Donald Trump used Twitter to make outrageous claims during the entire 2016 election, and he’s still making them after winning the presidency. He is now turning Twitter into a state-media machine capable of quickly and widely spreading disinformation.
In the middle of a rant today about the Electoral College, Trump tweeted a preposterous claim: that millions of people voted illegally in the election he just won. (Trump also trashed democratic norms before the election, saying it would be rigged and that he would not accept the results if he lost.) Trump made the false claim about illegal voting today in the middle of saying there should be no vote recount in Wisconsin.
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
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 27, 2016
There is no evidence that millions of people voted “illegally” in this election. Voter fraud is a myth at any meaningful scale. To give an idea of how rare fraud is in elections, one 2014 study from Loyola Law School professor Justin Levitt found only 31 credible incidents of fraud in US elections since the year 2000 — out of more than a billion ballots cast. To claim there were millions of ballots illegally cast is careless and absurd.
But this is just one false claim of many, and Trump has given no indication that he will restrain his careless speech or improve his standards for evidence. He has used Twitter to tweet and retweet false and misleading information at a volume that has challenged the bandwidth of fact checkers. In many cases the fact-checkers don’t get a word in before the false claim: