Donald Trump is certain he must have won the popular vote, and he's going to keep pushing that idea even if it means he has to strangle the data into submission to prove it.
In his interview with ABC News, he claimed that a 2012 Pew study proved that those three million votes he lost of the popular vote were from people who were "dead, illegal and [registered in] two states, and some cases maybe three states."
So what does he have to back up this absurd statement?
Apparently, this:
[T]he only study cited by the White House that does talk about voter fraud hinges on the fact that five people who cast votes in the 2008 election also clicked a button on an internet survey that year indicating that they were not American citizens.
Those five clicks are the main data point in a study published in 2014 by Jesse Richman and David Earnest, political scientists at Old Dominion University who argued that voting by non-citizens is common enough that it could sway close elections.
As soon as that paper was published, however, its conclusions were rejected by several experts, including the researchers who directed the internet survey, the Cooperative Congressional Election Study. Professor Stephen Ansolabehere of Harvard University, the principal investigator of the C.C.E.S., argued that those five participants, a tiny fraction of the 23,800 people who completed the survey, could easily have been citizens who clicked the wrong button.
“The core of the problem with the study is that every survey question has some measurement error in it,” Ansolabehere said in an interview on Wednesday. “So, if you’re taking an internet survey, one kind of error is click-through error – some people are just taking the survey very fast accidentally click the wrong button. There’s some percentage error in every question, and we’re aware of that and that affects inferences you draw.”
In a peer-reviewed response to Richman and Earnest’s work, based on follow-up interviews with participants in the study in 2010 and 2012, Ansolabehere and his colleagues concluded that the error rate with the citizenship question was high enough to suggest that the five people who said they were non-citizens in 2008 were citizens who had simply clicked the wrong box.
“When we look at the panel where we reinterviewed those people, we find that none of those five people were non-citizens,” Ansolabehere added. “It was just click-through error on the survey.”
So, what have we got here?
No actual voter fraud.
No statistical analysis that suggests voter fraud.
Not even a study that suggests there might be voter fraud.
Just standard error to be expected of a very small number of people clicking the wrong button in an online survey — error that was cleared up by follow-up interviews.
Oh, and a great deal of dishonest manipulation of that error by politically motivated persons now working in the White House, by way of Breitbart News.
And one thin-skinned pathological narcissist who can't believe he's in fact hated and rejected by the majority of the population instead of lauded and loved.
And the Trump administration is going to try to use this lie, this shred of nothingness, this bit of trumpery, to push ever more voter suppression and purging of the voter rolls to try to maintain their corrupt hold on power in 2018, in 2020, and maybe forever.
If enough people fall for the lie, and let them.