EDITORIAL: Donald Trump’s voter fraud claims are silly, but opportunities abound for shenanigans

Donald Trump’s tweeting fetish has his opponents scurrying around in all directions. One in particular that generated quite an amusing response was his post three weeks after the election that in addition to “winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.”

Mr. Trump has continued to repeat this claim despite the fact that there is absolutely no evidence of widespread voter fraud, let alone of 3 million fraudulent votes cast for Hillary Clinton.

Not surprisingly, Democrats have eagerly bit at his trolling and have seized on the president’s voter fraud narrative as yet one more reason why they believe he is wholly unfit to lead the nation. But according to an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal last week, an investigation in Mr. Trump’s own hometown indicates that, in some places, concerns about the integrity of the voting process are more than imaginary.

In a commentary headlined, “Voter Fraud a Myth? That’s not what New York Investigators Found,” attorney Larry Levy reveals that back in 2013, the New York City Department of Investigation conducted a test on the voting system. Investigators posed as 63 individuals still on the city voter rolls despite having died, moved out of the jurisdiction or been convicted of a felony at least two years earlier.

“The investigators didn’t go to great lengths to hide their fraudulent votes,” Mr. Levy writes. “In five instances investigators in their 20s and 30s posed as voters age 82 to 94. In some cases, the investigators were of different ethnic backgrounds from the voters they were impersonating.”

Others informed poll workers that they had moved, but didn’t have time to get to their new homes on Election Day.

“Only one investigator was flat-out rejected,” Mr. Levy writes. All told, 97 percent of the badly disguised fake voters were allowed to cast ballots without incident. None was reported to the authorities or to the city’s Board of Elections.

Democrats for years have been fighting efforts to safeguard the integrity of the process as a nefarious plot to keep poor and minority voters from participating. Donald Trump’s silly voter fraud claims provide another excuse for them to laugh off or ridicule debate on the issue.

But as Mr. Levy notes, the New York City experiment showed that too often “such illegal behavior doesn’t get reported or corrected” and that jurisdictions are susceptible to those who might seek to manipulate the tally. There’s nothing wrong with embracing policies intended to limit those opportunities.