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.
— Alex Padilla (@AlexPadilla4CA) November 28, 2016
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.
We are getting attacked for participating in a recount that we didn’t ask for by the man who won election but thinks there was massive fraud
— Marc E. Elias (@marceelias) November 28, 2016
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.
Vote count numbers in the article are wrong. Trump EC count more like 290, not 232. Popular vote margin for HRC now > 2 million.
If this surprises anyone anymore they would either need to be brain dead or have been living in a cave off the grid.
George Lakoff talks about how conservatives love for the “Strict Father” model of politics.
Yet when these alt-right nutters come in, it seems like the obvious missing ingredient is adult supervision. So we have the Nurturing Father, the Strict Father, and now the Missing Father model of governing. Can a Man Baby govern?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6iZEiIp7YMPar for he course: Know-Nuthin’ faux-news sites dog-whistling to a thin-skinned, ignorant, megalomaniac.
So, Trump refuses the daily intelligence briefings from the professionals in the U.S. intelligence services (because, presumably, he either does not think they are accurate, he already knows more than they do, or he realizes he won’t understand or won’t be able to focus for the entire briefing), yet he accepts and repeats as fact conspiracy theories and plain lies from Infowars and other right-wing and alt-right websites and groups. Ladies and gentlemen, the President-elect of the United States. Embarrassing. Sad.