The controversy over the final vote count for the 2016 election just went nuclear. On Sunday afternoon, the claim was made that Donald Trump’s popular vote count will win over Hillary Clinton if millions of illegal immigrants’ votes were subtracted from the recount. This was not some random Twitter rumor or a fake news website, this was President-Elect Trump himself making this bold claim. Adding fuel to the fire, Gregg Phillips and True The Vote released a statement alleging that Trump’s description of the 2016 election is “accurate” — and that Barack Obama’s Department Of Justice has been covering the massive voter fraud up.
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The internet lit up when Trump’s Twitter account first made the startling allegations.
“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,” wrote Trump. “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)!”
Trump did not provide any evidence to back up his claim that the final vote count might be so dramatically off, leaving many wondering where he came up with the idea that millions of illegal immigrants voted. While some Twitter users, and even many media reports, assumed the originator of this claim must be Alex Jones’ InfoWars , the first anyone has made such a claim was on November 10 when Gregg Phillips of VoteStand and True The Vote made the following tweet.
Needless to say, the greater the allegation, the greater the need for hard evidence backing the claim up. But by November 13, Phillips raised the estimate to 3 million illegal alien voters , claiming this was merely a baseline. Unfortunately, when various journalists (including The Washington Post ) asked for more info, Phillips’ only response was to say that the “data is not accessible via web” and that the “tedious work” of sorting the data was currently underway.
Some conservative news sites believe that Phillips’ claims should not be taken seriously. For example, Jay Caruso of Red State reached out with several questions and now he claims Phillips blocked him on Twitter. Several hours later, Caruso published a story where he called Phillips’ claims “specious”, “unreliable”, and alleged that a “source who worked for True The Vote thinks a lot of this is meant to get a seat at the table with President-elect Donald Trump.”
“According to the source, TTV started buying voter rolls dating back to 2010. This allows them to say they have ‘millions’ of voter files, but if the data is not updated after each election, the data couldn’t possibly be accurate. The source said they do not do this. They’ll buy data after sending out a fundraising email when they say they’re preparing for a voter fraud fight in a particular state. They can easily make a claim they have a lot of ‘data,’ but it has little value if they’re not doing anything with it or keeping it up to date…. How could he possibly verify millions of people voted illegally a mere five days after the election? Gathering that amount of information requires time and a lot of money. If they have the proof as Phillips claims, why not release it?”
Phillips has yet to respond to the report by Caruso. However, the True The Vote representative has been claiming their evidence and data has been under “attack” on Twitter for weeks.
“Our data and methods related to non-citizens voting has been argued before the Supreme Court. Hey haters, this stuff is real,” he said. Several days later, he claimed that Twitter bots were largely responsible for the “hate” he was receiving. “Attacks last week on my non-citizen voting research was 93% driven by bots using AI. Even the leftists attacks are fake.”
Phillips claimed that the 2016 election vote data will be released to the public rather than through the media. In addition, he said True The Vote plans on filing a federal lawsuit over the alleged non-citizen votes. On November 25, Phillips tweeted, “We are exploring suing Jill Stein for fraud.”
Phillips’ comments triggered a minor wave of interest on social media after conservative news sites published on the topic, but now Donald Trump’s popular vote tweet may have pushed True The Vote into the spotlight. In response, the voter fraud accountability organization released a statement.
“True the Vote absolutely supports President-elect Trump’s recent comment about the impact of illegal voting, as reflected in the national popular vote. We are still collecting data and will be for several months, but our intent is to publish a comprehensive study on the significant impact of illegal voting in all of its many forms and begin a national discussion on how voters, states, and the Trump Administration can best address this growing problem.”
Late Sunday evening, Phillips provided more information, claiming that Trump’s tweet “is accurate. Millions of illegal votes were cast. We began work on this project in 2009.” Aside from the press release, Phillips did not give a date or a timeline for when he expected True The Vote to release their data, but in subsequent tweets he hinted that the organization may be purposefully waiting until President-elect Trump is sworn in along with the new presidential cabinet.
“After eight years of cover up by the Obama DOJ, do you really think we will release anything to them?” tweeted out Phillips. “We will release a comprehensive research study to the public, Attorney General [Jeff] Sessions and all interested parties.”
Now, what is the final vote count for the 2016 election you may ask? David Wasserman of Cook Political Report has been keeping an online spreadsheet with a running tally of the 2016 popular vote count. As of the early morning of November 28, 2016, Clinton is at 64,654,445 votes, with Trump at 62,418,792 votes, giving Hillary a lead of 2,235,653 votes.
As you can see, if illegal immigrants voted to the tune of 3 million votes, then suddenly Hillary’s popular vote win is turned upside down. While this scenario would not change the outcome of the electoral votes, if True The Vote proves their allegations with hard evidence, their data will have dramatic ramifications for the American election process — never mind if the accusations against the Obama administration are backed up. Even if their evidence is not convincing, the fact that they influenced a future U.S. president to speak publicly on the issue is remarkable. Unfortunately, all we can do is wait and see what happens in 2017. Stay tuned.
[Featured Image by Alex Wong/Getty Images]