Despite having control of the most powerful office in the world, President Donald Trump continues to raise questions about the legitimacy of the election’s vote counts.
After months of allegations, Trump called for a major investigation into voter fraud Wednesday, vowing to strengthen voting procedures based on the outcome. The revelation comes less than 24 hours after White House press secretary Sean Spicer stood by the president’s claims, maintaining Trump has long believed he lost the popular vote to Democrat Hillary Clinton because of “widespread” illegal ballots.
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“I think the president has believed that for a while based on studies and information he has,” Spicer said, referencing a 2008 Pew Research study that, he said, showed 14 per cent of people who voted were illegal immigrants.
“There are other studies that were presented to him,” he continued.
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All 50 states have finalized their election results with no reports of widespread fraud. And, if the president’s claims were true, it would mark the most significant election fraud in U.S. history.
The facts
The study – or, more appropriately, studies – Spicer referenced during Tuesday’s press briefing do not appear to support evidence of widespread voter fraud.
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When Spicer referenced a study that showed “14 per cent of people who voted were not citizens,” many believe he was referring to a study published in 2014 in the Monkey Cage, a blog hosted by The Washington Post. Using data from the Cooperative Congressional Election Study, collected between 2008 and 2010, researchers found 14 per cent of non-citizens were registered to vote.
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The study was widely criticized and critiqued by other researchers. In fact, the report now features an editor’s note that reads, “Subsequently, another peer-reviewed article argued that the findings reported in this post (and affiliated article) were biased and that the authors’ data do not provide evidence of non-citizen voting in U.S. elections.”
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When he mentioned the Pew Research, he may have been thinking about a study published in 2012 which found that approximately 24 million voter registrations in the U.S. were no longer valid, roughly 2.75 million people had registered in more than one state, and more than 1.8 million dead people were still registered to vote.
Though the study may give some validity to Trump’s concerns about the number of deceased voters – tweeting Wednesday that the investigation would look into deceased voters, “many for a long time,” who are still registered – the study did not find that the discrepancies led to voter fraud.
David Becker, the primary author of the study, pointed that out when Trump’s campaign raised questions about voter fraud in November.
In response to a tweet by a CNN producer Tuesday, Becker said he is not aware of any Pew Research studies that support findings of voter fraud.
In fact, Trump’s own attorneys dismissed claims of voter fraud in a legal filing responding to Green Party candidate Jill Stein’s demand for a recount in Michigan following the election.
“All available evidence suggests that the 2016 general election was not tainted by fraud or mistake,” read the filing.
What other studies have said about voter fraud
Several other studies point towards a lack of evidence of voter fraud in the U.S.
A 2014 study, published in The Washington Post, found 31 credible cases of impersonation fraud between 2000 and 2014, out of over one billion ballots. A similar study, done in 2012 by Arizona State University, found 10 cases of voter fraud between 2000 and 2012.
In 2012, a Department of Justice unit examining the 2002 and 2004 federal elections found 0.00000013 per cent of ballots cast were fraudulent.
According to an overview of over a dozen voter fraud investigations by New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice, “voter fraud is sufficiently rare that it simply could not and does not happen at the rate even approaching that which would be required to ‘rig’ an election.”
A 2007 Brennan Center report titled “The Truth About Voter Fraud,” cited voter fraud incident rates between 0.00004 percent and 0.0009 percent.
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Federal investigations of voter fraud are rare. A five-year probe initiated by the George W. Bush administration turned up no evidence of voter fraud and ended in resignations and more investigations for the Department of Justice, which enforces federal voting rights laws.
Democrats are now worried Trump’s persistence on the issue will open the door for Republicans to impose restrictions on voting.
“The great political crisis we face is not voter fraud, which barely exists,” Senator Bernie Sanders, who ran against Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination, wrote on Twitter Wednesday. “It’s voter suppression and the denial of voting rights.”
Rep. Elijah Cummings, ranking Democrat on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, said Wednesday his panel has already sent letters to the attorneys general in all 50 states asking for reports of any election irregularities.
Yes, voter fraud does happen, but rarely
There were, however, a few reported cases of voter fraud during the 2016 election.
For example, 11 days before the election, police in Iowa arrested a woman accused of voting twice by casting early-voting ballots at two locations. The Des Moines Register newspaper reported she was a registered Republican who cited concerns the polls were rigged in favour of Clinton.
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“I wasn’t planning on doing it twice, it was spur of the moment,” the woman told Iowa Public Radio.
“The polls are rigged.”
A Texas man was also arrested for attempting to vote twice on election day. According to the Fort Bend County Sheriff’s office, the man claimed he worked for Trump and was testing the security of the polling station.
A Florida woman was accused of tampering with absentee ballots she was opening at the Miami-Dade Elections Department and a Virginia man was also charged with submitting falsified forms while working for a voter-registration campaign. Prosecutors said there was no evidence an illegal vote was actually cast in that case.
— With files from Reuters and The Associated Press
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