Tom Steyer is pushing a dubious claim that 100,000 African-American voters were kept from the polls in Wisconsin in 2016 by voter-suppression efforts.
The California billionaire and Democratic presidential candidate is tying his claim to the fact that President Donald Trump won Wisconsin by a relatively thin margin, implying that if the alleged voter suppression had not happened, Hillary Clinton would have won the state’s 10 Electoral College votes. Steyer is spreading this claim despite repeated refutations from fact-checking sites and media outlets.
“We really do have to make it easy to vote and get rid of voter suppression,” he said on the campaign trail last week in New York City.
“The voter-suppression part in the United States—people think it can’t be that bad, but it is. It’s deliberate, it’s organized, it’s very effective, and it’s, it makes a huge difference. And the numbers I give on that are simple: 100,000 African Americans prevented in 2016 from voting in Wisconsin. Trump won Wisconsin by 22,000 votes. It really matters. It’s systematic.” – READ MORE