Donald Trump’s ego is so bruised by losing the popular vote in the election (now by more than 2.2 million votes) that he took to Twitter to peddle a series of blatant lies about voter fraud.
Tweeted Trump:
“In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally…It would have been much easier for me to win the so-called popular vote than the Electoral College in that I would only campaign in 3 or 4-states instead of the 15 states that I visited. I would have won even more easily and convincingly (but smaller states are forgotten)!…Serious voter fraud in Virginia, New Hampshire and California – so why isn’t the media reporting on this? Serious bias – big problem!”
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/802972944532209664
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/802973848022847489
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/802975667197386752
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/803033642545115140?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
Trump’s assertions are false.
Election law experts quickly rejected Trump’s claims as farfetched.
“There’s no reason to believe this is true,” said Rick Hasen, a professor specializing in election law at the University of California, Irvine. “The level of fraud in US elections is quite low.”
Hasen added, “The problem of non-citizen voting is quite small — like we’re talking claims in the dozens, we’re not talking voting in the millions, or the thousands, or even the hundreds.”
David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research and a former senior trial attorney in the Voting Section of the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division, agreed that widespread fraud was unlikely.
“We know historically that this almost never happens,” he said. “You’re more likely to get eaten by a shark that simultaneously gets hit by lightning than to find a non-citizen voting.”
And Snopes chalks Trump’s claim up to the “fake news” factory:
On 14 November 2016 — not even a week after the results of the 2016 presidential election were announced — our inbox exploded with messages requesting that we investigate the claim that more than three million votes were cast by “illegal immigrants” or “illegal aliens” (non-citizens). In some cases it was also claimed that these three million voters are “under investigation” for fraud, or that three million votes for Hillary Clinton will be “voided” because they were illegal. Under federal law, non-citizens cannot vote in a presidential election.
The first thing we found was that while no such claim has been reported in the mainstream media, it has been repeated on scores of partisan, right-leaning web sites since the 8 November election under the guise of “news.”
Clinton’s deputy communications director Christina Reynolds fired back:
Winning the electoral college won him the presidency, so Trump's excuses on why he lost the popular vote by millions are just small and sad.
— Christina Reynolds (@creynoldsnc) November 28, 2016
To my knowledge, the very very rare cases of people voting illegally found so far were Trump voters. https://t.co/Bc7AEFEFbU
— Christina Reynolds (@creynoldsnc) November 28, 2016
And the argument that he would have just campaigned in a few places and won is silly–HRC would have done the same.
— Christina Reynolds (@creynoldsnc) November 28, 2016
And of course, none of that matters. We have the system we have–HRC got more votes. Trump got more electoral votes and will be president.
— Christina Reynolds (@creynoldsnc) November 28, 2016
Apparently a president who will continue to tell lies via Twitter to make his own news and distract from his very large problems.
— Christina Reynolds (@creynoldsnc) November 28, 2016
Glad to see most of the media calling this what it is–a baseless lie. And hope it doesn't stop them from covering his conflicts of interest
— Christina Reynolds (@creynoldsnc) November 28, 2016
