Asked to elaborate on Trump’s point, Miller cited a 2014 Washington Post story and a Pew Center Study from two years prior. However, both of those examples have been refuted. | AP Photo Trump spokesman fails to back up Trump claim of voter fraud

President-elect Donald Trump transition spokesman Jason Miller offered no new evidence on Monday to back up his boss’s false claim there was widespread voter fraud in the presidential election. Instead, Miller clung to two previously debunked examples, while criticizing reporters for not taking the topic more seriously.

“If this much attention and oxygen is going to be given to a completely obnoxious, throwaway fundraising scheme by someone like Jill Stein, then there should be actual substantive looks at overall examples of voter fraud and illegal immigrants voting in recent years," Miller told reporters during an official transition briefing call. "That is the broader message that I think should be taken away here."


Trump claimed in a series of tweets over the weekend that he would have won both the Electoral College and the popular vote if you “deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.” Election experts told POLITICO the claims are baseless.

The president-elect made the comments as he was pushing back on Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein’s request for statewide recount in Wisconsin. Hillary Clinton’s campaign announced it would participate in the effort on Saturday, although Clinton’s top lawyer said that her team had not found any proof to back up allegations of hacking or tampering with voting machines.

Asked to elaborate on Trump’s point, Miller cited a 2014 Washington Post story and a Pew Center Study from two years prior. However, both of those examples have been refuted.

As a candidate, Trump also pointed to the Pew Center report titled “Evidence That America’s Voter Registration System Needs an Upgrade.” Miller and Trump accurately quote the report’s finding that 24 million voter registrations nationwide are “no longer valid or are significantly inaccurate.” Yet, the report provides no credence for the claim that any of those voters committed fraud.

In an interview with POLITICO, David Becker, the primary author of the Pew report, said there are "zero findings" in regards to any fraud.

In fact, Becker said voter lists are "as about as accurate as we've seen" due to a number of states participating in Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC), a non-profit organization that helps states communicate with each other to ensure the most accurate voter rolls by making sure the 20 states and Washington D.C., who voluntarily belong to the group and pay dues. States are notified of potentially updates to their rolls including if a voter who may have died or someone who has moved away from the state they are registered in.

Both Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, where Stein has requested recounts, belong to ERIC.

Becker added that in his more than two decades in the field, he has never seen any large-scale fraud by undocumented immigrants.

"This just doesn't occur in any kind of numbers,” he said. “And when it does, it is often a mistake, usually just a small number of people. There have been election officials who have tried to investigate it and prosecute it, at most they have found a handful, like a dozen statewide, of non-citizens who were on the lists — let alone voting.”

The prospect of potential deportation for the payoff of casting just one vote, Becker said, makes such a scenario even more implausible.

“If they did it intentionally, they would run the risks of prosecution, prison and deportation," he said. "All just for the payoff of casting one vote in an election where more than 130 million plus votes were being cast.”

The Post article Miller points out is actually a blog post from the site’s Monkey Cage vertical, written by two professors at Old Dominion University who said their study on data from 2008 and 2014 shows undocumented immigrants were illegally registered to vote. But their findings have been strongly criticized and questioned.

In particular, a peer-reviewed academic study failed to replicate the claims, and the argued that the original findings the result of methodological mistakes.

“The results, we show, are completely accounted for by very low frequency measurement error; further, the likely percent of non-citizen voters in recent US elections is 0,” Harvard professor Stephen Ansolabehere, YouGov Managing Director Samantha Luks and University of Massachusetts Amherst professor Brian F. Schaffner wrote in their 2015 response to the original study.

Election officials in California and Virginia have also said that Trump's claim in a separate tweet -- that "serious voter fraud" took place in those states as well as New Hampshire -- is false.

A massive nationwide partnership of news organizations also monitored the potential for fraud on Nov. 8. Known as “Electionland,” the effort was spearheaded by the Pulitzer Prize-winning site ProPublica and included more than 250 news organizations across the country.

Summing up the group's work, ProPublica wrote on Twitter Sunday night that there is “no widespread voter fraud.“