President-elect Donald J. Trump has been mocked for his tweeted claim that if it were not for illegal aliens voting, he might very well have won the popular as well as the electoral vote. Is his claim less credible than the one put forth by some of Trump’s opponents that Russian hackers got into voting machines that aren’t even connected to the Internet to switch votes around? 

Trump puts the number at several million. Certainly the number is higher than one, considering the loosening of voting restrictions in recent years, from motor voter laws to same-day registration to handing out drivers licenses to illegal aliens. It is in no way implausible to picture an illegal alien getting his driver’s license and then marching to the polls to vote against a candidate who opposes such actions by government,

I would argue that in this context the efforts by Democrats to fight voting integrity efforts such as Voter ID requirements and purging the rolls of dead voters is designed to rig the system, as Trump might say, in their favor. As Investors Business Daily noted in 2014, dead voters casting votes, illegal aliens voting, and people being registered to vote in multiple states is a common and documented occurrence:

The fact that many people will do anything to get out of jury duty has exposed massive fraudulent voting in Frederick County, Md., that may have been going on for years…

The Virginia Voters Alliance (VVA) cross-checked jury duty forms with individual voting records and found that hundreds of voters in that one Maryland county cast votes after reporting they were noncitizens. One in seven Maryland residents are noncitizens, so extrapolating the number of possibly illegal votes cast in recent elections over the entire state hints at possible election-changing fraud.

Maryland is one of many states that in the process of making it easier to vote has also made vote fraud easier to commit. Maryland both issues driver's licenses to illegal aliens and has a Motor Voter law that allows that license to be used to register and vote.

The VVA filed suit Friday in U.S. District Court in Maryland asserting that individuals who opted out of jury duty as noncitizens have been able to cast votes in at least three Maryland elections.

Based on the number of these unqualified voters in Frederick County, it is estimated that up to 7% of Maryland's registered voters could be illegal immigrants, enough to swing elections.

Despite the fact that there is no evidence that requiring a Voter ID suppresses voter turnout among minorities, it has been used by the feds to prevent states like the battleground state of North Carolina from working to heighten voting integrity. In another 2014 editorial, IBD noted the fraud that goes on that Democrats ignore:

People move from state to state and voters die, but voting records are not often updated in a timely fashion to reflect those facts, leaving an abundance of seemingly valid voter registrations that can be used to skew the results of close elections. Only recently has cross-checking between states been done.

As Fox News has reported, a law passed last year by the North Carolina legislature required election staff to check information for North Carolina's more than 6.5 million voters against a database containing information for 101 million voters in 28 other states.

That cross-check found listings for 35,570 North Carolina voters whose first names, last names and dates of birth match those of voters who voted in other states.

North Carolina is also one of the states that Attorney General Eric Holder and the Department of Justice have sued over a series of laws to ensure fair and honest elections, including one requiring voter ID.

 "We will show that they were discriminatory in both intent and in impact," he said in announcing the North Carolina suit, arguing that "concern of voter fraud is something that is made up" to justify the laws.

Yet he does not explain the support for voter ID by Nelson Mandela in his campaign to end apartheid in South Africa and bring democracy to that country. At one rally, Mandela wore a T-shirt that read: "Get an ID. Register. Vote." In recent Afghan elections, voters proudly displayed their voter ID cards.

A paper in the scholarly journal Electoral Studies suggests that as many as 2.8 million illegal aliens voted  in the 2008 election:

How many non-citizen votes were likely cast in 2008? Taking the most conservative estimate (those who both said they voted and cast a verified vote) yields a confidence interval based on sampling error between 0.2% and 2.8% for the portion of non-citizens participating in elections.

Taking the least conservative measure e at least one indicator showed that the respondent voted yields an estimate that between 7.9% and 14.7% percent of non-citizens voted in 2008.

Since the adult noncitizen population of the United States was roughly 19.4 million (CPS, 2011), the number of non-citizen voters (including both uncertainty based on normally distributed sampling error, and the various combinations of verified and reported voting) could range from just over 38,000 at the very minimum to nearly 2.8 million at the maximum”…

As Team Clinton joins the effort by left-wing nut Jill Stein to question the integrity of the 2016 votes, we might consider Democratic efforts over the years to undermine our electoral process. In addition to securing the borders and vetting refugees, it might be time to secure our polling places and do some “extreme vetting” of the voters who enter them.

Daniel John Sobieski is a freelance writer whose pieces have appeared in Investor’s Business Daily, Human Events, Reason Magazine and the Chicago Sun-Times among other publications.