Well, I was so busy working on the first post for this blog that I almost missed the latest antics of  our 45th President, who is already at it again. According to the Washington Post, Trump told a gathering of top Democratic and Republican lawmakers after his inauguration that he would have won the popular vote were it not for three to five million illegal ballots.

It’s actually possible that this is not a lie. It’s possible that President Trump actually believes this because he is just a straight-up moron. But I don’t have the time or the energy to try to draw those sorts of distinctions here. Regardless of whether Trump believes it or not, it simply is not true. There were not five million illegal ballots cast in the election. There were not three million illegal ballots cast in the election. There almost certainly were not even three dozen illegal ballots cast in the election.

I want to pause here to make a point that should be apparent to everyone, but for some reason many Trump supporters often seem to have difficulty with: When you make outlandish claims, the burden of proof is on you, not on the people who dispute those claims. If Donald Trump is going to say that five million people voted illegally, he has a responsibility to provide evidence for that claim.

Of course, Donald Trump doesn’t know what the word “responsibility” means, so I will engage with his idiocy this time. People who advocate for these moronic theories often point out that there are “millions” of dead people still on the voting registries. Yeah. When people die, their names do not get automatically removed from the voter rolls. Democracy is awesome, but it’s not magical. The fact that the names of deceased voters remain on the lists does not mean those people are voting. They are not voting, on account of they are dead.

A 2014 investigation examined every election since 2000 — that’s more than 1 billion ballots in total — and found 31 instances of possible voter fraud. 31 out of 1 billion is not quite nothing, but it’s close enough to nothing to be considered a rounding error. Also: Many of those 31 instances were not fully investigated, and so the actual number of fraudulent ballots is probably lower still. This makes it essentially unthinkable that three million people could suddenly show up and cast fake votes in one single presidential election. It’s truly ridiculous, and yet people will believe it because Republicans and their allies in the media have spent the last 8+ years convincing their supporters that facts and evidence are nothing more than tools used by liberals to brainwash you.

Think about the amount of work it would take to cast just a single fake ballot: First, you have to know the name of someone who is registered to vote, but who for some reason is unlikely to vote. Then you need to know that person’s polling place. Then, depending on the relevant laws in the state, you may need to come up with some kind of ID to prove that you are that person. Then you have to not only get past the poll workers, but also escape the notice of the lawyers and poll watchers from both campaigns (assuming you’re doing this in a swing district, which you’d damn well better be or what is the point?). Then, great job, you’ve done it, you’ve cast a ballot. Now either you’re done and you go home and the bad guys in this scenario have somehow recruited three million other people who, like you, are for some reason willing to risk a heavy prison sentence for no personal gain, OR you’re not done and you repeat the process again and again throughout the day, somehow without ever getting caught. If you have to vote multiple times, obviously you have to go to different polling locations so that you don’t get noticed. That means, of course, that you need the names of different voters, and again, depending on the state, it may mean that you need different IDs. You have to slip past different poll workers, lawyers, and poll watchers. How many times do you think you could do this in a day? Six? Eight? Ten? Let’s say you could do it ten times. For three million illegal votes to be cast, the nefarious party would need to have an army of 300,000 people running around casting fake ballots on election day. All of them without getting caught. All of them without ever breaking their silence and talking to the media about what they had done. That would be a pretty impressive criminal operation.

Or you could accept the simpler answer, which is that the whole “fraudulent voting” canard is a myth and President Trump is, as usual, lying.

As with the inauguration lie, it’s important to keep in mind how this particular whopper feeds into the image Trump wants to create of himself as a popular leader with a broad political mandate to do what he wants. Everyone came to his inauguration! The only reason he didn’t win the popular vote was because it was stolen! He won the electoral college in a landslide! (Another lie, by the way). We all used to laugh at the way dictators like Bashar al-Assad and Fidel Castro claimed to have won elections with 97% of 99% of the vote. If we fail to hold Trump accountable for these ridiculous lies now, we may not be laughing for much longer.