United States President-elect Donald Trump on Sunday said that he lost the popular vote because millions of people in the United States had voted for his rival Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton.
Although Trump won the electoral votes to be the next President of the United States, former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton won the popular vote or vote of the people. Ever since her evident win for the popular vote, there were conspiracy theories floating on the Internet, which suggested that Clinton had won the popular vote because millions of people voted for her illegally. This theory has been widely debunked.
While Trump's senior advisers on Sunday clashed amongst each other over the appointment of Secretary of State in Trump's administration, the President-elect appeared to focus more on pushing the conspiracy theory of voter fraud for the 2 million more vote Clinton had garnered in popular voting. The Democrat's total tally of votes stood at 64 million.
The accusation was initially spread by conspiracy sites like Infowars.com and was later discredited by fact-checking organisations. The theory garnered most traction after Clinton was declared the winner of popular vote.
Trump took to social networking site Twitter and claimed that not only did he win the Electoral College, he also won the popular vote considering the deduction of millions of "illegal" votes on Clinton's side.
"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," Trump tweeted on Sunday.
He also tweeted a string of posts about the vote recounting in Wisconsin. Trump denounced the Green Party and its leader Jill Stein's attempt to call for a recount in three battleground states, which Trump won. He also ridiculed the Democratic Party for joining the Green Party in the vote recounting attempt.
A group of scientists and activists have claimed that they have found a strange pattern in vote counting in three battlegrounds states which warrants a vote recount. The scientists say that there may have been vote rigging during the vote counting of the 2016 presidential elections. The group had urged Democratic Party's candidate Hillary Clinton to call for a recount, seeing no response Green Party's Jill Stein organised a fundraiser for vote recount in Wisconsin, one of the key states Trump won.
