Skeptics Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for scientific skepticism. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
According to president elect Donald Trump, millions of people voted illegally:
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
I suppose referring to illegal immigrants, undocumented, voting. Is this true?
As with many of Trumps statements, this does not seem to be true. There are dozens of journalists from different political backgrounds rejecting the claim:
Here are quotes from those articles.
CNN:
Trump could be referencing a series of fake stories on conspiracy websites that said he actually beat Clinton in the popular vote count. Trump's transition team did not return requests for comment Sunday afternoon.
Huffington Post:
Trump’s latest lie seems to have originated from the conservative conspiracy website Infowars, which published an article claiming that Trump actually won the popular vote because “three million votes in the U.S. presidential election were cast by illegal aliens.”
On a call with reporters on Monday, Trump’s transition team could not provide any credible evidence for his lie, citing only a debunked blog post and a Pew study that did not contain any proof of undocumented immigrants voting.
Politico, discussing a study Trump used to justify his claim:
There is no evidence that non-citizens have voted in recent U.S. elections.
[...]
The authors were essentially basing their claims on two pieces of data associated with the large survey—a question that asks people whether they are citizens and official vote records to which each respondent has been matched to determine whether he or she had voted. Both these pieces of information include some small amounts of measurement error, as is true of all survey questions. What the authors failed to consider is that measurement error was entirely responsible for their results.
[...]
Richman and his colleagues saw the very small number of people who answered that they were “immigrant non-citizens,” and extrapolated that (inaccurate) number to the U.S. population as a whole.
Fox News:
Officials in those states insisted Monday that Trump’s claim of millions of illegal votes, including ones allegedly cast by illegal immigrants, is unfounded.
NPR:
That peer-reviewed article comes from a team of researchers that includes Stephen Ansolabehere, who developed the CCES. He and two colleagues wrote at the Monkey Cage that Richman and Earnest's findings were based on "measurement error."
[...]
He also pointed to a 2012 study from the Pew Charitable Trusts. The numbers he cites are in fact correct: That study showed that 24 million voter registrations at the time were "no longer valid" or were "significantly inaccurate," and that nearly 2.8 million Americans were registered in more than one state.
That's a sign that states' voter registration databases could use some extra upkeep but it's not itself evidence of fraud, as Miller said it was.
[...]
However, the Trump campaign has yet to provide evidence that widespread fraud — involving "millions of voters" — in fact swayed the results of the presidential election, as the president-elect said it did.
ABC News:
The next day, the Pew study's primary author, David Becker, tweeted in response to references to his research: "As primary author of the report the Trump camp cited today, I can confirm the report made no findings re: voter fraud. We found millions of out of date registration records due to people moving or dying, but found no evidence that voter fraud resulted. Voter lists are much more accurate now than when we issued that study in 2012, thanks to the 20 states sharing data through @ericstates_info."
Conclusion
Trump does actually cite two studies - Do non-citizens vote in U.S. elections? - and Inaccurate, Costly, and Inefficient.
But the first has been heavily criticized for drawing invalid conclusions by journalists as well as by a peer-reviewed study: The perils of cherry picking low frequency events in large sample surveys:
The example for this analysis is Richman et al. (2014), which presents a biased estimate of the rate at which non-citizens voted in recent elections. The results, we show, are completely accounted for by very low frequency measurement error; further, the likely percent of non-citizen voters in recent US elections is 0.
According to the author of the second study that Trump cites, it doesn't say that millions voted illegally.
No. Those claims were never supported by any evidence. If there was any evidence of millions of "illegal votes", presumably, against Trump, his campaign would have surely requested a recount and/or filed a lawsuit to challenge the results in those states.
Election officials in the 3 states mentioned by Trump, New Hampshire, Virginia, and California have rebutted his assertions of wide spread voter fraud:
“We have heard claims like this in the past, relative to our elections, but we have been provided no evidence that suggests that there is voter fraud on a widespread scale in New Hampshire,” David Scanlan, New Hampshire’s deputy secretary of state, told POLITICO in a phone interview Monday.
“The claims of voter fraud in Virginia during the Nov. 8 election are unfounded,” Virginia Department of Elections Commissioner Edgardo Cortés said in a statement to POLITICO. “The election was fair and all votes cast by eligible voters were accurately counted.”
“It appears that Mr. Trump is troubled by the fact that a growing majority of Americans did not vote for him,” he (Secretary of State Alex Padilla) said Sunday, according to the LA Times. “His unsubstantiated allegations of voter fraud in California and elsewhere are absurd. His reckless tweets are inappropriate and unbecoming of a president-elect.” Source
I think it's a well established practice for the accuser to prove the accused guilty, not for the accused to prove innocent. Since no proof has been presented, the premise should be rejected.
