REUTERS/David Becker
Gregg Phillips, a man President Donald Trump has presented as an expert on voter fraud, was registered to vote in three states during the 2016 election, the Associated Press reports. Phillips runs the conservative group True The Vote, which claims to have collected evidence of people registering to vote in multiple states, and has threatened to release those people’s names as evidence of voter fraud. But Phillips, himself, was simultaneously registered in Alabama, Mississippi, and Texas during the 2016 election, the Associated Press found. While the latter two registries were not active, elections officials said Phillips would have been able to vote there by producing a valid ID and applying to update his address while at the voting site. Multiple registries for a single person are not uncommon, as a person sometimes remains registered in a state even after they have moved to another. In the Trump White House, alone, advisor Steve Bannon, press secretary Sean Spicer, and treasury secretary nominee Steven Mnuchin are double-registered, as are Trump’s daughter Tiffany Trump, and Trump’s son-in-law and advisor Jared Kushner.
But Phillips has suggested that multiple registrations are signs of voter fraud. Without presenting any evidence, Phillips has claimed that 3 million people cast illegal votes in the presidential election. Trump has gone on to parrot the claim after it was picked up by right-wing news outlets. Shortly after his inauguration, Trump told congressional leaders that he lost the popular vote as a result of up to 5 million illegal ballots cast against him.
Trump has directly cited Phillips in attempt to defend the claim. “Look forward to seeing the final results of VoteStand,” Trump tweeted on Friday. “Gregg Phillips and crew say at least 3,000,000 votes were illegal. We must do better!”
Interviewed by The Daily Beast, Phillips refused to provide evidence of the voter fraud he says he has discovered. A history of bad business deals and close brushes with ethics rules in Texas led the research director of Texans for Public Justice to describe him as “one of our revolving door kind of hustlers.”