Less than a week into his presidency, Donald Trump was still focused on an election he had already won.
Trump had captured the Electoral College and become the 45th president of the United States.
But Hillary Clinton had received nearly 2.9 million more votes nationwide.
Trump offered an extraordinary explanation for that difference:
Millions of people, he claimed, had voted illegally.
There was no evidence demonstrating fraud on anything approaching that scale.
Nevertheless, on January 25, Trump announced that he would seek a major federal investigation into voter fraud.
A Claim of 3 to 5 Million Illegal Votes
Two days earlier, Trump met with Democratic and Republican congressional leaders at the White House.
During the meeting, Trump said he believed between 3 million and 5 million illegal votes had been cast in the 2016 election.
If those votes were removed, Trump argued, he would have won the popular vote as well as the Electoral College.
It wasn't the first time he had made such a claim.
After the election, Trump had written on Twitter:
“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.”
But neither Trump nor his administration produced evidence showing that millions of fraudulent votes had been cast.
Sean Spicer Confirms Trump Believes It
The issue quickly reached the White House briefing room.
Reporters asked Press Secretary Sean Spicer whether the new president actually believed millions of people had voted illegally.
Spicer said he did.
“The president does believe that,” Spicer told reporters.
Spicer said Trump based his belief on studies and other information that had been presented to him.
But the White House did not provide evidence documenting millions of illegal votes.
Election officials and researchers had found nothing approaching the scale Trump was describing.
Trump Calls for an Investigation
On January 25, Trump announced his next step on Twitter.
He said he would request a:
“major investigation into VOTER FRAUD.”
Trump said the investigation would examine people registered in two states, people he described as voting illegally and registrations belonging to people who had died.
Those categories required important distinctions.
Being registered in more than one state, for example, does not mean someone voted twice.
Americans move between states, and voter-registration databases are not always immediately updated when they do.
Dead people can also remain on registration lists because election databases sometimes lag behind death records.
An outdated voter registration is not evidence that a fraudulent ballot was cast.
What the Evidence Showed
Individual cases of illegal voting do occur and can be prosecuted.
But extensive research into American elections has consistently found voter fraud to be rare.
Studies examining voter impersonation found incidence rates representing tiny fractions of ballots cast.
Research into noncitizen voting similarly found no evidence that millions of noncitizens were participating in federal elections.
For Trump's claim to explain Clinton's popular-vote advantage, the United States would have needed to experience illegal voting on a massive scale.
No evidence demonstrating such an event emerged.
Winning the Election, Disputing the Popular Vote
Trump's claim was unusual for another reason.
He had won.
The Electoral College determines the presidency, and Trump had secured enough electoral votes to take office.
There was no need for him to win the national popular vote to become president.
Nevertheless, the popular-vote result remained a recurring subject for Trump.
His allegation effectively offered an explanation for the discrepancy:
Trump had not truly been outpolled nationally, he maintained. Illegal voting had created Clinton's advantage.
That assertion transformed what could have remained a statistical footnote of the 2016 election into a federal political issue.
From a Claim to Government Policy
The consequences would extend beyond Trump's tweets.
Several months later, Trump established the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity.
The commission was tasked with studying vulnerabilities in American election systems and examining registration and voting practices.
It quickly became controversial over its requests for state voter information and disagreements about its mission.
In January 2018, Trump dissolved the commission.
It had not produced evidence substantiating his original assertion that millions of illegal votes had been cast in 2016.
An Issue That Would Outlast 2016
The January 2017 controversy is important for reasons extending beyond one disputed statistic.
Trump was beginning his presidency by making large claims about the integrity of an American election without producing evidence sufficient to substantiate them.
The subject would not disappear.
Questions about voter fraud, election security, voter registration and the reliability of American elections would repeatedly return to national politics during Trump's presidency.
In January 2017, however, the issue centered on a straightforward factual question:
Had 3 million to 5 million people illegally voted in the election that had just made Donald Trump president?
The evidence did not support that claim.