Trump drama rolls on: Disputes, falsehoods hit transition

The president-elect didn’t cite any evidence, but transition team spokesman Jason Miller said today that two studies from recent years appeared to validate his claim.

On Sunday, Trump tweeted that “serious voter fraud” occurred in California, New Hampshire, and Virginia, states won by his opponent, Democrat Hillary Clinton.

President-elect Donald Trump, behind by about 2.2 million votes, tweeted one week after the contest that, “If the election were based on total popular vote, I would have campaigned in N.Y., Florida and California and won even bigger and more easily”.

News organizations and political analysts say no evidence supports Trump’s claim. Clinton, however, maintains a more than 2 million vote advantage in the popular vote count.

But the primary author of the Pew study said fraud was not a factor. The nation’s election system is decentralized, a patchwork of state laws whose differences would be almost impossible to target on a large scale, said Wendy Weiser, director of the Democracy Program at the nonpartisan Brennan Center for Justice. “I oversaw the entire report, start to finish. There was not a finding of fraud whatsoever”.

Stein said on MSNBC Monday that she knows she won’t win – but she’s concerned enough about hacking of election machines that it’s worth the inquiry.

“These were not results from fraud or any intentional act”, he said, but the result of not “keeping up with people as they move and some cases when they die”.

On Monday, he also threatened to end the thaw in United States relations with Cuba, following the death of Fidel Castro, unless Havana makes concessions on human rights and opening up its economy.

He concluded his post saying that his resignation now will allow the state to fill his vacancy with someone who will vote for Trump. It won’t change the outcome, and it will increase divisions in a nation turning into a permanent grudgeocracy of “us against them”.

WASHINGTON (AP) – Donald Trump’s tweets can’t erase the reality that he lost the popular vote in this month’s election, according to The Associated Press’ vote-counting operation. The number “45” – a reference to Trump becoming the country’s 45 president – is stitched on the side.

Current and former officials in the three states Trump mentioned also disputed his claims.

In an unusual public airing of internal machinations, Trump senior adviser Kellyanne Conway warned Sunday that the president-elect’s supporters would feel “betrayed” if he tapped Romney as secretary of state.

Green Party nominee Jill Stein received 51,463 votes in MI and has signaled she plans to ask for the Board of State Canvassers for a recount.

Stein’s Wisconsin recount request included an affidavit from University of MI computer scientist J. Alex Halderman stating that a hand recount is the only way to determine whether there could have been a cyberattack that affected the results. His Michigan margin was a hair’s breadth 0.22 percent of the state’s votes.

About 95 percent of all ballots cast in Wisconsin are paper ballots, the vast majority of which are tabulated by optical scanners, with the remainder counted by hand.

Although he has confidence in the work of local registrars across the state, Wertz says he would like to see election laws tightened, to verify that an applicant is a USA citizen, or in the case of a college student, registered to vote in only one locality.