, the extent of non-citizen involvement in America’s election system. It also would identify violators, who should be punished.

“If that federal database were used to scrub the state databases,” Adams predicts, “all sorts of illegals would pop out. That’s what the Left fears the most. It would reveal rats everywhere.”

Obama barred state election officials from SAVE since, as he might have said, Let me be clear, vote fraud is a myth, so why measure it? When Florida successfully sued to access SAVE, DHS did not hand Tallahassee these records. Instead, Florida officials had to ask DHS to scrutinize each suspicious name individually. This slowed things to a trickle.

Trump should open SAVE’s spigots so every state may compare its voters against this massive database. States led by Republicans, who cherish ballot integrity, most assuredly will embrace these records.

In contrast, California, New York, and other Democrat strongholds likely will spurn SAVE.

Luckily, Adams observes, there is a statute for that. Then-U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy used 42 U.S. Code §1974b to acquire election-related documents from southern states that blocked blacks from voting in the early 1960s. What sweet justice for Trump to deploy the same duly enacted federal law that RFK harnessed to demand the voter rolls of intransigent Democrat states and determine if they are awash in illegal aliens and other non-citizen voters.

After Trump’s inquiry, the scale of voter fraud may or may not reach his claim of 3 to 5 million bogus ballots. By now, however, the Left should know better than to underestimate him. Trump has a gravity-defying knack for confounding his critics and landing on his feet.

Trump’s analysis almost surely will show that voter fraud is greater than zero, which is the number that Democrats claim it to be. And that’s the point. Americans should have zero tolerance for voter fraud. How sad that this problem is among the few things that reputedly tolerant Democrats actually tolerate.