A case cited by the White House as evidence that non-citizens cast illegal votes in American elections did not actually involve any non-citizens voting, the latest in a series of misleading statements on the subject by the administration.

Donald Trump’s deputy press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, referred in a television interview on Sunday to an incident in her native Arkansas, which she said supported Trump’s claims about voter fraud.



Trump has repeatedly alleged, without evidence, that he lost the national popular vote to Hillary Clinton, his Democratic opponent, because millions of non-citizens voted illegally. His claim has been widely dismissed as a fabrication. Trump said earlier this month that his administration would launch a national investigation into voter fraud, but then it did not.

After the president and a senior aide revived the claims last week, Huckabee Sanders was asked on MSNBC: “Do you think that there are 3 to 5 million undocumented immigrants who cast votes, and that that would have swung the president’s election, in terms of the popular vote, his way?”

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Huckabee Sanders replied: “Look, I don’t know how many different voters voted illegally, but I do know that it exists. In my home state of Arkansas, there was a judge that was caught with, I think, roughly 180 ballots sitting on his kitchen table. So to pretend like voter fraud isn’t something real and doesn’t exist is laughable.”



Questions over Huckabee Sanders’ remarks were first raised by ThinkProgress.

In a series of emails to the Guardian this week, Huckabee Sanders said she had in fact been referring to a public corruption case from 2011 that differs significantly from the description she gave in her MSNBC interview.



“It was a city councilman, not a judge,” Huckabee Sanders said in an email. In response to repeated follow-up inquiries, she confirmed that she meant the prosecution of Phillip Carter, a councilman in the city of West Memphis. Carter and several associates were caught bribing people to vote for a candidate in an election for the Arkansas house of representatives.



The FBI said Carter and other allies of Hudson Hallum, a Democratic candidate, gave residents chicken dinners, bottles of cheap vodka and small cash payments if they cast absentee ballots for Hallum. Carter, Hallum, Hallum’s father, and a police officer all pleaded guilty to federal charges of conspiracy to commit election fraud. But court filings from the case make no reference to anyone ineligible voting or trying to vote.



Hallum’s team was also found to have been helping voters to apply for and submit the absentee ballots, and secretly destroying the ballots if they found a voter had selected Hallum’s opponent. The criminal complaint against them, however, did not mention anyone being caught with 180 ballots on a kitchen table.



Five other people received state charges relating to the scheme. According to court filings, all were charged with unlawfully possessing “more than 10 absentee ballots of others, with the intent to defraud an election official”. All pleaded guilty to misdemeanors in Crittenden County circuit court.

Two of the state defendants were justices of the peace, but Larry Jegley, the county prosecutor who prosecuted their cases, said no one had been discovered with dozens of ballots at a kitchen table, or anything similar. “The scheme was broken up before the ballots were cast,” said Jegley.



Jegley also confirmed that all absentee ballots involved in the incident were completed in the names of local people who were eligible to vote in the election. “All names were of registered voters,” he said in an email.



Huckabee Sanders did not respond to an email asking whether she now acknowledged that the case did not involve anyone voting illegally or being caught with dozens of ballots on a kitchen table.



To support his allegations, Trump has cited supposed research by Gregg Phillips, a conservative social media user. Phillips claimed that a project he led called VoteStand found that 3 million people had voted illegally in the US. Phillips has declined to publish any research or provide any evidence for his claims.

The president has also falsely stated that a Pew study supported his claim that millions of people voted illegally, despite the study’s author refuting this repeatedly.

Jegley, the prosecutor, said that local voting irregularities in his experience tended to be attributable to incompetence or honest mistakes.

“I am amazed at how well the process works, even in poor old Arkansas,” said Jegley, who is a Democrat. “I have a hard time grasping the concept that millions of illegal or fraudulent ballots are or even could be cast in this country. Just because I say it doesn’t make it so, but based on my long observation of and participation in the electoral process I would wager I am correct.”