President Trump’s election integrity commission will finally hold its first public working session on Sept. 12 in New Hampshire.
The panel will meet at St. Anselm College in Manchester, New Hampshire, according to a notice published Thursday in the Federal Register, and anyone can register to attend.
Trump established the advisory group in May and charged it with uncovering vulnerabilities in America’s election system that lead to ‘fraudulent voter registrations and fraudulent voting.’
The president has insisted that ‘millions’ of illegal votes were cast against him last November – enough to give Hillary Clinton a moral victory by winning the popular vote.
But there has been no evidence to back up his claim.
President Donald Trump is just 3 million cases of voter fraud away from proving his claim of widespread wrongdoing, and his voter commision was set up to make the case
A notice published in the Federal Register on Thursday lays out details of the meeting, which will take place Sept. 12 in Manchester, New Hampshire
Trump won the Electoral College tally by a 306-232 margin, stunning the nation, but he wasn’t satisfied.
Less than three weeks after winning White House, the president tweeted that ‘[i]n addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.’
And just days after being sworn in, he told a group of congressional leaders at a White House reception that widespread voter fraud had threatened his victory.
Reports from that meeting described Trump complaining about between 3 million and 5 million illegal votes.
Clinton collected 2.8 million more votes than Trump, largely by running up the score in Democrat-dominated states like California and New York.
Trump first claimed on November 27, 2016 that he was robbed of ‘millions’ of votes
On July 19, 2017 the president spoke during the election integrity panel’s first meeting, which was held in the White House complex
Asked the next day if Trump actually believed 3 million or more people voted against him fraudulently, then-White House press secretary Sean Spicer told reporters that ‘the president does believe that, I think he’s stated that before, and stated his concern of voter fraud and people voting illegally during the campaign, and continues to maintain that belief based on studies and evidence people have brought to him.’
Hillary Clinton collected nearly 3 million more votes than Trump in the 2016 presidential election but lost in the Electoral College
Trump had earlier cited a 2012 Pew Research Center report that found 1.8 million deceased people on America’s voter rolls and 2.75 million who were improperly registered in more than one state.
Overall, the Pew study found, 24 million U.S. voter registrations – 1 in 8 – are either invalid of ‘significantly inaccurate.’
Pew, however, did not claim that many, or even any, of those people actually voted illegally. it only concluded that they were registered improperly.
Still, two White House officials told DailyMail.com over the summer that the president maintains his belief that the 2016 election was rife with fraud.
Trump’s 12-member election commission held a 2-hour meeting in Washington on July 19, dominated by a speech by Vice President Mike Pence and the swearing-in of members.
The president told commission members that ‘every time voter fraud occurs, it cancels out the vote of a lawful citizen and undermines democracy. Can’t let that happen.’
‘Any form of illegal or fraudulent voting, whether by non-citizens or the deceased, and any form of voter suppression or intimidation must be stopped.’
Vice President Mike Pence co-chairs the commisson with Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach (right)
He also reiterated his claim, based on anecdotes from people he met on the campaign trail, about ‘voter inconsistencies and irregularities which they saw, in some cases having to do with very large numbers of people in certain states.’
Two days later, during then-White House Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci’s only press briefing before his unceremonious firing 10 days later, he was asked about Trump’s ‘3 million’ claim.
‘If the president says it – let me do more research on it – my guess is that there’s probably some level of truth to that,’ he told reporters.
‘I think what we have found sometimes is that the president says stuff, some of you guys in the media think it’s not true. It turns out it’s closer to the truth than people think.’
On the day of the commission’s first meeting, vice chair Kris Kobach, the Kansas secretary of state, told MSNBC that it was impossible to say for sure that Clinton actually won the popular vote.
‘We may never know the answer to that,’ Kobach said. ‘We will probably never know the answer to that question because even if you could prove that a certain number votes were cast by ineligible voters, for example, you wouldn’t know how they voted.’
Commission co-chair Kris Kobach, the Kansas secretary of state, claimed in July that ‘we may never know’ whether Hillary Clinton legitimately polled more votes than Trump
The conservative Heritage Foundation maintains a database of proven voter fraud cases, with 1,071 cases including 938 criminal convictions.
Some, however, date back to the 1970s.
Recent cases of election fraud are both scant and bipartisan.
A Virginia man drew a 100-day jail sentence this month for faking voter registration forms while working with a Democratic Party operative.
An Iowa woman pleaded guilty in June to voting twice in 2016, each time casting an absentee ballot for Trump.
She told investigators that she believed Trump’s campaign-trail claims that the November election would be ‘rigged,’ and feared that her first ballot would be illegally changed to benefit Clinton.
A Republican election judge in Illinois cast an absentee ballot for her late husband, who died before he could fillit out on his own.
More than 137.7 million Americans voted in the 2016 elections.