Just under 3 million Americans are registered to vote in two places, but the overwhelming majority of them don’t vote twice, according to a new analysis by TargetSmart, the data firm used by the Democratic National Committee for its national voter file. These findings, discussed in an interview with VICE News, discredit recent assertions by President Donald Trump that there is an epidemic of double-voting and voter fraud. Since it became clear that Hillary Clinton won the popular vote in November’s presidential election, Trump has repeatedly claimed, without evidence, that he came up 2.9 million ballots short because 3 million to 5 million people voted illegally. (There are 200 million registered voters in the U.S.) Five days into his presidency, Trump called for a “major investigation” into that alleged fraud but then later scaled back his effort to a “commission” led by Vice President Mike Pence to study the problem.
“When you see people that are registered in two states that voted in two states, when you see other things, when you see illegals,” Trump said when pressed to provide evidence to back up his claims in an interview this week with Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly. “A lot of people have come out and said that I am correct,” he added, without specifying who.
A quarter of American voters now believe millions of votes were cast illegally in the 2016 election, according to a Politico/Morning Consult survey released last week (they are divided on whether those votes helped Trump or Clinton).
Each state maintains its own voter database, and it’s true that all of them include a number of dead, moved, and ineligible voters. A 2012 Pew Report found that about 2.8 million people have active registrations in more than one state and more than 1.8 million deceased people had active voter registrations. And states can’t easily check or investigate whether people are mailing in a ballot in one state and voting in another because there is no national voter file kept by the federal government to crosscheck people’s names.
Full Article: Trump’s voter fraud claims are absurd, yet another analysis shows – VICE News.