Donald Trump regularly claims that the presidential election is “rigged” against him, thanks in part to “all too common” instances of voter fraud. “Watch Philadelphia. Watch St. Louis. Watch Chicago, watch Chicago. Watch so many other places,” the GOP nominee urged his supporters at a recent rally.
Election experts typically respond by pointing out that instances of fraud by voters at the polls are actually remarkably rare.
But they do happen. Case in point: Police in Des Moines, Iowa, said Friday that they had arrested Terri Lynn Rote, 55, on suspicion of voting twice in the general election.
Rote, a registered Republican, allegedly submitted ballots at two different early-voting locations in Polk County, Iowa, according to local media reports. She has been charged with first-degree election misconduct, a felony.
“I wasn’t planning on doing it twice. It was a spur of the moment,” Rote told Iowa Public Radio. “The polls are rigged.” She said she feared her first vote for Trump would be changed to a vote for Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.
In February, a reporter for The Blaze, a conservative website run by Glenn Beck, interviewed and photographed Rote, who was then planning to support Trump in the Iowa caucuses.
The Polk County auditor said this was the first instance of alleged voter fraud he could remember in 12 years, while the county prosecutor called it one of the few examples he’d seen in his 25 years of work.
According to police, two other unnamed suspects are accused of casting mail-in ballots and also voting in person, but they have not been arrested.
Editor’s note: Donald Trump regularly incites political violence and is a serial liar, rampant xenophobe, racist, misogynist and birther who has repeatedly pledged to ban all Muslims — 1.6 billion members of an entire religion — from entering the U.S.
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