Oh, FFS. Yet another Donald Trump “waaaah waaaah I lost the popular vote so someone must have cheated” tweet offers some insight into where he gets his specific claims. The short answer is that Trump’s source appears to be numbers from a Republican operative named Gregg Phillips:
Where did Phillips get his numbers? For all we know, he pulled them right out of his own ass, and he hasn’t offered more information, despite having had plenty of time to do so. His claims first came in two tweets dated November 11 and 13, saying that he’d “Completed analysis of database of 180 million voter registrations” and had “verified more than three million votes cast by non-citizens.” He didn’t say anything about how analyzing voter registrations said anything about votes cast, and it would have been difficult to know much about votes cast at that time:
Phillips made his claim on Nov. 13, only five days after the election. Meaning that his data apparently came in before any number of states certified their results. One of the first to do so was Vermont, which certified its results on Nov. 17 — four days after Phillips was able to determine that his 180-million-person database included the votes of 3 million immigrants here illegally.
And while on some theoretical level, Phillips could have been looking at early voting numbers, that would have been “a massive undertaking” and “nearly all of those early votes [cast by Latinos] would have had to have been from illegal voters” to produce three million illegal votes. Phillips’ “analysis” also came up with very different numbers than previous studies. For instance:
News 21, a national investigative reporting project funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, found just 56 cases of noncitizens voting between 2000 and 2011.
It looks an awful lot like Trump is propping his wishful thinking (“I’m popular! People like me and they all voted for me, every one!”) up on the claims of a partisan fraudster, in other words, while dismissing reams of actual evidence saying his conspiracy theories are false. Phillips, for his part, broke weeks of Twitter silence in response to Trump’s tweet, but not to offer more support for his claims. Instead, he punted: “Catherine Engelbrecht and .@TrueTheVote will lead the analysis and reporting effort from here.” But there’s no detailed information available from True the Vote, either, just a claim that they’re working on it. But if Gregg Phillips could establish within a week of the election that there had been three million illegal votes, what’s taking so long here?