What did Donald Trump do today?

He sued California as a pretext to declaring election results he doesn't like invalid.

Two days ago, the Trump DOJ sent California election officials a list of 20,000 voters it claimed, without evidence, were noncitizens, It demanded that any mail-in ballots cast by those voters be segregated and not counted.

The list was sent on a flash drive with a password on a sticky note attached to it. (For reasons that should be obvious to anyone who has worked in an office in the last 20 years, or paid attention to the US government's own warnings about cybersecurity, nobody in California's government was dumb enough to plug the flash drive into a computer.)

Today, moments after the DOJ's self-imposed 48-hour deadline for compliance expired, the Trump administration sued California, asking a judge to force the state to block the counting of ballots cast by the voters it was targeting. One election law expert said that the "frivolous" legal filing made it seem as though "the sole purpose of this is to set the stage for false claims about elections."

As California officials pointed out, Trump has forced the DOJ to make these kinds of claims before, to (literally) zero effect. The Trump administration recently presented Nevada with a list of 16,000 supposed noncitizens on its voting rolls. The state investigated and found that every single voter on the list was a citizen and eligible to vote legally. 

Under the United States Constitution, states—not the federal government—administer elections. There is no master list of American citizens eligible to vote, and courts have struck down Trump's efforts to create what would be, at best, a shoddy and error-ridden imitation of such a list. As plaintiffs in those suits have noted, sowing chaos and doubt about the legitimacy of elections while threatening legitimate voters in states that elect Trump opponents is in his interests. 

For obvious reasons, voter fraud is unbelievably rare, quite literally one of the least commonly committed crimes on the books. One way of looking at it is that Donald Trump has personally been convicted of more felonies than there are hypothetical cases of mail voting fraud in any major election year going back twenty years, according to exhaustive studies done by the Brookings Institute and the ultraconservative Heritage Foundation.

Facts aside, Trump has a long history of making preposterous claims about noncitizens voting. After winning the 2016 election but losing in the popular vote to Hillary Clinton by three million votes, Trump insisted that the whole margin was due to 3-5 million "illegal" votes, all cast for Clinton. 

Needless to say, this is a lie, presumably one he told as a way of emotional self-soothing over losing in any kind of popularity contest to Clinton. Trump has never explained how he knew about the supposed plot to rig an election he won anyway, or how he knew all those "illegal" votes were for Clinton, or why a conspiracy involving five million participants couldn't have been organized well enough to distribute itself better among swing states, or the name of a single noncitizen voter in that election.

In fact, Trump has never committed to honoring the will of the American people free and fair elections where he doesn't like the results, and he's repeatedly said so in advance of the elections. The difference is that this time, he is starting the frivolous legal challenges to them ahead of the election itself.
 

Why does this matter?

• Nobody—not even Donald Trump—believes this is about keeping noncitizens from voting. 

• There's only one reason why an unpopular politician who claims he's allowed to be a dictator would try to undermine faith in elections.