Three weeks after he won the 2016 election, the president-elect made a claim about the contest he had just carried. "In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide," he wrote, "I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally." [1] It was a strange thing to say about a race you won, and there is a clean way to test it, because his own administration tried to prove it and could not.
The claim
Be exact about what was asserted: not a handful of bad ballots, but millions, enough to erase a popular-vote loss of nearly three million. PolitiFact went looking for the evidence and rated the statement Pants on Fire, its lowest rating, finding zero support for it. [1] The claim was not hedged or vague. It was a specific, enormous number, and a specific number is a thing that can be checked.
The search his own side ran
Here is the part that settles it. In 2017 the administration created a body for exactly this purpose, the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, chaired by the vice president and built to find the fraud the president kept describing. [2] It carried the standing of the federal government and the full attention of the press. In January 2018, after roughly eight months, it was disbanded without producing findings of widespread fraud. [2][3] One of its own members, Maine's secretary of state, reviewed the internal documents and reported that the draft report's section on evidence of fraud was "glaringly empty." [3]
THE BOTTOM LINE
- "Millions of people voted illegally" in 2016: False [1]
- PolitiFact: Pants on Fire, zero evidence [1]
- The president's own fraud commission closed in 2018 with no findings [2][3]
A government that wants to find something, run by the very people making the accusation, is the friendliest possible jury. This one looked, with every advantage, and came back empty. The claim did not fail for lack of trying. It failed because the millions were never there.
