AP Photo SOAPBOX Trump’s Bad Voter Fraud Math The president can investigate imaginary votes all he wants. His numbers don’t add up.

Chris Ashby is a campaign finance and election lawyer at Ashby Law. These are his personal opinions.

It seems our new president can’t accept the fact that he won. Not content to have claimed the presidency in the only vote that matters—the Electoral College vote—President Donald Trump on Wednesday called for a “major investigation” into his loss, by some 3 million votes, of the national popular vote.

Mere weeks ago, defending his victory against recounts brought by Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein, attorneys for Trump stated that there was no evidence of voter fraud. Earlier this week, however, President Trump told congressional leaders that as many as 5 million people voted illegally in the presidential election. (Amazingly, he also seems to know that all 5 million voted for Hillary Clinton on their secret ballots. And the failing, losing Clinton campaign lacked the foresight to steer these illegal votes to the states that ultimately mattered—sad!)


At bottom, there is no evidence to support the president’s charge—nor could there be, as records of who voted in the 2016 election are just now becoming open to the public, and in many states will not be available for several more weeks or months.

As support for his claim, President Trump pointed to a 2012 report by the Pew Center on the States that found millions of invalid voter registrations, including registrations for nearly 2 million dead people, and double registrations for approximately 2.75 million voters. Of course, the report’s author correctly pointed out that invalid registrations do not correlate to illegal votes. In fact, neither the Pew report, nor any other report, study or analysis found widespread, systemic voter fraud of the degree that would be necessary to result in 5 million illegal votes.

Indeed, verified instances of voter fraud are extremely rare, and are infinitesimal in relation to the total number of votes cast in our elections—as they should be, because fraudulent voting is a serious crime. In the 2016 election, were 5 million individuals willing to risk several years in prison and tens of thousands of dollars in fines just to cast an illegal vote for Clinton? By way of comparison, the total number of individuals incarcerated in federal prisons, state prisons and county jails—for all crimes—is about 2 million.

President Trump also reportedly has claimed that his friend and supporter, the German professional golfer Bernhard Langer, was turned away from voting at a polling location in Florida, while “people who did not look as if they should be allowed to vote” from several Latin American countries were permitted to vote.

Perhaps the president truly believes these alternative facts. But real facts compel one conclusion: The election was neither rigged nor stolen—not the electoral vote, not the popular vote. Widespread, systemic voting fraud of the magnitude the president alleges is not possible.

Let’s consider basic math. There are roughly 100,000 voting locations in the United States. If 5 million people voted illegally in the presidential election, that would amount to 50 fraudulent votes per voting location. Throughout a 12-hour voting day, that’s four illegal votes per hour, or one crime every 15 minutes, in 100,000 polling places across America.

Of course, not everyone cheats. Voter fraud is an intentional act, so it is not randomly and evenly distributed across the electorate. Rather, it is targeted to the individual voting locations in which it takes place—or, as then-candidate Trump called them during the campaign, “certain places.” So we can be certain that illegal voting did not occur in all 100,000 voting locations. For instance, White House press secretary Sean Spicer on Wednesday conceded that illegal voting did not occur in Philadelphia, Detroit or Milwaukee. He went on to intimate that it could have occurred in New York, California and other places where Clinton ran up the score and the Trump campaign “didn’t compete.”

Given that the Trump campaign competed and won in more than half of the states, it seems too much then to assume that the 5 million illegal votes were cast in only half of America’s 100,000 precincts. Even 25,000 polling places—1 in 4—seems too high. But if 25,000 polling places were targeted by illegal voters, that would be 200 illegal votes per voting location—17 illegal votes per hour, or one every 3.5 minutes.

In reality, the number of targeted polling places would have to be much lower. If even 10,000 voting places were hit with fraudulent voting, that would mean 5,000 illegal votes per location, 417 per hour, seven per minute. That’s seven illegal votes per minute in 10,000 polling places across America, all to deny Trump a popular-vote victory.

Any way you slice the numbers, President Trump’s claims just don’t add up. Take, for example, the 2012 Pew report’s finding that 2.75 million people were double-registered. If every single one of those individuals resolved to, attempted and did commit the crime of double voting in the 2016 presidential election, it still would not erase Clinton’s popular-vote victory. Or take the 10 million or so individuals of voting age who are in our country illegally. One in two of them would have had to have registered and voted—without being rejected—to account for the higher end of the president’s claim that 5 million people voted illegally in the election.

None of this happened. As I explained here before the election, I believe that voter fraud happens, but a conspiracy of this magnitude would require the participation of Republican and Democratic governors, state and local election officials, political party observers and representatives of major party, minor party and independent candidates, as well as voters, election lawyers and members of the news media.

After this election, Republican governors and election administrators in red, blue and swing states all said the election was clean. President Trump’s own lawyers stated—on the record in a judicial proceeding—that “[a]ll available evidence suggests that the 2016 general election was not tainted by fraud or mistake.” Even President Obama acknowledged that the result of the election accurately reflected the will of the American people.

But President Trump is obsessed with vanity metrics, so he can’t accept the fact that he lost the national popular vote by the equivalent of the margin in California. Instead, he proposes to subject our election system to a show trial—and in the process, to make waste of taxpayer dollars, his administration’s political capital and the American public’s time, attention and confidence.

Our system of voting is not perfect. Voter rolls in some states are bloated with ineligible voters, voting equipment in other states is outdated and all states should assess the security of their voting machines and other election materials and make improvements as necessary. But our system of voting also is not rigged, was not hacked and was not overrun by 5 million illegal voters. If President Trump has information to the contrary, he should come forward with the facts—not alternative facts, and not a story he heard from a golfing buddy.