Verified? Really?
The Washington Post dug into the likely source of Trump’s wild claim that millions of people voted illegally.
On Nov. 13, Gregg Phillips, a former Texas Health and Human Services Commission deputy commissioner, tweeted about there being 3 million votes that were cast by noncitizens.
https://twitter.com/JumpVote/status/797843232436748288
Phillips hasn’t provided any evidence for that claim. InfoWars and Drudge picked it up, but Drudge labeled it a “claim.”
When Matt Drudge qualifies something with “Claim:,” it’s worth treating it with skepticism.
The rumor-debunking site Snopes looked at Phillips’s claim and found no evidence for it. (It also noted that Phillips has a history of implying that Obamacare will lead to the registration of millions of immigrants here illegally.) Phillips replied on Twitter, “One might imagine someone would have called me.” That’s easier said than done; when I was looking at this earlier this month I couldn’t find a way to contact Phillips. An email to True the Vote, a conservative group focused on the issue of voter fraud (for which Phillips claims to be a board member), did not receive a reply.
Phillips has said that he will release evidence of his claims at some point in the future — but not to the media. As of writing, there simply isn’t any data to that effect.
Yet Trump – who will be president in a few weeks – is happy to blat out the accusation all the same. He’s the same reckless malevolent narcissist he’s always been.
Ah, but one difference is, there are unfortunately yuuge amounts of data supporting your claim, bigly. (There are other differences too, I hasten to add!) ;)
https://www.facebook.com/144310995587370/photos/a.271728576178944.71555.144310995587370/1354113497940441/?type=3&theater
xkcd: Where citations come from
I was having a disagreement with someone years ago about something, and he said he had verified it by checking two sources, which he obligingly provided for me. I checked his sources…one of the “independent” sources was simply citing the other one.
Most people don’t understand how that doesn’t constitute two sources. That is one source, repeated. Then, this man I was talking with cited it on his blog. Now we have “three” sources for the next person checking. And none of the sources were what I would call reliable, but that is a separate issue…how to tell the reliability of sources, like my student who cited a site dealing with supernatural things (even by their name) on a paper; when I told him that was not acceptable, he found a new site, a Raelian site, which looked so “sciency” that he had no way of knowing it was not a good site, unless he knew what the Rael in the name meant.
Sounds like the guy who’s been explaining things to me on Twitter for two days. He’s wrong every single time, and he does it with massive confidence and disdain.