President-elect Donald Trump made the unfounded claim Sunday he won the popular vote in the presidential election — if millions of so-called “illegal votes” had not been counted.
“In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally,” he tweeted.
There is no evidence that millions voted illegally.
Tallies of the popular vote show that Hillary Clinton beat Trump by more than 2 million votes, though Trump won more Electoral College vote and therefor the presidency.
“It would have been much easier for me to win the so-called popular vote than the Electoral College in that I would only campaign in 3 or 4 states instead of the 15 states that I visited,” Trump wrote. “I would have won even more easily and convincingly (but smaller states are forgotten)!”
The latest tweets came after Trump railed against the election recount effort by Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein, calling it a “scam” and saying “nothing will change.” Stein filed for a recount in Wisconsin and said she would file for recounts in Michigan and Pennsylvania as well, after people pointed to anomalies in voting data in the three swing states.
In a series of Twitter posts on Sunday, the independent investigative news website ProPublica said its extensive election monitoring had revealed no evidence of systemic fraud, and that for millions of people to vote illegally “would require a conspiracy larger than all previous conspiracy theories combined.”
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Write to Mahita Gajanan at mahita.gajanan@time.com