Three million people voted illegally, says Donald. If it weren’t for them, he would have won the vote.

How many polling places are there in America? Hard to pin down, like a lot of the large statistics about America. According to the Federal Election Assistance Commission (https://www.eac.gov/assets/1/AssetManager/2004%20EAVS%20Chapter%2013.pdf), there were 185,994 electoral precincts in 2004 (latest I could find, but the number changes slowly as a result of population growth). Precincts aren’t the same as polling places, and nationwide there are an average of 2.22 precincts represented by each polling place. This works out to 83,781 polling places in America, but given the uncertainties in the numbers, and my goal to explain a concept and not answer a math question, let’s go with 100,000 polling places in America.

Trump and his conways claim that 3,000,000 people voted illegally in 2016, all of them for Hillary Clinton; this would neatly wipe out Trump’s loss of the popular vote.

Trump is claiming that an average of thirty bogus voters showed up at each and every polling place in America, and implies that every one of them is undocumented.

Thirty voters. At 100,000 polling places. And nobody noticed.

That assumes an even distribution, a horrendously evil yet competent plan that organized three million undocumented aliens to be bussed or helicoptered or droned or whatever, in platoons of 30, to every polling place in America.

And oh by the way, the large majority of those election systems are run by Republicans.

So maybe they decided not to risk the scam at the 85% of the Republican-run polling places, and instead concentrated on the “safe” polling places. Top of my head, that would work out to about 210 bogus voters at each of the remaining polling places.

The EAC estimates an average registration per polling place of 2,648, and generally about half as many show up to vote. According to Trump, then, each involved polling place saw a jump of 20% in the number of ballots submitted.

And nobody noticed. Anywhere.

I predict a red-hot market in bridge futures among Trumpists.