President has long believed claim – despite a lack of evidence – based on ‘studies and information he has’, says press secretary Sean Spicer

Donald Trump still believes the false claim that millions of people voted illegally in last year’s presidential election, the White House confirmed on Tuesday.

While some Republicans distanced themselves from the assertion, his press secretary, Sean Spicer, stood by it during Tuesday’s press briefing but was vague on the possibility of an investigation into the supposed crime.

Asked if the president believes that millions voted illegally in the election, Spicer replied: “The president does believe that. He has stated that before. I think he stated his concerns of voter fraud and people voting illegally during the campaign and he continues to maintain that belief based on studies and evidence that people have presented him.”

On Wednesday, Trump tweeted that he intended to launch a “major investigation into voter fraud”. However, he cited improper voter registration as the focus of the investigation and did not state a desire to review the 2016 presidential election.

“I will be asking for a major investigation into VOTER FRAUD, including those registered to vote in two states, those who are illegal and....,” he wrote in a first tweet, adding in a second: “even, those registered to vote who are dead (and many for a long time). Depending on results, we will strengthen up voting procedures!”

The controversy reignited on Monday night when Trump, who won in the electoral college but lost the popular vote, reiterated his view to congressional leaders that millions voted illegally, according to reports. He was criticised by Democrats and some Republicans.

But Spicer, who has the unenviable job of publicly defending Trump’s spur-of-the-moment comments and tweets, insisted: “As I said, I think the president has believed that for a while based on studies and information he has.”

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Pressed further, Spicer said it was “a longstanding belief” of Trump’s. “This isn’t the first time you’ve heard this concern of his. I think there have been studies. There was one that came out in 2008 that showed 14% of people who had voted were non-citizens. There are other studies that have been presented to him. It’s a belief that he maintains.”

The press secretary appeared to be referring to a Washington Post article by the political scientists Jesse Richman and David Earnest which, drawing on the Cooperative Congressional Election Study, argued that more than 14% of non-citizens in 2008 and 2010 samples indicated that they were registered to vote.

The Washington Post’s website now prefaces the article with three rebuttals, a response from the authors defending their work, and a peer-reviewed article contending that the findings “were biased and that the authors’ data do not provide evidence of non-citizen voting in US elections”.

When pressed about whether Trump would call for an investigation into what a reporter said would be the biggest scandal in American electoral history, Spicer said: “Maybe we will.” He later added: “Anything is possible. It’s a hypothetical question.”

Asked what it meant for democracy, he was evasive and replied only: “It means I’ve answered your question.”

But some members of Trump’s own party were critical on Tuesday and urged the president to stop spreading baseless allegations. Lindsey Graham, senator for South Carolina, said: “I wasn’t there, but if the president of the United States is claiming that 3.5 million people voted illegally, that shakes confidence in our democracy – he needs to disclose why he believes that.”

Graham added: “I would urge the president to knock this off; this is the greatest democracy on Earth, we’re the leader of the free world, and people are going to start doubting you as a person if you keep making accusations against our electoral system without justification. This is going to erode his ability to govern this country if he does not stop it.”

The House speaker, Paul Ryan, also distanced himself from the comments. “I have no way of backing that up,” he said. “It doesn’t matter to me. He won the election.”

But the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, told reporters: “The notion that election fraud is a fiction is not true … It does occur, there are always arguments on both sides about how much and how frequent and all the rest, but most states have done a better job on this front.”

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Colorado Republican Cory Gardner, who said this weekend that he had written in Mike Pence’s name in lieu of Trump when voting, said there was voter fraud in the US. When pressed about whether more than 3m illegal votes had been cast, the first-term senator simply said: “I haven’t seen any evidence of that.”



Other Republicans simply punted. When asked about Trump’s comments on Tuesday morning, before the Spicer press conference, the Arizona senator John McCain said: “Long ago I gave up talking about what the president talks about; my concern is what he does.”

In contrast, Democrats slammed the president’s statement. The Senate minority leader, Chuck Schumer, said: “The president ought to realise he is president. Instead of talking about the election or how many people showed up at the inauguration, he ought to talk about how many jobs he created.”

Schumer went on to cast blame on elected Republican senators for not condemning these comments: “When these falsehoods are told, our Republican colleagues have an obligation to reject them, not to skirt around them. The bottom line is simple: you cannot run a government, you cannot help people, you cannot keep America safe, if you cannot admit to the facts, plain and simple.”

The Vermont senator Bernie Sanders simply said the president’s accusation of voter fraud was a “delusional statement”.



Weeks after the election, Trump insisted in a tweet that he had won the popular vote “if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally”.

Fact-checking websites and newspapers traced the claim to a two-week-old “random tweet” by a former Republican party official in Texas. Gregg Phillips claimed on 12 November to have found “more than three million votes cast by non-citizens” – but he too failed to provide evidence.

The topic was one Trump long harped on throughout the campaign with claims that the election was “rigged”.



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In October, he insisted at a Wisconsin rally: “People who died 10 years ago are still voting.” Trump specifically claimed 1.8 million dead people would vote – and for “somebody else”. This appeared to be a reference to a 2012 study that found up to 1.8 million active voter registrations from deceased voters. That specific study did not provide any evidence of voter fraud or any ballots cast by the deceased. Instead, it simply illustrated that some state voter databases were out of date.

Trump had also long specifically warned of voter fraud in minority communities, specifically in Philadelphia, where Barack Obama won African American neighborhoods by overwhelming majorities in 2012. In an October rally in exurban central Pennsylvania, Trump warned the almost entirely white crowd: “Watch your polling booths, because I hear too many stories about Pennsylvania, certain areas. We can’t lose an election because – you know what I am talking about.”

There is no evidence of widespread voter fraud. Research over the last 16 years has found voter fraud to be extremely uncommon, and 2016 appeared to follow that pattern. ProPublica election monitors saw no evidence of widespread illegal voting.