"[President] Trump has continued to claim – without any evidence – that there was massive voter fraud in the 2016 presidential election," said the left-leaning folks at the Annenberg Public Policy Center on Thursday.

Politico said, "The president can investigate imaginary votes all he wants. His numbers don't add up."

At Slate was the headline, "Trump is planning a federal investigation into mass voter fraud, which does not exist."

In the old legacy media, the verdict already is in: "There's no evidence that widespread voter fraud happened, there never has been," flatly stated Fox News' Shepard Smith.

TRENDING: Franklin Graham to lead prayer march in D.C.: 'Only hope for our country is God'

Without, of course, any evidence for his statement.

He cited no studies, investigations, audits.

Didn't mention the oddities from previous presidential elections where there were more votes that than were people in some jurisdictions. Or the charges for vote fraud. Or the convictions.

But Smith's recent comment typified what the old networks, newspapers and such are saying, in light of President's Trump's comments about widespread fraud that may have happened over the course of the 2016 election.

For example, ABC stated, "President Donald Trump and the White House are reiterating the unsubstantiated assertion that millions of people illegally cast ballots in the 2016 presidential election – a claim Trump first made after the election without presenting evidence."

The New York Times joined in: "During a private meeting with congressional leaders on Monday, President Trump asserted that between three million and five million unauthorized immigrants had voted for his Democratic opponent and robbed him of a victory in the national popular vote. There is no evidence to support the claim. …"

And USA Today chorused, "President Trump continues to claim – without any evidence – there was massive voter fraud in the 2016 presidential election."

Here are Smith's comments:

But those comments may shortly have to change, as, even while there's word that President Trump may order an investigation into vote fraud, a separate organization has confirmed plans for a forensic audit.

An examination.

A review.

Of actual, verifiable vote fraud in the United States.

True the Vote, the organization that infamously was targeted by the Obama Internal Revenue Service because of its conservation foundations, and fought the agency in court, has confirmed a study of the vote fraud problem already is beginning.

Citing its "comprehensive forensic audit" of the election results, officials with the organization said, "Our focus will include, but not be limited to, non-citizen voting, falsification of identity, double voting, mail-in ballot fraud, votes cast in the name of dead voters, and federal registration flaws."

Millions of files

In the statement from True the Vote chief Catherine Engelbrecht, she said her group already has developed methodologies and supports needed to do such a complicated analysis.

"We are not only comfortable with, we're confident in, our ability to manage a usable platform of hundreds of millions of files," she said. "There is no doubt this will be our biggest project to date, but we aren't going it alone. Our audit team will include world-class technologists, researchers, data miners, statisticians, scholars, analysts, and subject matter experts. This isn't B team stuff. The integrity of our elections is too important."

Those results then will be released, showing voter fraud does exist.

Officials with the group Americans for Legal Immigration PAC have explained they have the world's largest archive of details about illegal immigration and associated issues such as illegal alien crimes and voter fraud activity.

"It is amazing to see all of these major news sources put out 'fake news' claims that Trump has zero evidence for his justified voter fraud concerns," said ALIPAC chief William Gheen. "We have been sounding the alarm that the Democratic Party has facilitated and utilized illegal alien voters in western states like Nevada, California, Oregon and Washington state since at least 2010! Our archives are filled with substantial evidence of non-citizens voting in U.S. elections, and we applaud Donald Trump answering our call to launch an official federal investigation into these matters!"

He said his organization is compiling a special online report that provides evidence. ALIPAC is creating a special page to provide details, such as the study from 2008 that claimed 2.8 million non-citizens voted.

Or the thousands of names removed from voting rolls as ineligible after various investigations.

Only three years ago, John Fund wrote at National Review, "Voter Fraud: We've got proof it's easy."

"Undercover agents were able to vote as dead people, but election officials are attacking the agents. Liberals who oppose efforts to prevent voter fraud claim that there is no fraud – or at least not any that involves voting in person at the polls. But New York City’s watchdog Department of Investigations has just provided the latest evidence of how easy it is to commit voter fraud that is almost undetectable. DOI undercover agents showed up at 63 polling places last fall and pretended to be voters who should have been turned away by election officials; the agents assumed the names of individuals who had died or moved out of town, or who were sitting in jail. In 61 instances, or 97 percent of the time, the testers were allowed to vote. Those who did vote cast only a write-in vote for a 'John Test' so as to not affect the outcome of any contest," he reported.

Hotlines

The American Center for Law and Justice has provided a list of hotlines state-by-state for reporting voter fraud, and Infowars has reported the VoteFraud.org group cited three million votes in the election were cast by illegal aliens.

At about the same time, at Accuracy in Media, James Simpson reported on a specific, and different, vote fraud:

It is difficult to describe the enormity of the crime being committed by the Obama administration and their Democratic allies. They flagrantly flout the law, while simultaneously turning it into a weapon against political opponents, use government agencies to target innocent Americans, attempt to create legal voters through amnesty, and undermine voter integrity measures to facilitate vote fraud, while denying it even exists. In short, they are corrupting the entire process. Thus, it is fitting to begin this report by recounting a story of deliberate, blatant official voter fraud. This April 17, the Illinois House Executive Committee voted to authorize $100 million to construct President Obama’s future presidential library and museum in Chicago. AP reported that the Committee voted "unanimously," 9-0 to support the plan. The report was false. Only four of the 11 Committee members were in attendance – all Democrats. They did not even have a quorum. Furthermore, this was supposed to be a "subject matter only" hearing, i.e., entailing no votes. No matter; the legislators simply made up the results – even counting absent Republicans as "yes" votes. Republican State Representative Ed Sullivan observed, "In this case they didn’t even care to change the rules; they just flat out broke them."

At Townhall in 2014 was a report on the results of work at Old Dominion University, which revealed in an article in Electoral Studies: "Most non-citizens do not register, let alone vote. But enough do that their participation can change the outcome of close races."

The data came from the Cooperative Congressional Election Study.

"More than 14 percent of non-citizens in both the 2008 and 2010 samples indicated that they were registered to vote."

WND reported just this week that in 2016, Hillary Clinton garnered 2.9 million more votes nationwide than Trump, while the Republican won the Electoral College vote, 304-227.

Hans von Spakovsky, a former member of the Federal Election Commission, is a senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation, and joined Fund in authoring "Who’s Counting? How Fraudsters and Bureaucrats Put Your Vote at Risk."

They allowed WND to use quotes from the draft of an op-ed they submitted for publication, titled, "Trump’s probe of voter fraud long overdue. No one should oppose collecting the data Obama’s administration has been hiding."

Perhaps their most consequential insight is that if all the past indicators are true and there likely has been rampant voter fraud, it may not be all that difficult to prove, particularly now that there is a will to look for it.

"Conducting an investigation that will help resolve the size of the voter fraud problem is straightforward," asserted Fund and von Spakovsky.

"The Department of Homeland Security should cooperate with states wanting to check the citizenship status of voters on their rolls. The Justice Department should put pressure on or sue counties and states that refuse to clean up their rolls."

Fund and von Spakovsky cited "a 2012 study from the Pew Center on the States estimating that one out of every eight voter registrations is inaccurate, out-of-date or a duplicate."

"About 2.8 million people are registered in more than one state, according to the study, and 1.8 million registered voters are dead. In most places it’s easy to vote under the names of such people with little risk of detection."

No I.D.

WND reported previously on an explosive undercover video showing just how startlingly simple it is for anyone to commit voter fraud in Michigan – even when the voter provides no I.D. and falsely assumes the identity of a well-known columnist.

The undercover footage was released by Project Veritas founder and pioneering investigative reporter James O'Keefe.

In the video, O'Keefe visits a polling location in Michigan and requests a ballot for Detroit Free Press columnist Brian Dickerson.

At the location, workers request O'Keefe's name, address and driver's license.

"Oh, you do need a license?" O'Keefe asks. "I don't actually have my wallet with me. I lost it over the weekend hunting. My license fell out of my pocket."

He adds, "I didn't know I needed an I.D."

"You do," says the poll worker, who asks, "What's your address?"

O'Keefe obviously provides an incorrect address, and the poll worker is puzzled because O'Keefe says he lives on "Marietta" rather than "Henrietta."

The female poll worker calls Birmingham, Michigan, city clerk Laura Pierce for instructions on what to do about a voter with no I.D.

The worker tells O'Keefe: "So you have to fill out the front, and do the back. And then you can vote."

"Do I need to get an I.D.?" he asks.

"No, vote," she says, instructing him to simply sign an affidavit on the back "saying you are who you say you are."

O'Keefe asks her: "If I don't have a license, how do you guys know I am who I say I am?"

Watch the undercover video:

A video sting by O'Keefe, first reported by WND, also prompted the resignation of Democrat campaign staffer Patrick Moran, the son of Rep. Jim Moran son, and a criminal investigation by the Arlington County Police Department in Northern Virginia, near Washington, D.C. Prosecutors decided not to press charges.

The Moran video:

Patrick Moran, who is also the nephew of Virginia Democratic Party Chairman Brian Moran, Jim Moran's brother, is seen on video suggesting that the undercover Project Veritas reporter create fake utility bills to serve as voter ID so he can cast ballots in the names of registered voters. Moran warns there will be "a lot of voter protection" at the polling places to enforce the state's identification laws.

WND also reported when O'Keefe's team captured on video a regional director of the voter mobilization group launched by Barack Obama, Organizing for America, helping an undercover reporter vote for the president in two states. The director was fired after the video was reported.

There also was the report on major voter fraud going on in Virginia and Pennsylvania.

The Public Interest Legal Foundation claimed in lawsuits claiming voter fraud is taking place in Broward County, Florida, and in Wake County, North Carolina.

1,000 instances

The Public Interest Legal Foundation's report found more than 1,000 instances of illegal immigrants or non-citizens being registered to vote in just eight Virginia counties. They cast nearly 200 ballots in elections before being purged from voter rolls.

The other 125 counties in Virginia did not provide data, so the problem is much more widespread than the small sample would indicate, said attorney J. Christian Adams, who represents the foundation.

In 2014, Indiana launched a program to verify voter addresses, to crack down on voter fraud

Indiana officials admitted at least one in eight voter registrations contains inaccurate information.

In 2014, Fox News reported officials in North Carolina were investigating hundreds of cases of potential voter fraud after identifying thousands of registered voters with personal information matching those of voters who voted in other states in 2012.

And there were charges against a handful of people in Colorado for voter fraud.

Other contemporaneous headlines included "Nun charged with vote fraud" and "Woman, 86, charged with felony vote fraud."

After the 2012 election, WND compiled the the Big List of vote fraud reports, accessible at this link.

It documented how 59 different Philadelphia voting divisions in which Mitt Romney received zero votes compared to Obama's 19,605. And the Cleveland precinct in which Obama beat Romney 542 to 0. (In fact, Romney received zero votes in nine Cleveland precincts.)

The listing that follows is just a sampling of the results:

The Market Daily News reported on those 100 precincts in Cuyahoga County, Ohio, that on election day gave Romney zero votes, and Obama got 99 percent. "In more than 50 different precincts, Romney received two votes or less," the report said. "One would think that such improbable results would get the attention of somebody out there."

According to Philly.com, 59 voting divisions in Philadelphia produced a "head-spinning figure," not one vote for Romney. "The unanimous support for Obama in these Philadelphia neighborhoods – clustered in almost exclusively black sections of West and North Philadelphia – fertilizes fears of fraud, despite little hard evidence," the newspaper said.

A poll watcher told WND up to 10 percent of the ballots cast at a polling station in Pennsylvania reverted to a default, which gave Barack Obama a vote no matter who the voter had selected. The incident took place in the state where officials claimed Obama got a total of 19,605 votes in 59 voting divisions to zero for Mitt Romney and not far from the 100 precincts in Ohio where Obama got 99 percent of the vote, a feat not even achieved by third-world dictators. It was in Upper Macungie Township, near Allentown, Pa., where an auditor, Robert Ashcroft, was dispatched by Republicans to monitor the vote on Election Day. He said the software he observed would "change the selection back to default – to Obama."

Chicago elections worker Steve Pickrum told WND as an equipment manager for the elections system, he was called when a voting machine malfunctioned. "On early voting when I did work on the floor when voters needed help using the equipment, I was able to see the preference of the voter, and every time that I saw [a] voter voted for Romney a 'voter save failure' message came up on the screen,'" he reported. Then when he went on election day to vote himself, he picked Romney and experienced the same error message. He reported he never experienced the error message when the voter was choosing Barack Obama.

Another poll worker, this one assigned at the University of Michigan, reported to WND a list of irregularities, including that the precinct captain told her at one point, "You go sit down, you are bothering me," when she was trying to observe the proceedings. "I was only standing there and looking at voter documents," she told WND. "It was clear that what bothered him was my very presence." She said a short time later a young man arrived and identified himself as a Democrat poll challenger. "The first time he said anything was to object to my challenge of a voter. He tried to anger the voter by telling her 'She does not believe you are who you say you are.' He was trying to create a scene. It then happened again and I told him 'You are not here to challenge me!' His reply was a very loud 'Yes I am! You are a Republican and you are here to prevent people from voting. You are holding up the line and creating obstructions,'" she reported. She told WND in fact no one waited more than about 15 minutes to vote the entire day, and there were no obstructions.

Byron York of the Washington Examiner reports that some 200,000 fewer white voters were recorded in Ohio's election than in 2008. "There are several theories about those missing white voters, but the most plausible is that the ones who were undecideds or weak Republicans were deeply influenced by Obama's relentless attacks on Romney …"

And in Florida, the Sun Sentinel reported that election workers a week after the election said they found 963 unaccounted-for ballots – in a warehouse. "How can you lose them? This is terrible," candidate Chickie Brandimarte told officials. Election supervisor Brenda Snipes, however, said it's routine for various vote totals to be adjusted up until the Nov. 18 final certification.