WASHINGTON: President-elect Donald Trump said on Monday said that he had fallen short in the popular vote in the general election only because millions of people had voted illegally, leveling the baseless claim as part of a daylong storm of Twitter posts voicing anger about a three-state recount push. “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,” Mr Trump wrote on Monday afternoon.
The series of posts came one day after Hillary Clinton’s campaign said it would participate in a recount effort being undertaken in Wisconsin, and potentially in similar pushes in Michigan and Pennsylvania, by Jill Stein, who was the Green Party candidate. Mr Trump’s statements revived claims he made during the campaign, as polls suggested he was losing to Ms Clinton, about a rigged and corrupt system.
The Twitter outburst also came as Mr Trump is laboring to fill crucial positions in his Cabinet, with his advisers enmeshed in a rift over whom he should select as secretary of state. On Monday, Kellyanne Conway, a top adviser, extended a public campaign to undermine one contender, Mitt Romney — a remarkable display by a member of a president-elect’s team. In television appearances, she accused Mr Romney of having gone “out of his way to hurt” Mr Trump during the Republican primary contests.
Claims of wide-scale voter fraud have been advanced for years by Republicans, though virtually no evidence of such improprieties has been discovered — especially on the scale of “millions” that Mr Trump claimed. Late on Monday, again without providing evidence, he referred in a Twitter post to “serious voter fraud in Virginia, New Hampshire and California.”
Many of Ms Clinton’s supporters have been galvanised by the notion that vote recounts in the three states — where Mr Trump leads by a combined total of about 1,00,000 votes — could somehow overturn Mr Trump’s commanding Electoral College victory. By announcing, three weeks after Ms Clinton conceded the race, that it would participate in the Wisconsin recount, her team has helped reignite the contentious atmosphere of the campaign, of which Mr Trump’s Twitter barrages were a fixture. After spending almost five days in Palm Beach, Florida, where he celebrated Thanksgiving, Mr Trump made no public statements other than those via Twitter on Monday.
— By arrangement with the New York Times
