In-person voter fraud has been one of the favorite Republican boogeymen for years now, which isn't surprising since it does double duty for them: it gives them an excuse to prevent people from voting if they're statistically not likely to vote Republican and it allows them to gin up anti-immigrant hysteria to motivate their base. In Donald Trump's case, it also allows him to save face, since he's been claiming with no proof that he only lost the popular vote because literally millions of non-citizens illegally voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016.

But since the election, a Department of Justice-led investigation has been underway examining voter fraud in North Carolina, a state that Trump won by over 177,000 votes. That investigation found just 19 people from countries like Germany, Japan, and Mexico voted in the last presidential election there, or a little more than 0.0001 percent of Trump's margin of victory. No doubt, this will be seen as a victory by conservatives who believe that a plague of nefarious immigrants are desperately trying to swing U.S. elections in favor of Democrats (who are by and large not much friendlier to immigrants than most Republicans are) despite the fact that this is a vanishingly small number with no evidence of widespread coordination. Per the New York Times:

Nearly 4.8 million people voted in North Carolina’s 2016 general election, and election officials said last year that about 500 of those ballots had been cast by ineligible voters, the vast majority of them barred from voting because they had felony records. Many of those said they did not know that their criminal record prevented them from voting.

As the Times reports, North Carolina's Republican-dominated state legislature is trying to use the news to win public approval for a constitutional amendment that would require photo I.D. to vote. The state's previous attempts were ruled unconstitutional after it was determined that they were designed primarily to suppress African American turnout.

Of course, Trump's own sham commission on "election integrity" failed to turn up any evidence of widespread voter fraud. Yes, there are individual, anecdotal cases of voter fraud that happen, but 19 votes aren't enough to swing an individual district, let alone a whole state. Furthermore, the government is incredibly selective about who gets charged with voter fraud and how. African American woman casts a provisional ballot without realizing she's not allowed? Five years in prison. A white woman deliberately votes for Donald Trump twice? No charges.

Similarly, while the administration is hyper-fixated on spooky foreigners showing up at the polls, they are dramatically less interested in trying to prevent any other form of election tampering. Take for example a recent bill in Congress designed to beef up election security. The bill would have given each state's top election official high enough security clearance to receive intelligence about potential election security threats, require every state to do an audit after each federal election, and provide incentives to acquire machines that keep a paper record of votes. But despite high-profile, bipartisan support, the bill died because of objections from the Trump administration. In a statement to Yahoo News, a White House spokesperson said that the Department of Homeland Security already has "all the statutory authority it needs to assist state and local officials to improve the security of existing election infrastructure.”

It's hard to come up with any convincing reasons for the White House to oppose strengthening election security, but one thing is clear. When Trump and Republicans don't think they can win, they'd much rather not deal with the whole "democracy" thing at all.