Like so much of what's wrong with America these days, the president*'s current obsession with how many people didn't vote for him has its roots in Texas. Apparently, the White House is basing its preposterous notion that three million undocumented people voted illegally in 2016 on the work of a guy named Gregg Phillips, a former Texas government bureaucrat who's been pitching this nonsense for a while now, most notably on Alex Jones' worldwide audience of well-armed shut-ins.

The mighty Texas Tribune has the skinny on how this percolated up from the fever swamps into the White House.

This isn't the first time Trump has made that unsupported claim. In November, Trump said on Twitter that "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." A former Texas official may be the original source for that claim. Gregg Phillips, a former Health and Human Services Commission executive, said on Twitter that he has discovered that more than 3 million people who voted were not citizens. Phillips' claim was later highlighted in InfoWars, a conspiracy theory website run by Alex Jones, a Trump ally.

Yes, dear friends. The most powerful man in the world is so goddamned set on proving that the country loves him that he's going to launch an investigation based on the work of a guy who promotes that work on broadcasts sponsored by vitamin supplements guaranteed to prevent the one-world government from reading your mind. May I just say once again that there is no way in the world that this is in any way normal?

(This, of course, comes hard after Jones' claim that his InfoWars chronic ward will be issued White House press credentials, a claim the White House hastened to deny.)

There also seems to be some mischief being done in this regard with the work of a political scientist at Old Dominion University named Jesse Sherman, as the Virginian Pilot tells us, and Sherman is doing his damnedest to get out from under the foolishness.

Trump announced Wednesday that he's ordering a "major investigation" into voter fraud – a claim he first made on the campaign trail, then repeated this week at a meeting with Republican leaders. Richman heard his research – or some twist on it – being cited by White House press secretary Sean Spicer as he defended Trump's "long-standing belief" to a room full of reporters Tuesday: "I think there have been studies; there was one that came out of Pew in 2008 that showed 14 percent of people who have voted were not citizens." Spicer got it all wrong, according to Richman. "First of all, he's confusing our study with another study," Richman said, "and then he's flipping ours around and exaggerating the most extreme estimates from it." The Pew Charitable Trusts did release a study in 2012 that indicated 1.8 million deceased voters remain on the rolls and millions of other voter records are out of date. But the study did not say anything about voter fraud. The 14 percent cited by Spicer appears to have come from research Richman and ODU co-authors published in 2014, an analysis titled "Do non-citizens vote in U.S elections?" Using data from the Cooperative Congressional Election Study, which interviews tens of thousands of people every election year, the ODU study concluded that, at most, "maybe 14 percent of non-citizens engaged in some type of voting behavior," Richman said. Repeat: That's not 14 percent of all voters. That's 14 percent of all non-citizens.

I feel for Sherman, but his protestations mean nothing to the people who are going to use his work to restrict the franchise of the voters they don't like, and they mean nothing to a president* who is so desperate for demonstrations of his greatness that he left the plane of empirical reality years ago and now is taking the American government with him. This is the great Civil Rights battle of the 21st century, and I'm not entirely sure anyone is up for it.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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