Experts laugh off Donald Trump's dark warnings about 'rigged' election

On Monday, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump told a crowd in Ohio that he's afraid the November election is "gonna be rigged" against him, a charge he elaborated on to Fox News host Sean Hannity on Monday night.

"I've been hearing about it for a long time," Trump said when Hannity asked about his "rigged" concerns. "And I know last time, there were — you had precincts where there were practically nobody voting for the Republican. And I think that's wrong. I think that was unfair, frankly, to Mitt Romney." Trump warned that on "Nov. 8, we'd better be careful, because that election is going to be rigged. And I hope the Republicans are watching closely, or it's going to be taken away from us." Trump made a similar accusation in 2012, tweeting after Romney's loss that "this election is a total sham and a travesty. We are not a democracy!"

Political scientists and elections experts were unimpressed with Trump's fraud predictions — though they conceded that yes, there were several precincts where Romney received zero votes. Using those heavily black precincts as evidence of a "rigged" election is "a laughable and even irresponsible allegation," though, Larry Sabato at the University of Virginia tells FactCheck.org. "With no evidence at all, Trump is charging — in advance of the election — that if he loses, it might well be because the election is rigged. Puh-leaze."

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Stanford political scientist Jonathan Rodden, a fellow at the conservative Hoover Institution, said that President Obama received 100 percent of the vote in 1,600 of the 165,000 precincts he studied in 2008, but that "virtually all of them were in dense city centers populated overwhelmingly by minorities," and he's "pretty comfortable" that "the Republican candidate simply performed poorly in city centers." Daniel Tokaji at Ohio State's Moritz College of Law told ABC News that Trump is simply wrong: "Voter fraud is extremely uncommon, nowhere near the scale that would change the result of a presidential election in any realistic scenario."

Elections are run mostly by states, and in the 40 states where elected officials oversee federal votes, the relevant official in 25 states is Republican and 15 are Democrats, ABC News notes. When Fox News anchor Bill Hemmer pressed Sam Clovis for evidence of fraud on Tuesday, Clovis said, "trust me, I'm not trying to further this thing," but that "the perception is there" that election fraud is real and "a lot of people still believe that there is voter fraud taking place," dating back to Bush v. Gore in 2000 — an interesting case for Republicans to cite. Watch below. Peter Weber