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  • 2016-11-16 (xsd:date)
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  • Three Million Votes in Presidential Election Cast by 'Illegal Aliens'? (en)
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  • On 14 November 2016 — not even a week after the results of the 2016 presidential election were announced — our inbox exploded with messages requesting that we investigate the claim that more than three million votes were cast by illegal immigrants or illegal aliens (non-citizens). In some cases it was also claimed that these three million voters are under investigation for fraud, or that three million votes for Hillary Clinton will be voided because they were illegal. Under federal law, non-citizens cannot vote in a presidential election. The first thing we found was that while no such claim has been reported in the mainstream media, it has been repeated on scores of partisan, right-leaning web sites since the 8 November election under the guise of news. Here are a few examples: The reporting in this excerpt from InfoWars.com is typical: We scoured at least a dozen such articles for evidence to support the claim, but found none. All of them pointed back to the same source: a pair of tweets by someone named Gregg Phillips, whose Twitter profile identifies him as the founder of VoteStand (America's first online fraud reporting app): Phillips offers no evidence whatsoever to back up the claim that he verified more than three million non-citizen votes. Nor does he divulge his data sources or methodology, much less explain how it was possible to verify three million fraudulent votes within five days of a national election. In point of fact, Phillips bluntly refuses to share this information with journalists, claiming it will be released in open form to the American people: Phillips, who also founded the technology consulting firm Autogov and served as managing director of Newt Gingrich's Winning Our Future super PAC during the 2012 presidential campaign, is no stranger to voter fraud controversies. He was quoted in a 30 October 2013 Breitbart article (which described Phillips as a voter integrity activist) characterizing Obamacare as the biggest voter registration fraud scheme in the history of the world. Per the requirements of the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA), Obamacare health insurance exchange web sites provide voter registration services to customers. While some observers have complained that the exchanges are inadequate to the task of signing up new voters and have actually failed to register millions of eligible people, according to a 2014 MSNBC report, others, Gregg Phillips among them, argue the opposite — that Obamacare has opened the floodgates for millions to register illegally: Based on these past statements, it seems likely that Phillips' case that three million non-citizens voted in the past election is related to his claim that illegals are registering to vote via Obamacare. In the absence of supporting data, however, he has really made no case at all. The three million non-citizens figure may just as well have been plucked out of thin air. (en)
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