? Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach said Wednesday, without providing evidence, that he agrees with President-elect Donald Trump’s assertion that the number of illegal votes cast in the Nov. 8 general election exceeded Democrat Hillary Clinton’s margin of victory in the popular vote.

Trump made that assertion in a Twitter post on Tuesday. It has been roundly refuted by election officials in most states.

National election totals reported so far show Clinton won the popular vote by about 2.2 million ballots, but lost the electoral vote, 306-232. Although recounts are underway in a handful of states, they are not expected to change the results.

Speaking with reporters after a meeting of the State Board of Canvassers, which certified the results of the election in Kansas, Kobach said as many as 3.2 million votes may have been cast illegally by non-U.S. citizens.

The Kansas State Board of Canvassers, which includes Gov. Sam Brownback, Kobach, Deputy Attorney General Athena Andaya, met Wednesday to certify results of the 2016 elections in Kansas. Kobach said afterward that he accepts President-elect Donald Trump’s assertion that the number of illegal votes cast in the election exceeded Democrat Hillary Clinton’s margin of victory in the popular vote.

Kobach said his estimate of 3.2 million illegal votes was based on a study, roundly criticized in academic circles, conducted at Old Dominion University that was based on polling data from the 2008 and 2010 elections by the Cooperative Congressional Election Survey, a project of Harvard University.

Kobach said that study estimated that as many as 11.3 percent of non-U.S. citizens living in the country, both legally and illegally, reported that they had voted in in the 2008 and 2010 elections.

Extrapolating from that, Kobach said, it would be “reasonable” to assume that 11 percent of the estimated 28 million noncitizens now living in the U.S., or 3.2 million people, voted illegally in 2016.

“Can you necessarily conclude that all of them voted for Hillary Clinton?” Kobach asked rhetorically. “No, but you can probably conclude that a very high percentage voted for Hillary Clinton given the diametric opposite positions of the two candidates on the immigration issue.”

In fact, however, Kobach overstated the study’s findings, which were originally published in the journal Electoral Studies.

“Our best guess, based upon extrapolations from the portion of the sample with a verified vote, is that 6.4 percent of non-citizens voted in 2008 and 2.2 percent of non-citizens voted in 2010,” the authors of that study, Jesse Richman and David Earnest, wrote in an Oct. 24, 2014, blog post on the Washington Post website.

Kobach would not comment on the possibility he may receive an appointment in the incoming Trump administration. But last week, he met personally with Trump and was photographed going into the meeting holding a “strategic plan” for the Department of Homeland Security, portions of which were visible to cameras.

That document included, among other things, proposed changes to the National Voter Registration Act, which plaintiffs in a federal lawsuit have used to block enforcement of a Kansas law that Kobach championed, requiring new voters in Kansas to show proof of U.S. citizenship in order to register.