Experts blast Trump over baseless claim of voter fraud
WASHINGTON — President-elect Donald Trump said Sunday that he had fallen short in the popular vote in the general election only because millions of people had voted illegally, leveling the baseless claim as part of a daylong storm of Twitter posts voicing anger about a three-state recount push.
“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,” Trump wrote.
The series of posts came one day after Hillary Clinton’s campaign said it would participate
in a recount effort being undertaken in Wisconsin, and potentially in similar drives in Michigan and Pennsylvania, by Jill Stein, who was the Green Party candidate. Trump’s statements revived claims he made during the campaign about a rigged and corrupt system.
Claims of wide-scale voter fraud have been advanced for years by Republicans, though virtually no evidence of such improprieties has been discovered — especially on the scale of “millions” that Trump claimed. Late Sunday, again without providing evidence, he referred in a Twitter post to “serious voter fraud in Virginia, New Hampshire and California.”
Alex Padilla, California’s secretary of state, scoffed as Trump’s assertion.
“His unsubstantiated allegations of voter fraud in California and elsewhere are absurd,” he said in a statement Sunday. “His reckless tweets are inappropriate and unbecoming of a president-elect.”
Kim Alexander, president of the nonpartisan California Voter Foundation, a nonprofit promoting the responsible use of elections technology, said she had no idea what Trump based his fraud assertion on, but added: “I can tell you that California has the most robust voting technology of any state in the country.”
As for the possibility of scores of noncitizens casting votes — a notion that has gained some currency among conservatives — “We know historically that this almost never happens,” David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research, told Politico.
“You’re more likely to get eaten by a shark that simultaneously gets hit by lightning than to find a noncitizen voting,” he said.
But Harmeet Dhillon, a California Committeewoman for the Republican National Committee, defended Trump’s fraud claim, even as she acknowledged she was unable to quantify the extent of the problem.
“There have been many episodes of voter fraud and lack of ballot integrity in California,” Dhillon said, resulting from what she described as a nonsecure secretary of state website and poor verification processes at the county level. “It’s very Third World here in California, and election integrity seems to be a low priority in many respects.”
On Saturday, Trump’s transition team lambasted the idea that recounts were needed. “This is a scam by the Green Party for an election that has already been conceded,” it said in a statement, “and the results of this election should be respected instead of being challenged and abused.”
That message runs counter to the one Trump sent Sunday with his fraud claims: If millions of people voted illegally, presumably officials across the country would want to pursue large-scale ballot recounts and fraud investigations.
But the Twitter posts could energize some of his supporters, who have claimed online that Clinton’s 2 million-vote lead in the popular vote has been faked. Trump at times promoted other conspiracy theories during the campaign, including claiming that Sen. Ted Cruz’s father was somehow tied to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
Many of Clinton’s supporters have been galvanized by the notion that vote recounts in the three states — where Trump leads by a combined total of about 100,000 votes — could somehow overturn Trump’s commanding Electoral College victory. By announcing, three weeks after Clinton conceded the race, that it would participate in the Wisconsin recount, her team has helped reignite the contentious atmosphere of the campaign, of which Trump’s Twitter barrages were a fixture.
Trump appeared fixated Sunday on the recount and his electoral performance. In a series of midafternoon Twitter posts, he boasted that he could have easily won the “so-called popular vote” if he had campaigned only in “3 or 4” states, presumably populous ones.
“I would have won even more easily and convincingly (but smaller states are forgotten)!” he wrote.
The afternoon messages followed a string of early morning posts in which the president-elect railed against the recount efforts. In an initial post, Trump wrote: “Hillary Clinton conceded the election when she called me just prior to the victory speech and after the results were in. Nothing will change.”
He went on to quote a comment by Clinton during one of their debates, in which she said she was horrified by Trump’s refusal to say that he would accept the outcome of the election. And he noted that in her concession speech, she had urged people to respect the vote results.
“‘We have to accept the results and look to the future, Donald Trump is going to be our President,’ ” Trump wrote on Twitter, quoting Clinton. “‘We owe him an open mind and the chance to lead.’ So much time and money will be spent — same result! Sad.”
One person who spoke with Trump over the holiday weekend said the president-elect had appeared to be preoccupied by suggestions that a recount might be started, even as his aides played down any concerns. Another friend said Trump felt crossed by Clinton, who he believed had conceded the race and accepted the results.
In a post on Medium, Marc Elias, the Clinton team’s general counsel, said the campaign would participate in Stein’s recount effort with little expectation that it would change the result, partly out of a sense of duty to the millions who voted for Clinton.
“We do so fully aware that the number of votes separating Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton in the closest of these states — Michigan — well exceeds the largest margin ever overcome in a recount,” Elias said, noting that Clinton campaign officials had found no “actionable evidence” of hacking or attempts to tamper with the vote.
In Wisconsin, Trump leads by 22,177 votes. In Michigan, he has a lead of 10,704 votes, and in Pennsylvania, his advantage is 70,638 votes.
Trump’s aides echoed his concerns about the recount effort in appearances on Sunday morning television news programs. Kellyanne Conway, who was his campaign manager, said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that Clinton and her campaign advisers would have to decide “whether they’re going to be a bunch of crybabies.”
Trump’s Twitter outburst also came as he is laboring to fill crucial positions in his Cabinet, with his advisers enmeshed in a rift over whom he should select as secretary of state. Conway on Sunday extended a public campaign to undermine one contender, Mitt Romney — a remarkable display by a member of a president-elect’s team. In her television appearances, she accused Romney of having gone “out of his way to hurt” Trump during the Republican primary contests.
Conway, echoing comments she posted last week on Twitter, made clear that she opposed choosing Romney as secretary of state.
“There was the ‘Never Trump’ movement, and then there was Gov. Mitt Romney,” she said on ABC, adding later, “I only wish Gov. Romney had been as critical of Hillary Clinton” during the general election. During the primaries, Romney called Trump a “fraud” and a “phony.” Chronicle staff writer Karen de Sá
contributed to this report.