WASHINGTON
President-elect Donald Trump’s team strove Monday to back up his claim of vote fraud, though they produced no evidence and two reports they did cite were from years ago and did not point to fraud even then.
Trump set off the brouhaha by charging Sunday that millions of people had voted illegally and deprived him of a popular-vote victory, and also that there was unspecified vote fraud in three states he lost: California, New Hampshire and Virginia.
“I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally,” Trump said in one tweet.
November 28, 2016 ">
As independent fact-checkers said there was no evidence of either charge, Trump spokesman Jason Miller referred to two reports in the past.
“So all these are studies and examples of where there have been issues of both voter fraud and illegal immigrants voting,” Miller told reporters.
One was a Washington Post story from 2014 about whether voting by noncitizens could decide control of the Senate. But those results were subsequently challenged.
The other was a Pew Charitable Trust report from 2012 that found that state voter registration lists were not up-to-date, largely because of poor record keeping. It found that 2.75 million people at that time were registered in more than one state, that 1.8 million names on state voter registrations were for dead people and that 1 out of every 8 voter registrations was either invalid or “significantly inaccurate.”
But the primary author of the Pew study said fraud was not a factor.
“They are misinterpreting” with regard to any finding of fraud, said David Becker, who at the time was the director of Pew’s elections program. “I oversaw the entire report, start to finish. There was not a finding of fraud whatsoever.”
Becker, now the executive director for the Center for Election Innovation and Research, said the report looked into inefficiencies of the voter registration system that led to out-of-date records remaining on the lists.
“These were not results from fraud or any intentional act,” he said, but the result of not “keeping up with people as they move and some cases when they die.”
Myrna Perez, director of voting rights and elections project at Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of law, said that numbers like 2.75 million people being registered to vote in two states might sound like fraud. But it doesn’t mean people are voting in two states. It just means they moved between elections and haven’t changed, or been notified to change, their former registrations.
“There has been no evidence produced to substantiate a claim like that,” White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said Monday before referring reporters to the Trump transition team.
November 28, 2016