SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Why would an immigrant living here illegally risk jail and deportation by trying to vote? That has always puzzled me.

And why would a political pro waste time and money soliciting votes from noncitizens when there are millions of legal voters available to persuade?

The answer is that undocumented immigrants don’t. And neither do campaign consultants.

President Donald Trump and MAGA Republicans who echo his diatribe are hallucinating or outright lying when they claim without evidence that there’s widespread fraud in American elections— specifically in blue states like California that vote for Democrats.

Trump reiterated the fabrication last week when he signed an executive order seeking to place tight federal controls on increasingly popular mail-in voting.

“Mail-in voting means mail-in cheating,” Trump reiterated. “Cheating on mail-in voting is legendary. It’s horrible what’s going on.”

“See you in court,” California Gov. Gavin Newsom replied.

California and several states partnered in filing a lawsuit accusing the president of an illegal power grab. They pointed out that states have a constitutional right to administer elections pretty much as they see fit.

Trump hypocritically voted by mail himself in a recent Florida special election.

“You know what, because I’m president of the United States,” he told reporters when asked about the vote. “I had a lot of different things” to do. For him, voting by mail was convenient.

As for the rest of us, apparently in Trump’s mind we don’t do anything important enough to warrant handy mail voting.

The reality is that egotistical Trump still can’t admit to himself that he lost the 2020 presidential election to Joe Biden fair and square. Democrats must have cheated, he thinks — or says he does.

The main way Democrats cheat, Trump and his followers assert, is to round up noncitizens and register them to vote — especially immigrants from Latin America.

It’s nonsensical. As if some undocumented immigrant struggling to survive and dodge ICE agents really gives a rat who’s elected governor or senator. Voting fraudulently is a crime — a misdemeanor or a felony, punishable by a steep fine and/or jail time.

And a campaign pro is going to break the law by offering cash or groceries to a noncitizen for her vote? That would be felony stupid.

“We can’t get Latinos who have been here legally for three generations to vote. If you’re going to spend money getting votes, that’s where you’re going to spend it,” says Republican consultant Mike Madrid, who has written a book about Latino political influence.

“The notion that Democratic operatives are going after undocumented immigrants is absurd.”

People who migrated here illegally, Madrid adds, “don’t want to touch the government in any shape or form. They just want to put in a hard day’s work and retreat to the shadows. They couldn’t care less about politics and voting in the United States.”

No hard evidence of significant election fraud in America in recent years has been produced by Trump or anyone else.

Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco, a leading Republican candidate for governor, apparently was trying to impress Trump and win his endorsement by seizing more than 650,000 ballots cast in November’s Proposition 50 election.

The sheriff said he was investigating claims — unsubstantiated — of election fraud. But the project is now on hold. A good place for it.

It was a waste of the sheriff’s resources to collect the ballots and would be an even bigger misuse of personnel and money to sift through all of those documents in a fruitless search for fraud.

I called Assemblywoman Gail Pellerin, a Democrat who was Santa Cruz County’s chief elections official for 27 years. She chairs the Assembly Elections Committee.

In all of those years supervising elections, Pellerin told me, she encountered only one clear case of fraud. A landlord snatched a ballot that had been mailed to a tenant and illegally cast it.

But a voter must sign the envelope containing a mailed ballot and the landlord’s signature didn’t match the intended voter’s as given when she originally registered. Election officials contacted the intended voter, who said she hadn’t received her ballot yet. The landlord was prosecuted and convicted.

Signatures are checked with the use of technology in California. That’s the main method of verifying a mailed ballot’s legality.

Pellerin says her own signature didn’t match up once. “I got sloppy and my signature had changed since I registered 20 years earlier.” She was contacted by an elections official and her ballot ultimately was counted.

In every election, she says, there are cases of a mother signing the ballot for a daughter who’s away at college, or someone signing for an aging parent. The signatures invariably don’t match and the voters are contacted.

But that’s about the extent of so-called cheating, Pellerin says.

“Immigrants are here to make their lives better,” she says. “They’re not going to risk any path to citizenship by trying to participate in an election.”

When voters register, they must answer under penalty of perjury whether they’re a citizen.

Trump’s convoluted intervention in state-operated voting would, among other things, direct the United States Postal Service to design new envelopes with bar codes that verify voter legality. The feds would refuse to send ballots to people deemed ineligible to cast them.

Gosh, what could possibly go wrong under the Trump administration?

Californians have embraced mail-in voting. In the gubernatorial election 40 years ago, only 9% of ballots were cast by mail; 20 years ago, 42% were. In November, it was up to 89%.

But baseless claims by Trump and his grovelers of “cheating” will persist. It fires up the conservative base and raises political money.

It also maligns noncitizens and dedicated elections officials who keep voting fraud-free.

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