Thread: President Donald Trump Says He Will Ask for ‘Major Investigation’ Into Voter Fraud

President Donald Trump Says He Will Ask for ‘Major Investigation’ Into Debunked Allegations of Voter Fraud

by Daniella Silva
Jan 25 2017, 10:47 am ET

President Donald Trump continued to perpetuate unsubstantiated and debunked claims of election irregularities Wednesday morning by promising a "major investigation" into what he described as "voter fraud."

The announcement comes after questions over Trump's repetition of a widely disproved claim that millions of "illegal" votes cost him the popular vote in the presidential election.

Trump tweeted Wednesday morning that he would ask for an investigation into voter fraud, including alleged votes by undocumented immigrants, people who are allegedly registered to vote in more than one state and "those registered to vote who are dead (and many for a long time)."

The president said that depending on the results of the investigation, he would call for "strengthening up voting procedures!"

Trump's tweets come after the White House doubled down on Tuesday that the president believed the debunked claim that millions of people voted illegally, costing him the popular vote.

Democratic-nominee Hillary Clinton beat Trump by nearly 3 million in the popular vote but did not secure the number of electoral college votes necessary for a victory.

"The President does believe that," White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer told reporters on Tuesday, just one day after pledging to tell the public "the facts as I know them."

"He's stated that before, I think he has stated his concerns of voter fraud and people voting illegally during the campaign and continues to maintain that belief based on studies and evidence people have presented to him," he said.

Two sources told NBC News that Trump spent the first ten minutes of a bipartisan meeting with congressional leaders at the White House on Monday talking about the campaign and repeating the allegation that 3 to 5 million people voted illegally.

Those figures appear to come from two different studies, but authors of both have come forward to say that their studies do not support theories of massive voter fraud.

A 2012 Pew report found millions of invalid voter registrations due to people moving or dying, but the report's author, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research David Becker, said in late November that the study found no evidence of voter fraud.

"We found millions of out of date registration records due to people moving or dying, but found no evidence that voter fraud resulted," he said.

In fact, Trump's examples in his Wednesday morning tweets all relate to voter registration issues, not fraudulent votes.

A second study was a highly criticized work by Old Dominion University professors who found 14 percent of non-citizens said saying they were registered to vote. The study was based on a sample of a few hundred respondents.

One of the authors said before the presidential election that Trump's campaign was exaggerating the study's findings.

"Both sides of the debate on non-citizen voting have exaggerated our findings concerning non-citizen representation," political scientist Jesse Richman wrote.

"There are many on the left side of that debate who have relentlessly sought to discredit our results and want to push the level of estimated non-citizen participation to zero. On the right there has been a tendency to misread our results as proof of massive voter fraud, which we don't think they are. Our focus has been on the data, rather than the politics."

The debunked claim was furthered by conspiracy theorist Alex Jones on his website Infowars.

But Trump's comments contradict what his own lawyers argued in December, while objecting to Green Party candidate Jill Stein's Midwestern recount efforts. At the time, his legal team said in filings objecting to Stein's recount efforts that there was no evidence of voter fraud in the presidential election.

"All available evidence suggests that the 2016 general election was not tainted by fraud or mistake," Trump's legal team said in their objection to the Michigan recount.

Heather Gerken, a professor of law at Yale University and expert on election law, told NBC News it was "completely natural" to have people on voter rolls in two states or for some people to remain on the voter rolls after they have died and stressed this did not equate to actual fraudulent voting.

"To equate that with voter fraud is irresponsible," she said. "They're completely different issues."

Gerken added that people moving to a different state or grieving loved ones not thinking to call election officials were often the cause of such voter registration issues.

She added that there was no evidence at all to support claims of mass voting fraud in last year's election — and the kind of voter fraud Trump claims would require highly coordinated nationwide efforts.

"You would have to imagine a massive conspiracy crossing many states to steal a federal election," she said.

Michael Waldman, president of the non-partisan policy institute The Brennan Center for Justice, said in statement Wednesday morning that "There is no evidence of massive voter fraud — none."

"The notion that millions of people voted illegally two months ago, and nobody noticed, is preposterous on its face," he said in the statement.

On Wednesday morning, Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted responded to Trump, tweeting that his state conducted a review four year's ago and was already conducting a state-wide review of the 2016 election.

"Easy to vote, hard to cheat," Husted said in the tweet.

Trump's comments have been criticized by officials on both sides of the aisle, with GOP Senator Lindsey Graham pleading with Trump to stop repeating the claim.

"To continue to suggest that the 2016 election was conducted in a fashion that millions of people voted illegally undermines faith in our democracy," Graham said.

And Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., said on MSNBC's Morning Joe on Wednesday that there was "no evidence" to back up Trump's claims.

"I think that those who allege that have to come up with some substantiation of the claim," he added.

Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md., told MSNBC that the Oversight the House's Committee on Oversight and Government Reform was sending a letter on Wednesday to 50 attorney generals all over the county "who have basically said that there is no real voter fraud."

"The thing that I worry about with this argument about voter fraud is it gives the Republicans and others another tool and another reason to justify to the public of denying people the right to vote," he said.

The National Association of Secretaries of State, which includes many Republicans, also took issue with Trump's claim.

"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 group said in a statement released yesterday. "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."

http://www.nbcnews.com/politics/poli...ations-n711956

Trump calls for 'major investigation' into voter fraud

By Dan Merica, Eric Bradner and Theodore Schleifer, CNN
Updated 11:33 AM ET, Wed January 25, 2017

(CNN)President Donald Trump called on Wednesday for "a major investigation" into voter fraud, following through with baseless claims he has made since November's election alleging millions of illegal votes during the general election without citing any evidence.

"I will be asking for a major investigation into VOTER FRAUD, including those registered to vote in two states, those who are illegal and ... even, those registered to vote who are dead (and many for a long time). Depending on results, we will strengthen up voting procedures!" Trump wrote in two consecutive tweets.

Trump's comments on voter fraud came Monday during a meeting with congressional leaders, where he reiterated an unsubstantiated claim that 3-5 million illegal votes cost him the popular vote, according to two sources familiar with the meeting.

On Tuesday, Trump's press secretary Sean Spicer vigorously defended Trump's statement about illegal voters, though neither Trump nor his surrogates could provide evidence that any substantial illegal voting had occurred or influence the popular vote.

Trump faced widespread criticism for his remarks, including from some congressional leaders in his own party, and Democrats have alleged that Republican efforts in the name of fighting voter fraud has the effect of preventing or delaying legal voters who traditionally back Democratic candidates.

Ohio's secretary of state replied to Trump's Tweet on Wednesday, saying his office already investigated claims of voter fraud.

"I responded ... for Ohioans, to let them know we already have an investigation, or review as we call it, underway," Jon Husted, a Republican, told CNN's Carol Costello Wednesday. "In the past ... we found less than a thousand cases of voter irregularity, less than a couple hundred cases of voter fraud, and zero cases of voter suppression."

Considering Ohio is home to about 7 million registered voters, these cases constitute "a small number," Husted said.

The reviews, which take place every two years, are best conducted at the state level, Husted said.

"I don't think that federal involvement is important in this particular matter, because the states run the elections," Husted said. "We don't want federal involvement in our elections, we want to keep this in the hands of the states -- that's where it should be."

Former Democratic National Committee chair Rep. Debbie-Wasserman Schultz issued a harsh condemnation of Trump's call for an investigation, telling CNN's "New Day" that the tweet's message was "deeply disturbing."

"He seems to be questioning the legitimacy of his own election, all while, for the last couple of months, touting how legitimate and huge his election was and historic it is. It can't be both," she said.

"What is the most deeply disturbing about his penchant for lying is -- if he is willing to lie about the trivial, like crowd size, or the significant, like voter fraud, then what happens if -- God forbid -- we go to war and we have our troops lives on the line and there are causalities? Is he going to send Sean Spicer out to lie about the causalities that have taken place? Are our allies going to be able to trust us?"

And former senior adviser to former President Barack Obama David Axelrod respond on CNN Wednesday by saying, "It becomes an impetus for those who want to further erode voter protection for people who legitimately want to vote and are facing a series of barriers."

When pushed by the media about whether Trump will call for an investigation into the matter, Spicer said, "maybe we will," adding later that Trump believes in voter fraud based on "studies and information he has."

"The President does believe that, I think he's stated that before, and stated his concern of voter fraud and people voting illegally during the campaign and continues to maintain that belief based on studies and evidence people have brought to him," Spicer said at Wednesday's press briefing.

Trump lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton by nearly 3 million votes in November, but won the Electoral College and thus the presidency. Trump, however, has seemingly been fixated on the popular vote, mentioning voter fraud in regards to his popular vote loss a number of times since November.

Spicer did not say specifically which studies the President was using to support his claim of 3 to 5 million illegally cast votes, but a 2014 study by Jesse Richman and David Earnest found more than 14% of non-citizens in 2008 and 2010 "indicated that they were registered to vote." Only US citizens can vote in federal elections.

However, Brian Schaffner, a political scientist at the University of Massachusetts, told CNN on Tuesday that his study that is apparently being cited by the White House was misinterpreted and did not support the administration's claims.

A number of studies have also found no evidence of widespread voter fraud.

The Truth About Voter Fraud, a report written by experts at The Brennan Center for Justice, found voter fraud rates were between 0.00004% and 0.0009%.

Trump himself -- through his lawyers -- have also argued that there was no evidence of voter fraud in the 2016 election. In a court filing objecting to Green Party candidate Jill Stein's Michigan recount petition, lawyers for the president wrote, "All available evidence suggests that the 2016 general election was not tainted by fraud or mistake."

Legal issues on voter rolls

Judges have identified examples of systemic efforts to distort the voter rolls in recent years.

But those efforts hurt traditionally Democratic voters and help Republicans.

In North Carolina, a federal appeals court wrote in 2016 that -- after receiving data on the use of voting practices by race -- the Republican-controlled state legislature enacted a series of laws designed to suppress African-American turnout with "almost surgical precision."

The state required voters to present forms of identification disproportionately used by white people. It cut back on early voting, eliminated same-day voter registration and preregistration for voters under 18, and it eliminated Sunday voting -- with the state even arguing in court that "counties with Sunday voting in 2014 were disproportionately black" and "disproportionately Democratic."

US Circuit Judge Diana Motz wrote in July 2016, in a ruling striking down North Carolina's, that the laws were "enacted with racially discriminatory intent."

"The General Assembly enacted them in the immediate aftermath of unprecedented African American voter participation in a state with a troubled racial history and racially polarized voting," Motz wrote.

Still, many North Carolina counties worked around Motz's ruling. Guilford, the state's third-largest county, opened just one polling place for the first week of early voting. Charlotte's Mecklenburg County chopped its early voting locations from 22 when early voting began in 2012 to 10 in 2016, with voters reporting waiting in line for three hours.

Democrats also believe that new voter ID laws played a role in lowering turnout in other states -- particularly Wisconsin, where Hillary Clinton narrowly lost to Trump. Turnout there dropped nearly four points from 2012, despite record early voting numbers.

CNN's Eleanor Mueller contributed to this report.

http://www.cnn.com/2017/01/25/politi...aud/index.html

Good. Have the investigation and settle this once and for all. The integrity of our voting system should be high priority imo.

California First.

New York Second.

You'll find what you're looking for. I thought it was really cool how he baited the demand for an investigation from the media. Multiple requests in the press conference, multiple jabbering on the talk shows suggesting he should do this, and then of course Bill O'Reilly of the Factor made the formal call for an investigation last night.

So of course, first thing this morning, Trump accommodates ordering a federal investigation of illegal voting.

Rush Limbaugh just talked about this and that Jeff Sessions will lead the investigation.

It was all calculated, all set-up. The CORRUPT MEDIA has no idea who they're dealing with. This play was a beautiful thing to watch.

And of course as we all know, the feds will find massive illegal voting in California and New York by illegal aliens and other non-citizens plus other types of fraudulent voter registrations and voter fraud.

Texas is infested with illegal aliens...add Texas to the list as well as Florida

Yeah, but based on the outcomes of the 2016 elections, I don't think that many voted. The huge disparity that points to illegal voting is in California and New York, especially California, where a lot of people are Republican and Independent. The change in this demographic to Democrat has been during thse high periods of immigration, people who would be eligible to vote. Same with New York.

Yes he needs an investigation into illegal alien voter fraud specially in California.

President Trump also needs to prosecute those in government who enabled massive illegal alien voting