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Donald Trump calls voter fraud probe but daughter Tiffany registered in two states

US President Donald Trump has called for a national investigation into voter fraud, including people who registered to vote in two states - even though one of his daughters and his campaign chief have done so.

Tiffany Trump is registered to vote in two states, New York and Pennsylvania, The Washington Post reported.

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Trump to investigate voter fraud

President Donald Trump, still claiming voter fraud cost him the popular vote despite a lack of evidence, tweeted that he is calling for an investigation into the matter.

She is not the only person close to Trump who has this distinction. His campaign chief Stephen Bannon registered in both Florida and New York, The Sarasota Herald-Tribune reported on Tuesday.

And Trump's Treasury Secretary nominee Steve Mnuchin is registered to vote in two states as well, CNN reported.

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The voter registration of Bannon drew a complaint during the campaign from a group that opposed Trump, but ultimately election officials in Sarasota County, Florida, dropped the complaint.

On Wednesday, the Sarasota County Supervisor of Elections office removed Bannon from the voter roll based on information received from the New York City Board of Elections, Ron Turner, a Sarasota elections official, said. Bannon did not vote in Sarasota County.

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Bannon registered to vote in Miami but did not vote there.

In August, Bannon switched his voter registration to Sarasota County. The global activist group Avaaz filed a complaint with the Florida Division of Elections on October 19, claiming Bannon did not live at the Sarasota County address.

The address in Sarasota County was at the home of Breitbart News writer Andrew Badaloto. Bannon ran the conservative news outlet until August.

But Bannon did not vote in Sarasota County either. On October 14, he registered to vote at an address on West 40th Street in New York City, Thomas Connolly, a spokesman for the New York State Board of elections, said.

Bannon remains registered to vote in New York and voted in the November 8 election, Barbara Brunson, a clerk at the New York City Board of Elections, said. He voted by mail.

Florida Division of Elections deputy counsel Lydia Atkinson wrote in a January 11 letter to the person that filed the complaint that the state would take no further action after looking into it.

"These allegations are neither facially sufficient or do not set out an incident of 'election fraud' as defined," she wrote.

Kendall Coffey, a Democrat and election law expert in Florida, said voters commonly do not take the time to cancel a voter registration when they move and re-register in a new location. That's common for college students, for example.

"It is not a crime to be registered in two states as long as, at the time of each registration, the voter's residency was claimed truthfully," Coffey, a former US attorney in Miami, said.

"Residency is principally a matter of the voter's intent as long as there is some accompanying physical movement to the new location. If one intends the new location to be his or her residence, and has a residence in the new jurisdiction to which movement has been made, courts will usually find that to be sufficient."

Trump tweeted Wednesday morning: "I will be asking for a major investigation into VOTER FRAUD, including those registered to vote in two states, those who are illegal and even, those registered to vote who are dead (and many for a long time). Depending on results, we will strengthen up voting procedures!"

Trump has repeatedly claimed widespread national voter fraud, but there is no evidence to support his claims.

On November 27, he tweeted that he "won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally". The fact-checking website PolitiFact rated his claim "Pants on Fire".

Trump probe

Trump's pledge to call for an investigation comes after he told members of Congress on Monday at a private reception that he believed he lost the popular vote because millions of undocumented immigrants cast ballots for his opponent, his press secretary said on Tuesday.

Trump believes as many as 5 million people voted illegally in the last US election, White House press secretary Sean Spicer told reporters.

Democrat Hillary Clinton won the national popular vote by about 2.9 million ballots, but Trump won enough states to secure 306 Electoral College votes and the presidency. Since his election, he has repeatedly said he would have won the popular vote if not for massive voter fraud that benefited Clinton.

Trump has repeatedly made the unsubstantiated claim that the 2016 election was tainted by massive voter fraud. He has not provided any credible evidence to back up the claim. He didn't specify which agency would handle the inquiry and didn't say whether he had already issued such a directive.

The allegation has been disputed by Democratic and Republican officials, including the state officials who run the nation's election systems. Several said Trump's allegations of voter fraud undermine confidence in US democracy.

Previous probes by academic researchers, the Department of Justice and other government agencies have found little evidence of large-scale voter fraud in the US.

The National Association of Secretaries of State said there was no evidence of such fraud in 2016.

"We are not aware of any evidence that supports the voter fraud claims made by President Trump," the group of state elections officials, a majority of them Republicans, said in a statement on Tuesday. "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."

Republicans disagree

Trump's own legal team said that the 2016 election "was not tainted by fraud" in response to a recount effort by Green Party candidate Jill Stein in Michigan.

"All available evidence suggests that the 2016 general election was not tainted by fraud or mistake," Trump's lawyers said in a legal filing on December 1.

Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted, a Republican, said in a reply to Trump's tweet that it would be difficult for illegal voters to cast ballots.

"We conducted a review 4 years ago in Ohio & already have a statewide review of 2016 election underway," he said in a tweet on Wednesday. "Easy to vote, hard to cheat."

Speaking to reporters on Wednesday, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi said Trump's call for an investigation was a sign of his insecurity.

"I frankly feel very sad about the president making this claim," Pelosi, a California Democrat, said. "I felt sorry for him. I even prayed for him, but then I prayed for the United States of America."

House Speaker Paul Ryan, a Wisconsin Republican, told reporters on Tuesday that he had seen "no evidence" of massive fraud in November's elections.

Spicer on Tuesday referred to a study "that came out of Pew in 2008 that showed 14 per cent of people who have voted were non-citizens" as evidence that 2016 voter fraud was widespread.

Pew Charitable Trusts spokeswoman Kelly Hoffman said that no such study exists.

"We did not publish a report in 2008 on that topic," she said in an email. "Our work has focused on inefficient and inaccurate voter registration processes, which are not evidence of fraud at polling places."

Trump has previously cited a separate study from 2014 that found 14 per cent of non-citizens may have been registered to vote in 2008.

The widely disputed study, first described in a 2014 Washington Post opinion piece, found that some of those non-citizens might have voted. The newspaper, at the time, published a series of rebuttals questioning the data and conclusions and has since posted a note on it saying that another peer-reviewed article argued the findings "were biased and that the authors' data do not provide evidence of non-citizen voting in US elections".

A 2012 study by Pew found that as many as one in eight voter registrations in the US either had significant inaccuracies or were no longer valid. The author of that study, David Becker, said the research did not back up Trump's claim of vote fraud.

"As I've noted before, voting integrity better in this election than ever before," Becker, now the executive director of the Centre for Election Innovation & Research, said in a Twitter post on Tuesday. "Zero evidence of fraud."

Asked repeatedly on Tuesday whether Trump would pursue an investigation into the alleged large-scale voter fraud, Spicer said "anything is possible", before turning to other issues.

"Maybe we will [investigate]," Spicer said. "We'll see where we go from here but right now the President's focus is on putting people back to work."

Matthew Miller, former director of the Department of Justice's Office of Public Affairs during the Obama administration, called Trump's planned investigation "dangerous".

"The federal government is now going to launch an investigation into something where there is no evidence any wrongdoing has occurred, all because the President's ego is hurt," he said.

"Then Republicans will use that investigation to justify restrictions that make it harder for people to vote."

The Washington Post, Bloomberg, MCT

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