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On 29 January 2017, the YourNewsWire fake news site published an article asserting that an NPR study had determined that 25 million fraudulent votes had been cast for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 president election: Were the claim correct, it would mean more than a third of Clinton's near 67 million popular vote tally consisted of votes were completely fake. There was, of course, no truth to that claim. The purported NPR study determining that 25 million fraudulent votes were cast for Hillary Clinton in November 2016 was not compiled by NPR, had nothing to do with the 2016 election, and did not declare that 25 million votes had been determined to be fraudulent (in any election). The referenced NPR study was in fact a 14 February 2012 NPR article about a Pew Research Center report issued in 2012. That Pew report observed that approximately 24 million voter registrations in the United States are no longer valid or are significantly inaccurate, but the NPR article specifically noted that there's little evidence that this has led to widespread voter fraud: The continued inclusion of inaccurate or outdated registrations on voter rolls is a widespread problem that continues to plague many states and local voter boards, largely because of difficulties in matching up persons who have died or moved with the registration records they left behind. However, the existence of inaccurate or outdated registrations does not constitute voter fraud per se, nor is it evidence or proof that voter fraud is taking (or has taken) place. Voter fraud only occurs when someone uses an invalid registration to illegally vote &mdash by, for example, assuming another person's identity, voting multiple times, or voting in states in which they are no longer resident. The Pew report did not track or measure any such fraudulent voting activity. The Pew Research Center report did not, as YourNewsWire falsely declared, state that 25 million fraudulent votes were cast in 2016 or in 2012 (the year the report was published) or in any other year, for Hillary Clinton or for any other candidate. The report antedated the 2016 election by more than four years, dealt only with voter registrations (not actual votes), and could not possibly be construed as documenting that 25 million fraudulent votes were cast for Hillary Clinton in 2016.
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