Fact-Checking Trump's Repeated Unsubstantiated Voter Fraud Claim

President Donald Trump and the White House are reiterating the unsubstantiated assertion that millions of people illegally cast ballots in the 2016 presidential election -- a claim Trump first made after the election without presenting evidence.

This afternoon, White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer said President Trump "does believe that" millions of illegal votes were cast in the presidential election -- citing "studies and information" that were presented to him as the basis of this belief. Spicer said "maybe we will" investigate the claimed fraud.

When Trump made the assertion of "serious" voter fraud in three states late November, officials there said was no evidence to that effect. And the authors of studies that a Trump spokesman cited as evidence disputed the characterization.

During a meeting with Congressional leadership on Monday, Trump said "3 to 5 million illegals" voted, according to two Democratic aides.

"We are not aware of any evidence that supports the voter fraud claims made by President Trump, but we are open to learning more about the Administration’s concerns," the National Association of Secretaries of State said today in a statement. "In the lead up to the November 2016 election, secretaries of state expressed their confidence in the systemic integrity of our election process as a bipartisan group, and they stand behind that statement today.”

Former Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by 2.9 million ballots -- though President Trump won the Electoral College with 304 electoral votes (two electors defected).

Academic experts and election officials both say there was no evidence of any widespread voter fraud in the 2016 presidential race.

An analysis by the Washington Post found only four instances of attempted voter fraud in the 2016 election. Two Trump voters in Iowa and Texas tried to vote twice but were caught. An Illinois voter tried to vote for her dead husband. And a poll worker in Florida was caught filling in the bubble for a mayoral election on an absentee ballot. There were three other instances that were under investigation, the Post said.

Sean Spicer defended Trump's beliefs by citing an academic study. "There’s one that came out of Pew in 2008 that showed 14 percent of people who voted were non-citizens," he said.

It's true there was a Pew Charitable Trusts study released in 2012 -- not 2008 -- that focused on voter registration irregularities, not actual voter fraud. That study found that approximately 24 million voter registrations were invalid or significantly inaccurate, more than 1.8 million deceased individuals were listed as voters and approximately 2.75 million people had registrations in more than one state. But the study's author, David Becker, wrote on Twitter that researchers found “no evidence that voter fraud resulted” from the irregularities on the voter registration books.

But the statistic Spicer cited comes from a report from two Old Dominion University professors in a 2014 Electoral Studies article, not from Pew. Spicer misrepresented that statistic: the study claimed 14 percent of non-citizens thought they were registered to vote -- not that they had actually cast ballots in the election. The study, written by professors Jesse Richman and David Earnest, found that at most 6.4 percent of non-citizens may have voted. But the study’s methodology –- using data from an online survey -- has faced broad criticism from the academic community.

Richman has told ABC News that his findings have been “taken out of context” and should not be used “to make an unsupported claim concerning massive vote fraud.” "I don’t know if Trump has read our statements to try to set the record straight. If he has, he’s deliberately trying to mischaracterize what our study shows," Richman told ABC News today.

"Did the non-citizen vote lead to Trump’s popular vote loss? No. Our data doesn’t support that," he told ABC News.

Experts don't claim that voter fraud is impossible or never happens. But it is very rare -- in most instances only concerning individual ballots.

"The scale he's talking about is just simply absurd," Lorraine Minnite, a professor at Rutgers who specializes in voter fraud research, told ABC News today. "There have been a handful of cases where people who are not citizens have made it onto the voter rolls for various reasons ... but the idea that 3 to 5 million illegal voters successfully cast ballots that were counted in this election is just beyond belief."

The Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law -- which led Election Protection, the nation’s largest non-partisan voter protection program -- called Trump’s fraud claims “bombastic” and “contrary to the evidence amassed this election cycle" when he first made them in November.

Even True the Vote -- a controversial advocacy group that mines for examples of voter fraud -- claimed they have discovered only 1,264 "voter crime" convictions in the last two decades, the result of a year of exhaustive research of state and local records.

These "voter crime" convictions weren’t exclusively voter fraud, but also included voter intimidation, vote buying and registration fraud.. And the "vast majority" of these crimes happened in state and local elections, according to True the Vote spokesman Logan Churchwell. Those 1,264 vote crimes are out of over a billion votes cast.

Let's block ads! (Why?)

from ABC News: Politics http://ift.tt/2k0YeAY

Tweet