Trump Won’t Back Down From His Voting Fraud Lie. Here Are the Facts.

During a private meeting with congressional leaders on Monday, President Trump asserted that between three million and five million unauthorized immigrants had voted for his Democratic opponent and robbed him of a victory in the national popular vote.

There is no evidence to support the claim, which has been discredited repeatedly by numerous fact-checkers.

That did not stop Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, from standing by the president’s words on Tuesday during a briefing with reporters at the White House. “As I said, I think the president has believed that for a while based on studies and information he has,” Mr. Spicer said.

That much appears to be true. Mr. Trump repeatedly raised doubts about the integrity of the American voting system in the period before the election in November and has falsely said since his victory that millions of people voted illegally.

Pressed to present the evidence on Tuesday, Mr. Spicer appeared to conflate two different studies that Mr. Trump’s staff had previously cited in defending his claim. “There’s one that came out of Pew in 2008 that showed 14 percent of people who voted were non-citizens,” Mr. Spicer said. “There’s other studies that have been presented to him.”
Here are the facts

Neither study Mr. Spicer apparently referred to supports Mr. Trump’s claim.

The first study was conducted in 2014 by professors at Old Dominion University and discussed on Monkey Cage, a blog hosted by The Washington Post. Using data from the Cooperative Congressional Election Study, the researchers found that 14 percent of non-citizens who responded to the survey in 2008 and 2010 said they were registered to vote.

The problem is that the study relied on flawed data and was roundly criticized by political scientists who said that a more careful examination of the data revealed no evidence that non-citizens had voted in recent elections.

The second study, conducted in 2012 by the Pew Center on the States, found that 24 million voter registrations were no longer valid or “significantly inaccurate”; that more than 1.8 million dead people were still listed on the voter rolls; and that almost three million were registered in multiple states, probably because they had moved from one state to another.

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