Before we get to this hidden camera video from James O'Keefe, I'd like to make an important point. I've been disturbed by the number of Republican voters who tell pollsters that they're prepared to blame a Donald Trump loss on fraud or a "rigged" vote count, as opposed to Trump receiving fewer votes than Hillary Clinton. Virtually every single national poll shows Clinton leading the race. Almost every swing state has shifted toward her column over recent weeks. Her on-air presence dwarfs Trump's. Her ground-level turnout operation is robust and sophisticated. So let's be clear and honest: If the status quo more or less holds steady and she wins in November, it will not because of cheating. Partisans who are unwilling to acknowledge troubling realities hamstring their party's ability to win future election because hard truths are never confronted. Democrats aren't immune from such conspiratorial sore loserdom either; see the "Gore won" nonsense that persists to this day, and the Ohio voting machines nonsense some John Kerry backers screamed about after President Bush's 2004 re-election victory. The point is, inventing nefarious explanations for straightforward failures accomplishes nothing but self delusion.

Speaking of delusional denialists who won't acknowledge troubling realities for partisan reasons, it's practically an article of faith on the Left that voter fraud is a non-existent problem -- solutions to which are cynical Republican voter suppression schemes to hurt racial minorities. (The vast majority of the non-white electorate supports voter integrity laws, which Democrats rarely mention). Clinging to this belief requires ignoring reams of examples of the phenomenon, which we have documented over and over again, through multiple election cycles. Or dismissing the evidence as meaningless anecdotes of "isolated incidents." Well, those isolated incidents keep piling up: Dead voters in Virginia. Dead voters in Colorado. Illegal voting in Illinois. A voter fraud investigation that has now expanded to 56 counties in Indiana. And those are in addition to these recent examples across four other states. Now, here we have a Democratic elections commissioner in New York City admitting in a concealed-camera exchange that voter fraud is a real and enduring issue, and endorsing the very sort of voter ID laws that his party's elites publicly demagogue as malicious forms of racially-motivated voters suppression (even though evidence contradicts this supposed outcome). Watch:

In the video, NYC Democratic Commissioner of the Board of Elections Alan Schulkin is caught on hidden camera at a United Federation of Teachers holiday party admitting that there is widespread voter fraud in New York City. “Yeah, they should ask for your ID. I think there is a lot of voter fraud,” said Schulkin, who elaborated on the types of voter fraud that are taking place in New York...“You know, I don’t think it’s too much to ask somebody to show some kind of an ID…Like I say, people don’t realize, certain neighborhoods in particular they bus people around to vote,” said Schulman.

"They" -- presumably meaning political machines -- "put [people] in a bus and go poll site to poll site" in "certain neighborhoods," Schulkin says, before declining to say what sort of neighborhoods he's talking about. Is this Democratic elections official candidly reporting he knows to be true, or is he a secret part of the baseless right-wing voter suppression project? Whenever leftists object to any and all evidence of this problem in order to fight against wildly popular voter integrity measures, it's always worth asking exactly how much fraud they're willing to tolerate. I'll leave you with another twist on a similar theme, via Fox News host Brit Hume: