After Clinton’s Strong Debate Showing, Trump’s Lies on Election Rigging Are Even More at Odds with Reality

After Clinton’s Strong Debate Showing, Trump’s Lies on Election Rigging Are Even More at Odds with Reality

After Clinton’s Strong Debate Showing, Trump’s Lies on Election Rigging Are Even More at Odds with Reality

It is voter suppression—not fantasies of fraud—that could actually undermine the will of the people.

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Even before he walked onto the debate stage Monday night at Hofstra University, Donald Trump was complaining that his first head-to-head contest with Hillary Clinton was not fair. “The system is being rigged,” he charged last week. “They want the host to go after Trump.”

For the Republican nominee, the alleged unfairness of the debate was a new take on a familiar theme. Since the beginning of his campaign, Trump has said that our politics is rigged not only against ordinary Americans but also, somehow, against Trump himself. This summer, he went so far as to suggest that the outcome in November, should Clinton prevail, might not be legitimate. “If the election is rigged, I would not be surprised,” he said in an interview with The Washington Post. “We may have people voting 10 times.”

In many ways, our political and economic system is indeed rigged. But it is progressive leaders such as Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), not Trump, who are putting forward real solutions to the problem. More to the point, if the election is swayed, it will not be because of voter fraud, which is virtually nonexistent in the United States. It will be because of voter-suppression efforts led by Republicans across the country.

Read the full text of Katrina’s column here.

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Katrina vanden Heuvel

Editorial Director and Publisher, The Nation

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