WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump’s press secretary on Tuesday mischaracterized the election results and the findings of a study that purported to show significant voting in the past by non-citizens.
Statements by Sean Spicer and how they compare with the facts:
SPICER: “He won overwhelmingly with 306 electoral votes, the most since any Republican since Reagan.”
THE FACTS: Not the most since Reagan, and not an overwhelming victory by history’s standards. You only have to go back to George H.W. Bush to find a bigger Republican Electoral College winner. Bush captured 426 electoral votes in 1988, or 79 percent, well ahead of Trump with 306 electoral votes, or 57 percent.
Trump actually ended up with 304 electoral votes because of the defection of two electors in December, but he had won enough states to get to 306.
The broader context: Trump’s victory ranked 46th out of the 58 elections since the nation’s founding, far from the “landslide” that Trump himself has often claimed.
Reagan achieved true blowouts, winning 489 electoral votes (91 percent) in 1980 and 525 (97.6 percent) in 1984.
___
SPICER: “I think there’s been studies. There’s one that came out of Pew in 2008 that showed 14 percent of people who voted were noncitizens.”
THE FACTS: First, Spicer mixes up studies. Second, he misrepresents the conclusions.
The Pew study, released in 2012 and based in part on 2008 results, was about outdated or otherwise inaccurate voter registration records, not about votes illicitly cast by noncitizens.
David Becker, an author of that study, said his report never found fraud. Moreover, he tweeted Tuesday that voting integrity in 2016 was “better in this election than ever before.”
The issue of noncitizen voting actually was examined in a 2014 study by two Old Dominion University professors who wrote about their findings in The Washington Post.
They did not conclude, as Spicer said, that more than 14 percent of voters were noncitizens. They said that an estimated 14 percent or more of noncitizens had registered to vote — a much smaller universe of people. Moreover, only “some of these noncitizens voted,” they said.
Their “best guess” was that 6.4 percent of noncitizens voted in 2008 and 2.2 percent in 2010.
Even those modest numbers were sharply disputed by other academics because of the study’s methodology. But even if the study were right, it would not support Spicer’s assertion. Nor does it support Trump’s repeated statements that illicit voting by people in the country illegally cost him a majority of the popular vote in November.
The broader context: No evidence of significant voter fraud surfaced from the 2016 election, despite plenty of digging.
___
Associated Press writer Stephen Ohlemacher contributed to this report.
Copyright 2017 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Baghdad Sean’s response:
'WE won’t let validated facts negate our alternative facts that’ve been vetted by the Cheeto-in-Chief…
"You only have to go back to George H.W. Bush to find a bigger Republican Electoral College winner. "
I don’t know why fact checkers would let the dodge of focusing only on Republican presidents count. This is obviously an effort to obscure Trump’s historically middling EC result, and is as valid as saying that Trump got more EC votes than 300 million Americans!
The only winning candidate who got fewer EC votes than Trump was George W. Bush, twice. But of the last 10 presidential elections, Reagan (twice), HW Bush (once), Clinton (twice) and Obama (twice) have had more EC votes than Trump.
In short, of the past 10 presidential elections, Trump’s result comes in 8th. And he lost the popular vote. That is an accurate portrayal of the election’s result, and fact checking should be about presenting the right portrayal as opposed to determining if the frame the speaker used was technically false.
The AP–FALSE NEWS!!!11!!1! Ban them from the press corp! Ban them from the White House! Investigate them! Send in the Feds!
I have developed an addiction for the daily lie from Vanilla Spice at the White House Presser, it is messing up my schedule…