The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Trump vows ‘major investigation’ of fraud claim
President’s legal team, GOP leaders have disputed claim.
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump reiterated his claim that at least 3 million immigrants in the country illegally cast ballots for Hillary Clinton, calling on Wednesday for an investigation into voter fraud, even though his own legal team has argued that no such fraud occurred.
Trump has been widely criticized for making such assertions without any evidence, and even top Republicans like House Speaker Paul Ryan said they saw no indication of such widespread illegal voting. Trump’s legal team challenged Green Party candidate Jill Stein’s recount petitions in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin after Election Day with a broad assertion: “All available evidence suggests that the 2016 general election was not tainted by fraud or mistake.”
Pressed for proof on Tuesday, Trump’s spokesman, Sean Spicer, said it was “a long-standing belief ” of the president’s that people had voted illegally but did not assert it was true.
Trump was not so reluctant.
“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 tweeted.
His reference to two states seemed to mean voters who have registrations not just in the state where they currently live. He has previously said that many immigrants who are in the country illegally voted in California, Virginia and New Hampshire, three states that went for Clinton in November. Top officials in California and other states have rejected such claims as absurd and unfounded.
Ohio’s top official responsible for voting procedures, Secretary of State Jon Husted, a Republican, responded to the president quickly.
“We conducted a review 4 years ago in Ohio & already have a statewide review of 2016 election underway. Easy to vote, hard to cheat,” Husted tweeted.
Democrats accused Trump of looking for reasons to justify new restrictions on voting to benefit Republicans in elections, particularly targeting immigrants and African-Americans.
“These allegations are basically a false flag so Republicans can engage in even more voter suppression,” Dan Pfeiffer, who served as a senior adviser to former President Barack Obama, said on Twitter.
Trump lost the popular vote to Clinton by nearly 3 million votes, the largest margin for a winning presidential candidate since the disputed election of 1876, and that defeat clearly still rankles the president. He first asserted weeks after the election that he actually won the popular vote “if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.”
Even though he offered no basis for such a claim and it was widely debunked, he repeated it on Monday evening in a meeting with congressional leaders.
Trump’s call for an inquiry came after Mara Liasson of NPR grilled Spicer on Tuesday about why, if he believed such enormous voter fraud occurred, he was not investigating it.
“Well, maybe we will,” Spicer answered.
At that briefing, Spicer said Trump made his statements based on studies but seemed to refer to two that, in fact, do not back up the assertion, one from 2008 and one from 2012, long before November’s election.
The 2012 study, conducted by the Pew Center on the States, found that there were millions of inaccurate voter registrations, including more than 1.8 million dead people still on the rolls. But it did not conclude that meant people were, in fact, voting illegally in vast numbers.
The author of the study, David Becker, disputed Trump on Twitter on Tuesday.
“As I’ve noted before, voting integrity better in this election than ever before. Zero evidence of fraud,” Becker tweeted.
Fellow Republicans were worried about Trump’s persistence in making false claims. Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina said the president should “knock this off ” and move on.
“This is going to erode his ability to govern this country if he does not stop it,” he said on CNN.
Even Spicer seemed eager to avoid the topic at his briefing on Tuesday and focus on other issues. Several times when reporters pressed him on where Trump was getting his information, Spicer repeated that it was the president’s “belief ” and then said the question had been “asked and answered” before calling on someone else.
‘This is going to erode his ability to govern this country if he does not stop it.’ Sen. Lindsey Graham