WASHINGTON — Surrogates for Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump Sunday accused Democrats of systematic voter fraud in some of the largest U.S. cities.
“They leave dead people on the rolls, and then they pay people to vote those dead people four, five, six, seven, eight, nine times,” former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani said on CNN’s “State of the Union” Sunday. “Dead people generally vote for Democrats.”
Giuliani and former House speaker Newt Gingrich singled out Philadelphia as a particular hotbed of cheating. “To suggest that we have, you don’t have theft in Philadelphia is to deny reality,” Gingrich said on ABC’s “This Week.”
Asked whether Republicans also cheated, Giuliani said that’s rarely the case. “They don’t control inner cities the way Democrats do,” he said. Blacks and other minorities often make up much of the population in U.S. inner cities.
Voting-rights advocates — and an increasing number of federal judges — have said there’s no evidence that impersonation at the polling place is a widespread problem. When it concluded in July that Texas’ voter-ID law was racially discriminatory, a federal appeals court said there had been only two convictions for in-person voter fraud, out of 20 million votes cast, in the decade before the 2011 law was passed.
Another federal appeals court blocked a Republican-backed North Carolina law, saying its provisions “target African Americans with almost surgical precision.” The measure imposed a photo-ID requirement, limited early voting and eliminated same-day registration.
Trump this month urged supporters at a rally in Pennsylvania to monitor polling places for fraud, issuing what voting-rights advocates say was a call for intimidation.
“You’ve got to go out, and you’ve got to get your friends, and you’ve got to get everybody you know, and you’ve got to watch the polling booths because I hear too many stories about Pennsylvania, certain areas,” Trump said.
“We can’t let them get away with this, folks,” he said in New Hampshire on Saturday.
Gingrich Sunday said the “best description” of the election was that it would be a ‘coup e’tat,’ a phrase that refers to the violent overthrow of a government.
Not all Republicans have jumped on Trump’s allegations of fraud. His running mate, Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, said he and Trump will “absolutely” accept the result of the election. Still, on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Pence said “the sense of a rigged election” has been created by “the obvious bias in the national media.”
House Speaker Paul Ryan said he is “fully confident” the that election will be carried out with integrity, his spokeswoman AshLee Strong said in a statement.
