Donald Trump, faced with the unfathomable prospect that he may actually lose, is now saying the election will be "rigged" against him.



As evidence, he cites recent court rulings in five different states, all of which slapped down laws Republicans pushed through under the guise of preventing voter fraud, because judges found they discriminate against minority voters.



Trump claims this is making the election "unfair" to him. "We may have people vote 10 times," he said.

The voter fraud bogeyman



Nonsense. In fact, voter fraud is extremely rare, especially for in-person voting -- the type targeted by strict new voter ID laws. A 2014 study found just 31 possible instances of fraud over 14 years of elections, with a total of 1 billion votes cast.



And a North Carolina court recently confirmed what many have long suspected: Strict new voting measures were passed with clear discriminatory intent. They "targeted African Americans with almost surgical precision," it said.



The Republican-controlled Legislature first asked for data on the use, by race, of certain voting practices, then went out of its way to ban them using methods that all disproportionately affected African Americans.

Can it get more obvious than that?

Bloomberg's take on Trump: scary, but spot-on



Legislators knew which voters they were eliminating when they required people to show photo IDs that white voters are more likely to have, ended same day registration and scaled back early voting, including one of two Sundays when African American churches drove people to the polls.



"In particular, African Americans disproportionately used the first seven days of early voting," the judge wrote. "After the receipt of this racial data, the General Assembly amended the bill to eliminate the first week of early voting, shortening the total early voting period from seventeen to ten days."



This law was, she said, "as close to a smoking gun as we are likely to see in modern times."



Courts in four other states -- Wisconsin, Texas, Kansas and North Dakota -- also struck down attempts at voter suppression in the past two weeks. And these are just the cases in which lawsuits were filed. Many new laws have yet to be challenged.



This Republican strategy predates Trump. In 2013, the Supreme Court struck down a key provision of the 1965 Voting Rights Act that said the Justice Department had to approve any changes to voting in certain states with a history of discrimination. Since then, we've seen an onslaught of suspicious changes; some in states that in the past would have needed pre-approval.



So in a way, Trump is correct: This election is being rigged. Not against him -- but against thousands of eligible voters who would be systematically stripped of one of their most fundamental rights.



It's dangerous to suggest, falsely, that an election is "rigged." No other presidential candidate has done so in the last century; not even Al Gore, who won the popular vote nationally but lost the election.

But how else should we describe laws that purposefully block eligible minority voters? The election rigging is being done by Trump's own party, to his own benefit -- and the detriment of our democracy.

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