A political scientist who produced data that is suspected to be the source of President Donald Trump's claims about voter fraud said that the Trump administration interpreted his study incorrectly.
Brian Schaffner, a University of Massachusetts political scientist, told CNN's Wolf Blitzer Tuesday that a 2014 study he designed did not support President Trump's conclusions.
In the study, some voters had said they were non-citizens, then he and colleagues talked to some of the voters who said that, and discovered that they accidentally clicked the wrong button in the study, said Schaffner. It turns out, all were actual citizens.
"The people that we could confirm were not citizens, there were basically no voters among that group," said Schaffner.
Regarding the president's claims that 3 to 5 million non-citizens voted, Schaffner said: "It's absurd… it's just not even plausible.
"It's very frustrating as I'm sure you can imagine. The data certainly do not show that," Schaffner added.
"Our best data would suggest that nobody who is a non-citizen voted in 2016. Now it's possible that there's a handful of people nationwide out there that were missing, but that there's anything systematic, or that there's anything that would have swung an election, it's just not plausible. There's no evidence for that whatsoever," Schaffner told Blitzer.
White House press secretary Sean Spicer did not say which study Trump had read to get his claim of 3 to 5 million illegal voters. The report Schaffner designed found more than 14 percent of non-citizens indicated they were registered to vote, according to CNN.
On Wednesday, Trump called for a "major investigation" into voter fraud in the 2016 presidential election.
© 2026 Newsmax. All rights reserved.