On the whole, politicians are not typically known for their honesty, but our recently elected 45th president, Mr. Donald J. Trump, has taken the practice of peddling "alternative facts" to all new levels. In fact, the pulitzer prize winning fact checking website, Politifact, had at one point during the campaign calculated that only a mere 4% of his statements could be considered completely true.

Given Trump's propensity for duplicity, there certainly is no shortage of fantastic claims for an enterprising citizen journalist to dig into. For my money though, his most interesting assertion to date still has to be that millions of illegal ballots cost him the popular vote this past November.

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 — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 27, 2016

This particular assertion is of interest to me for a handful of reasons. First, I have yet to see a single source outside of the Trump camp treat this claim with even an ounce of credibility. Second, unlike many of his most bombastic claims, this one is based on actual research from reputable sources in some cases. And, finally, this particular claim can be easily proven, or disproven as the case may be, by simply looking at the data.

So, let's jump right in and examine the evidence both for and against Trump's claim of a popular vote win. And feel free to follow along with the analysis by downloading the jupyter notebook for this article and running it locally.