A new study has concluded that as many as 5.7 million noncitizens may have voted in the 2008 election won by Barack Obama, giving credence to President Trump's much-maligned claim that more than 3 million illegal-alien voters cost him the nationwide popular vote last November.

A research group in New Jersey, Just Facts, announced it found that after examining post-election polling data, the number of noncitizens voting illegally in U.S. elections is likely far greater than previous estimates, the Washington Times reported.

As WND reported in March, many election experts agree with the president that widespread vote fraud exists, including illegal-alien voting. But they think it's unwise to make any estimates of the number of illegal voters, because there is no hard data at the moment. Yet, that likely will change with access now to records that were kept under wraps by the Obama administration.

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Last month, Trump signed an executive order commissioning Vice President Mike Pence to lead an investigation of vote fraud, and several independent groups are conducting their own probes. The White House investigation will include a look at outdated voter lists with names of dead people and multiple registrants.

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Just Facts re-examined a Harvard/YouGov study of tens of thousands of voters that concluded zero noncitizens voted, the Times reported.

The Harvard data previously was examined in a widely publicized study by professors at Old Dominion University in Virginia, which concluded as few as 38,000 and as many as 2.8 million noncitizens voted. Establishment media has insisted the Old Dominion study has been "debunked," but the authors stand by their findings.

Just Facts' analysis of the same Harvard polling data estimated that as many as 7.9 million noncitizens were illegally registered that year and 594,000 to 5.7 million voted.

The Times noted those numbers are more in line with the unverified estimates given by President Trump, who said voting by noncitizens is the reason Hillary Clinton ended up with a higher number of popular votes nationally. Clinton lost the only count that mattered, the state-by-state Electoral College vote, 305-232.

In the 2012 elections, Just Facts said, 3.2 million to 5.6 million noncitizens were registered to vote and 1.2 million to 3.6 million of them voted.

Noting polls show noncitizens vote overwhelmingly Democratic, Just Facts President James Agresti told the Washington paper his team used a series of complicated calculations "based on a more conservative margin of sampling error and a methodology that I consider to be more accurate."

He said Harvard/YouGov researchers wrongly assumed that people who said they voted did not vote unless their names showed up in a database, arguing millions of noncitizens use fraudulent identities. Secondly, he said Harvard wrongly assumed noncitizens never misidentified themselves as citizens.

He pointed out that some of the polled noncitizens denied they were registered to vote when publicly available databases show that they were.

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Other evidence

There is other evidence that noncitizens vote.

J. Christian Adams, who worked in the Justice Department’s Voting Rights Section under President George W. Bush and now heads the non-profit Public Interest Law Foundation, obtained voter-registration records from eight of Virginia’s 133 cities and counties, discovering 1,046 illegal aliens were illegally registered to vote. He's also forced several counties to clean up their voter rolls in states such as Mississippi and Texas.

John Fund, the author of several books on election fraud, told WND in March the Obama administration created an environment for vote fraud to thrive.

"When it comes to illegal votes," he said, "we need to end the Obama administration's consistent refusal to cooperate with states on allowing access to records of legal foreigners, illegal aliens and the Justice Department's refusal to require states to maintain clear voter lists if they accept federal funds for voting purposes.

Catherine Engelbrecht, founder of the Houston, Texas-based vote-monitoring nonprofit True the Vote, told WND "no one knows how many noncitizens are voting, because under the Obama administration, attempts to find answers were blocked at every turn."

She noted states that attempted to pass voter ID legislation or ask for proof of citizenship were sued by the DOJ.

True the Vote itself, she said, "was targeted for takedown by the administration because of the work we do; researching illegal votes, calling out election fraud, empowering citizens."

"We were asking questions they didn’t want answered," she said.

"Now, with the leadership of the Trump administration, we finally have an opportunity to stop guessing at how big the problem is," Engelbrecht told WND.

She said True the Vote is engaged in a "forensic audit" of the 2016 election to uncover illegal votes, election fraud and process deficiencies. The investigation "will be comparing data from state voter registries with data from scores of other available databases, including certain state agencies, national change of address, Social Security death index, and results from hundreds of FOIA requests."

In March, Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted announced that his office has identified an additional 385 noncitizens registered to vote in Ohio, 82 of whom have been identified as having voted in at least one election. It brings the total number of noncitizens on Ohio’s voter rolls Husted has been able to identify using available resources to 821, with 126 having actually cast ballots.

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