President Trump's Source For Voter Fraud Claims Is App Maker With No Proof

WASHINGTON, DC — President Trump tweeted Friday morning that he is looking forward to seeing results of an investigation from Gregg Phillips, a self-proclaimed anti-voter-fraud app maker who has provided no evidence of mass wrongdoing but whose alarmist tweets in November were picked up by a blog that says the Sandy Hook shooting was a hoax.

Trump's tweet came shortly after Phillips was interviewed on CNN by anchor Chris Cuomo, who pressed Phillips to provide any evidence whatsoever for his claims. Phillips did not.

Election officials across the country have said they have seen nothing to back up Trump and Phillips' claims that millions of illegal votes were cast in the 2016 presidential election. Trump, though, maintains his position and has called for a federal investigation into the matter.

"Look forward to seeing final results of VoteStand," Trump tweeted Friday morning, about 45 minutes after Phillips was on CNN. "Gregg Phillips and crew say at least 3,000,000 votes were illegal. We must do better!"

His Twitter profile says he founded the app "VoteStand," an "anti-vote fraud app." On Nov. 11, four days after the election, he tweeted, "Completed analysis of database of 180 million voter registrations. Number of non-citizen votes exceeds 3 million.Consulting legal team."

Two days later he added, "We have verified more than three million votes cast by non-citizens. We are joining .@TrueTheVote to initiate legal action. #unrigged"

Phillips provided no evidence to back up his claims, but his tweets were picked up by right wing blogs across the internet, including InfoWars, a website that regularly pushes conspiracy theories. InfoWars has said the Sandy Hook shooting was staged by the government and that the government was involved in 9/11 and the Oklahoma City bombings.

"Your reputation is amazing," Trump told Alex Jones, the website's founder, in an appearance on his radio program during the campaign. "I will not let you down."

Trump began to tweet about voter fraud after Phillips' tweets appeared on InfoWars.

Phillips continues to promise that the results of his "investigation" will be made public eventually. He told CNN it would be "another few months."

A study from News 21, a project funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, found 56 cases of non-U.S. citizens voting out of hundreds of millions of votes cast between 2000 and 2011.

Florida Gov. Rick Scott tried in 2012 to implement a "voter purge" of what he said were hundreds of thousands of illegal registrants from the state's rolls but dropped the effort after his list narrowed to fewer than 200 voters and serious errors were found with the state's methodology.

A joint statement earlier this month from secretaries of state, a majority of whom are Republicans, said there is no evidence to support Trump's claims.

"In the lead-up to the November 2016 election, secretaries of state expressed their confidence in the systemic integrity of our election process as a bipartisan group, and they stand behind that statement today," the statement said.

Image via the White House