Perhaps the biggest chutzpah yet in this chutzpah-laced presidency was President Donald Trump’s late-November Tweets demanding proof he did NOT lose the popular vote due to illegal voting. Trump shifted the burden of proof (normally on the person making an outlandish claim) to reporters and political opponents, demanding they prove a negative. It’s a fool’s errand. Millions of Wookies didn’t vote for Hillary, but what documents, eyewitness statements, or statistics could prove it for certain? Trump’s similarly fictional accusations can’t be countered by normal forms of evidence either.

But they can be countered by logic – with a twist of math:

The incentive just isn’t there. Since Trump claims most of the illegal votes were in states Hillary won (that’s how she supposedly ran up her nationwide tally), millions of Americans had to agree to commit felonies and risk their freedom for the foolish position that their one vote in a very blue state would actually help make Hillary president.

Cheating would have been caught. Hundreds of thousands of poll workers and election judges, about half of them Republicans, supervised precincts across the country. Some jurisdictions even require members of both parties be present. None of these Republicans (or next to none) reported even suspecting any voter fraud at all, at least not before President Trump alleged the cheating was gargantuan. What does he know that Republican poll workers don’t? They were there.

There aren’t enough illegal immigrants to reach three million cheaters. Fifty-eight percent of America’s 10 million adult illegal immigrants do not speak English well and would thus find the process daunting. And millions live in states that require Voter ID – which Republicans claim prevents voter fraud. In addition, some illegal immigrants (Venezuelan, Vietnamese) lean rightward politically, and 29 percent of Latinos (the largest group of illegal immigrants) and even 13 percent of Muslims backed Trump. So a million or two would never vote for Hillary. After subtracting Trump supporters and those stymied by language or voter ID, there aren’t many potential fraudsters left. It’s just not credible that those remaining – who are mostly poor and completely unorganized – would overwhelmingly find the time and the wherewithal to vote illegally.

Conspiracies this big just don’t happen. A voter fraud scandal this large would require not only millions of illegal participants, but thousands of American citizens to organize them – all without the use of normal communication methods that leave trails – email, Twitter, and Facebook. No friends and neighbors who overheard conversations or noticed suspicious behavior could ever have told one of the tens of thousands of journalists covering the election – nor any Republicans. The level of secrecy would be unprecedented in world history. And none of the millions of conspirators would later have ideological or ethical regrets – or go for the fame of exposing the worst political scandal since Watergate.

It would be both a flawless and an incompetent conspiracy. Trump’s claim portrays Democrats as both incredibly competent at winning raw votes and utterly inept at organizing them. Why would they solicit three to five million illegal votes nationwide, including millions in states whose results didn’t matter, when only 107,000 extra illegal voters in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan would have awarded Hillary the actual presidency? Any rational conspiracy to procure illegal presidential votes would focus on swing states.

Trump could easily demonstrate it happened. Twelve days after Trump’s accusation, the Louisiana Senate runoff took place. Trump could easily demonstrate fraudulent voting in federal elections by sending in poll monitors and investigators with body cameras. Even better, he could expose the November conspiracy by offering automatic citizenship plus immunity to the first hundred illegal immigrants to step forward with significant evidence of voter fraud. The extent of the problem would be immediately exposed.

Trump’s claims just don’t make sense. Was this level of fraud in previous elections, too? Why didn’t anyone notice and stop it? If voting fraud is so easy, why don’t any Republicans organize similar campaigns – after all, they could ethically justify it since Democrats do it, too. And please, why does the low end of Trump’s estimate (three million) happen to be almost exactly the number of illegal Hillary votes that would invalidate Democrat claims she got the most votes?

Americans who are bemused by this scandal need to start taking it seriously. One result of Trump’s planned voting-fraud investigation that is NOT going to happen is a conclusion the election was fair followed by a presidential retraction.

The other possibilities are not pretty: investigators pressured to manufacture fake evidence, a president who denounces or denies the results of his own research, a cover-up of data that reflects poorly on the president, and other escalations that can come only from the mind of a politician so averse to losing – even losing something that doesn’t matter or even really exist – that he would tell one of American history’s biggest whoppers.

David Benkof is a columnist for The Daily Caller. Follow him on Twitter (@DavidBenkof) or email him at DavidBenkof@gmail.com.