With votes continuing to be counted from the general election two weeks ago, Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton continued to increase her lead in the popular vote over President-elect Donald Trump. The gap between the two contenders stood at two million votes, according to reports released Thursday night. Yet despite these reports there are still allegations of massive voter fraud which enabled Clinton to win the popular vote.
Republican President-elect Mr Trump won the election by winning a majority of the electoral college votes, and he will be inaugurated in January. But with votes still being counted, the Cook Political Report has his tally at 62.2 million and hers at 64.2 million. It is the fifth time in American history that the winner of the popular vote has lost the election.
In 2000, Democrat Al Gore's final lead over George W Bush, who won the election after a prolonged legal challenge, was nearly 544,000.The Supreme Court ultimately decided that election by awarding Mr Bush a win in the contested state of Florida.
This year, Hillary Clinton scored large tallies in states like California, but Donald Trump won most of the so-called swing states, which ultimately decide the outcome of elections. The electoral college system favors candidates who win by a small margin in many states over those that win by a landslide in just a few, the idea behind that being that this method represents the entire gamut of voters rather than specific states with large cities where voters may lean in a direction that is opposed by most states.
A group of academics, lawyers and data experts are also trying to persuade the Clinton team to join their effort to investigate the results in three states to check that there was no foreign computer hacking manipulating the outcome. They are curious why Clinton fared worse in counties that relied on electronic voting machines compared to paper ballots and optical scanners.
But her campaign has not indicated any interest in joining a fight for a recount. The Green party candidate, Jill Stein, is raising funds to request a recount in the same states - Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, all won by Mr. Trump.
However other sources maintain that Trump actually won the popular vote. Numerous reports of voter fraud, of dead people having been represented by other voters and of voters who managed to vote many times have surfaced. The PEW research center claims that as many as 24 million voter registrations in the US are inaccurate, more than 1.8 million deceased people are listed as voters and more than 2.75 million people are registered to vote in more than one state.
Another vote fraud monitoring group, VoteFraud,org, claimed that 3 million illegal citizens voted in the US election. Almost all were expected to vote for Clinton as Trump favors evicting illegal citizens from the US. Thus it is entirely possible that despite voter counts showing Clinton leading the popular vote, there was widespread voter fraud and in fact Donald Trump is the winner of the popular vote as well as the electoral college.