Infowars Pushed Undocumented Voters Myth Trump Is Embracing

Radio host Alex Jones discusses Sen. Rand Paul's views on vaccination in a video uploaded to YouTube Feb. 3, 2015.
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Donald Trump’s campaign has yet to provide any evidence for the President-elect’s new claim that “millions” of votes cast by undocumented immigrants cost him the popular vote.

While elections officials and fact-checking websites have adamantly denied that any such widespread voter fraud occurred, one national news site has pushed this myth: conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’ Infowars.

A widely-shared November 14 article from the site that alleged that “Trump may have won the popular vote” claims that “more than three million” votes were cast by non-citizens. As PolitiFact documented, the story is based off tweets from Gregg Phillips, a GOP operative who claims to be the founder of VoteStand.com, a voter fraud reporting app. It also cites a report from VoteFraud.org, though no such report exists.

Phillips told PolitiFact he was still analyzing and verifying data and refused to offer any additional information about how he arrived at the three million figure.

Elections experts have concluded that there is almost no evidence for this sort of fraud, and a 2007 report from the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law found that in the few recorded examples in which undocumented immigrants registered or voted, investigators concluded “that they were likely not aware that doing so was improper.”

Trump currently trails Hillary Clinton in the popular vote by over 2 million votes, but he won the electoral college with 290 votes to Clinton’s 232.

In one of the many tweets the President-elect sent out Sunday, he claimed that his popular vote loss was the result of “serious voter fraud” in Virginia, New Hampshire and California—all states that Clinton won.

California Secretary of State Alex Padilla called Trump’s allegations “absurd” and “inappropriate” in a statement posted to his Twitter account on Sunday.

The Clinton campaign confirmed over the weekend that it would join a recount effort pushed by Green Party nominee Jill Stein in Wisconsin. Stein said she will also move forward with recounts in Michigan and Pennsylvania, and Clinton campaign attorney Marc Elias said the former Democratic nominee is considering joining those efforts.

In a tweet, Elias knocked Trump for challenging the legitimacy of an election he actually won.

Trump previously pushed the Infowars conspiracy that a shadowy cabal of global elites was conspiring to elect Clinton, and praised Jones, a 9/11 and Sandy Hook truther, for his “amazing” reputation.”

Correction: The original post accidentally listed both Trump and Clinton’s electoral college vote count as 232.

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