Donald Trump Said There Was Voter Fraud In Virginia, New Hampshire, And California — Is It True?
While President-elect Donald Trump was spending his holiday weekend at Mar-a-Lago, his luxurious club in Palm Beach, Jill Stein was raising money to conduct a vote recount in Wisconsin. Trump tweeted that he was working hard on Thanksgiving Day by doing everything in his power to ensure Carrier doesn’t move its Indiana plant and jobs to Mexico. But then Jill Stein submitted her formal request for every vote cast in Wisconsin to be recounted.
The state’s election commission confirmed on Friday that it received Stein’s formal request 24 minutes before the 5 p.m. deadline. Marc Elias, the Clinton team’s general counsel, wrote in a Medium blog post that the campaign does not believe voter fraud is to blame for Trump’s victory in Wisconsin, but Clinton’s lawyers will participate in the recount despite the expectation that the results of the election will not change.
“Because we had not uncovered any actionable evidence of hacking or outside attempts to alter the voting technology, we had not planned to exercise this option ourselves,” Elias wrote. “But now that a recount has been initiated in Wisconsin, we intend to participate in order to ensure the process proceeds in a manner that is fair to all sides.”
Trump reacted to the news via Twitter on Sunday morning.
The Green Party scam to fill up their coffers by asking for impossible recounts is now being joined by the badly defeated & demoralized Dems
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 27, 2016
The Democrats, when they incorrectly thought they were going to win, asked that the election night tabulation be accepted. Not so anymore!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 27, 2016
Hillary Clinton conceded the election when she called me just prior to the victory speech and after the results were in. Nothing will change
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 27, 2016
Trump then tweeted that massive voter fraud was one of the reasons he lost the popular vote. He said in the past that he ran his campaign to win the Electoral College but has never stated that he won the popular vote — until now.
In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 27, 2016
“It would have been much easier for me to win the so-called popular vote than the Electoral College in that I would only campaign in 3 or 4–states instead of the 15 states that I visited. I would have won even more easily and convincingly (but smaller states are forgotten)!” he wrote in a string of tweets.
Serious voter fraud in Virginia, New Hampshire and California – so why isn’t the media reporting on this? Serious bias – big problem!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 28, 2016
Trump went on to say that voter fraud in Virginia, New Hampshire, and California has not been reported. Is that true? Let’s take a look.
Virginia
There were claims made on Twitter and various right-wing websites about millions of undocumented immigrants. An InfoWars piece and tweets made by Twitter user Gregg Phillips are two of the few cited sources of massive voter fraud in Virginia.
“Three million votes in the U.S. presidential election were cast by illegal aliens, according to Greg Phillips of the VoteFraud.org organization” the InfoWars piece stated. “If true, this would mean that Donald Trump still won the contest despite widespread vote fraud and almost certainly won the popular vote.”
Snopes investigated the tweets and claims made in the article and found no evidence of voter fraud in Virginia.
“We scoured at least a dozen such articles for evidence to support the claim, but found none. All of them pointed back to the same source: a pair of tweets by someone named Gregg Phillips, whose Twitter profile identifies him as the founder of VoteStand (‘America’s first online fraud reporting app’). Phillips offers no evidence whatsoever to back up the claim that he ‘verified’ more than three million non-citizen votes. Nor does he divulge his data sources or methodology, much less explain how it was possible to ‘verify’ three million fraudulent votes within five days of a national election.”
New Hampshire
There is zero indication that any voter fraud took place in the state of New Hampshire. There were reports that a judge ordered a polling location’s hours to be extended due to “misinformation,” but there’s no mention of alleged fraud based on local news reports.
California
In May, an investigative reporter at KCBS-LA reported that nearly 300 votes were cast in California by the deceased in the previous elections leading up to the presidential primaries. TMZ ran a story about this voter fraud on Election Day in November, but the last update to the original story was posted on May 24 when the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors demanded answers about the investigation of voter fraud in California before a vote was cast in the upcoming presidential election.
[Feautred Image by Spencer Platt/Getty Images]
