Pressed for those studies that presented evidence of voter fraud, White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer offered a falsehood of his own, pointing to a study “that came out of Pew in 2008 that showed 14 percent of people who voted were noncitizens." Spicer makes misleading voter fraud claim to defend Trump's false voter fraud claim

White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer on Tuesday defended President Donald Trump’s claim that he lost the popular vote because of millions of votes by undocumented immigrants.

Asked about Trump’s claim, which has been widely debunked and is not backed by any public evidence, Spicer said Trump believes it based on "studies and evidence people have presented to him."

Pressed for those studies, Spicer then offered a falsehood of his own, pointing to a study “that came out of Pew in 2008 that showed 14 percent of people who voted were noncitizens."

That’s inaccurate on multiple counts: There is a study that found that 14 percent of noncitizens voted, but it’s not from Pew, it didn’t come out in 2008 and it has been widely debunked — including by members of the survey team on which the study is based.

The study was published in January, 2014 in the journal Electoral Studies and received renewed attention in October when the authors wrote up their findings in the Washington Post’s Monkey Cage blog . Using data from the Cooperative Congressional Election Study , which interviews tens of thousands of people every election year about their views on the election, the authors estimated that 14 percent of noncitizens had voted in recent elections. Trump has repeated this claim before.

The problem is the underlying study is wrong. Brian Schaffner, a political science professor and one of the coordinators of the Cooperative Congressional Election Study, explained in POLITICO in November that the authors of the study were misusing the dataset. Specifically, they weren’t accounting for measurement error (small errors in the data that result when respondents make mistakes because they didn’t understand the question or accidentally selected the wrong answer) in their results. Once they did so, their findings disappeared. “In fact, once my colleagues and I accounted for that error,” Schaffner wrote, “we found that there were essentially zero non-citizens who voted in recent elections.”

Other studies have found that there is no evidence of widespread voter fraud in the 2016 election, despite the president’s continued claims otherwise. As Schaffner concludes, “Simply put, the claims Trump is making are false through and through.”

The Pew Charitable Trusts did release a report in 2012 that showed there are 1.8 million people on the voter rolls who are deceased, while millions of others voter records are out-of-date. But that study did not say anything about actual voter fraud. Instead, it found that America’s voter registration system needs to be upgraded.