A prominent New York Times columnist sharply criticized President Donald Trump's latest pretense for claims of election meddling, accusing the White House of fixating on "a fake problem made up by losers."

In a recent installment of his "Takes" video series on YouTube, liberal NYT columnist Jamelle Bouie addressed the Trump administration's recent push to target "noncitizen voters," including a new demand that California purge the names of suspected noncitizens from its voter rolls ahead of the election. California's government pushed back, arguing there would be no way to inspect the voter rolls in time for Election Day and that attempting to do so would inevitably result in law-abiding voters being removed by mistake. The dispute has turned California's voter rolls into a flash point heading into the midterm elections, with state officials arguing the demanded review cannot be carried out both on time and accurately.

Bouie argued that the line of attack had no merit, accusing the administration of attempting to construct a pretext for delegitimizing the eventual results in California after the midterms. He also went further, forcefully rejecting the notion that noncitizen voting was anything close to a genuine problem, let alone one warranting a massive mobilization by the federal government.

"I think it's actually very reasonable for someone who isn't paying a ton of attention and doesn't know a ton to assume that the U.S. has a problem with non-citizens voting in federal elections, but I'm here to tell you that that's wrong. Just completely and totally wrong," Bouie explained. "Over the last decade, any number of groups, organizations and the like have done detailed studies of non-citizen voting, trying to find out what is the actual amount of non-citizen voting that happens in the United States, and the consistent answer no matter who you ask is that there is effectively none. Statistically equivalent to zero."

He continued: "I use those terms effectively and statistically zero because it's important to remember that in any given election year there are tens of millions of votes being cast; in a presidential election year, those numbers are north of a hundred and fifty 160 million votes. And so when you have that many people voting in that many places, there is bound to be some instance of something, basically anything. The question is whether it's prevalent, whether it's common, whether it happens at a frequency high enough that would justify actions that might disenfranchise completely legal voters and the answer to that question is no; it doesn't. It happens so infrequently that it's effectively the same as it not happening at all."

Bouie also cited a 2016 study from the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonpartisan law and policy institute based at New York University, which found that out of roughly 23.5 million votes cast across 42 jurisdictions, only about 30 instances of noncitizen voting could be identified — a share of the total ballots cast that was ultimately negligible, and far from a trend capable of meaningfully shifting a race.

"My odds right now of being struck by lightning three times in a row, higher than the rate of non-citizen voting, according to [the conservative Heritage Foundation's] data," Bouie added. The citation carried a deliberate edge: the Heritage Foundation is a conservative think tank that maintains one of the most widely cited public databases of U.S. election-fraud cases, and Bouie pointed to its own figures to underscore how close to zero he says the rate sits.