Trump says he’ll order investigation into ‘voter fraud’

US President Donald Trump said Wednesday he will order an investigation into voter fraud.

The president tweeted early Wednesday that the measures will affect those registered to vote in more than one state, “those who are illegal and even, those registered to vote who are dead (and many for a long time).”

Trump says that “depending on results, we will strengthen up voting procedures.”

Trump, who lost the popular vote in the 2016 race by some 3 million votes but won the presidency by winning the Electoral College, repeatedly made disputable claims of a rigged voting system before the election. Now in the White House, he appeared to be doubling down on the issue.

Trump’s press secretary on Tuesday mischaracterized the election results and the findings of a study that purported to show significant voting in the past by noncitizens, according to a fact check by the Associated Press.

“I think there’s been studies. There’s one that came out of Pew in 2008 that showed 14 percent of people who voted were noncitizens,” Sean Spicer told reporters on Tuesday.

According to AP, Spicer mixed up studies and misrepresented their conclusions.

The Pew study, released in 2012 and based in part on 2008 results, was about outdated or otherwise inaccurate voter registration records, not about votes illicitly cast by noncitizens.

David Becker, an author of that study, said his report never found fraud. Moreover, he tweeted Tuesday that voting integrity in 2016 was “better in this election than ever before.”

The issue of noncitizen voting actually was examined in a 2014 study by two Old Dominion University professors who wrote about their findings in The Washington Post.

They did not conclude, as Spicer said, that more than 14% of voters were noncitizens. They said that an estimated 14% or more of noncitizens had registered to vote — a much smaller universe of people. Moreover, only “some of these noncitizens voted,” they said.

Their “best guess” was that 6.4% of noncitizens voted in 2008 and 2.2% in 2010.

Even those modest numbers were sharply disputed by other academics because of the study’s methodology. But even if the study was right, it would not support Spicer’s assertion. Nor does it support Trump’s repeated statements that illicit voting by several million people in the country illegally cost him a majority of the popular vote in November.

The broader context: No evidence of significant voter fraud surfaced from the 2016 election, despite plenty of digging.

Spicer also said Tuesday that Trump “won overwhelmingly with 306 electoral votes, the most since any Republican since Reagan.”

In fact, he did not win the most electoral votes since Reagan, and far from an overwhelming victory by historical standards. George H.W. Bush won more, with 426 electoral votes in 1988, or 79% of the total, well ahead of Trump with 306 electoral votes, or 57%.

Trump actually ended up with 304 electoral votes because of the defection of two electors in December, but he had won enough states to get to 306.

Trump’s victory ranked 46th out of the 58 elections since the nation’s founding, far from the “landslide” that Trump himself has often claimed.

Reagan achieved true blowouts, winning 489 electoral votes (91%) in 1980 and 525 (97.6%) in 1984.