Mark Joseph Stern, in Slate, dismisses the idea that there could possibly exist serious levels of voting fraud in this country, and sounds the left’s La patrie est en danger! alarm over imminent nefarious Republican attempts “to limit voting rights.”

On Sunday night, the president-elect of the United States declared that more than 2 million fraudulent votes had been cast in the election that elevated him to the presidency. “I won the popular vote,” Donald Trump tweeted in an angry response to Jill Stein’s swing state recount, “if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.” Some pundits once again insisted that this demonstrably false assertion was “just a distraction” to divert our attention from the real crises and scandals. That’s nonsense. One of the key crises facing the United States today is the Republican-led assault on voting rights. And whether or not he intended to, Trump just helped to lay the groundwork for a coming crackdown on suffrage across the country.

The Trump Administration should prioritize efforts to prove him right.

Nearly every major city in this country is controlled by a democrat party machine which systematically exchanges patronage (and other things) for votes.

In thousands and thousands of voting precincts, you can find on election day professional agents of the democrat party delivering voters to the polls. In minority neighborhoods across the country, you can find ministers receiving “walking around money” for delivering their congregations to the polls. If I tried, I would have no difficulty finding polling places in my own native state where small sums of cash routinely change hands in exchange for voters pulling the democrat party lever. In 2015, 141 US counties had more voters than living eligible residents.

Donald Trump’s famous tweet may have been characteristically guilty of hyperbole, but Trump was right to point to a flagrant and brazen pattern of voting fraud that is widely institutionalized and ignored by law enforcement and the election authorities in this country. The United States is not a banana republic. There should be no exchanges of cash for votes, no deceased people on the voting rolls, no organized hunt and drag operations, and definitely no inner city residents voting “a few times.”

The Trump Administration should create a special Justice Department division with the sole mission of tracking down and prosecuting election fraud abuses, and the Trump Administration should introduce in Congress a comprehensive bill to establish strict and uniform national voter identification requirements. That would put an end, once and for all, to the ability of urban political machines to manufacture votes in unlimited quantity as required.