As the White House’s anti-fraud task force struggled with its principal task, Team Trump last week turned to a new idea: crowdsourcing. Under the Republican administration’s latest gambit, Americans who uncover and report cases of fraud will be eligible for cash rewards.

Donald Trump specifically said at an Oval Office announcement that “people will make millions of dollars by turning others in.”

That’s an extraordinarily unlikely scenario, although the fact that the president was turning to regular people to help uncover evidence seems effectively like an admission that the task force has fallen short of success. Oddly enough, a week later, Trump, frustrated that his own team hasn’t found evidence of systemic voter fraud either, rolled out another crowdsourcing plan.

On Monday afternoon, he published an item to his social media platform that read in its entirety, “Anybody reporting Voter Fraud in the past Elections, or the upcoming 2026 Midterm Election, will be paid $1,000,000 upon the arrest and conviction of those that created the Fraud! Thank you for your attention to this matter.”

During a brief Q&A with reporters, the president stopped whining about Barack Obama’s Cheesecake Factory joke long enough to reiterate his support for the idea.

“I’m also going to be issuing $1 million bonus or reward, or whatever you want to call it, for anybody that reports voter fraud, leading to the arrest and conviction of somebody,” Trump said. “We’re giving that person $1 million.”

Some skepticism is in order. It’s not at all clear whether this new initiative exists in reality. The New York Times reported, “The White House did not immediately respond to questions about where the money would come from for the ostensible rewards or how Americans are supposed to report fraud accusations.”

I guess it’s possible that Trump might agree to cut checks with his own money (he made at least $2.2 billion last year, so he could afford it), but the president isn’t known for easily parting with cash. That means he’d have to get the money from somewhere else, and to date, Congress hasn’t appropriated any such funds. He would also have to create some kind of mechanism for reporting allegations of fraud, which does not currently exist.

The project struck me as interesting, though, because of the motivation behind the apparent scheme. As a factual matter, voter fraud in American elections is exceedingly rare; and the U.S. system is both strong and secure, even if Trump and other Republican conspiracy theorists have spent many years desperately trying to convince the public there is a national scourge tearing at the very fabric of our democracy.

The offer of $1 million payouts is notable, in other words, because it’s the latest in a series of moves intended to undermine public confidence in elections by pointing to an imaginary crisis.

Richard Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, and an election law expert, told The Washington Sun that the White House’s latest move is “part of a larger project on the part of Donald Trump to generate distrust of the election system by touting election fraud as some kind of problem.”

If recent history is any guide, these efforts are likely to get worse in the coming days and weeks.

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