Offering no evidence, Trump claims voter fraud cost him 2016 win in New Hampshire

Offering no evidence to support a charge of major election fraud in the 2016 elections, President Donald Trump again claimed on Thursday that he lost the state of New Hampshire to Hillary Clinton because of widespread illegal voting, which he said involved 'thousands and thousands' of people coming in from other states to cast ballots against him.

"New Hampshire was taken away, it was taken away from us," the President said at a campaign rally in Manchester, New Hampshire.

"We should have won New Hampshire," he told the crowd.

Before flying to New Hampshire, the President made the same claim - again without any evidence - as he stood on the tarmac before boarding Air Force One.

"New Hampshire should have been won last time, except we had a lot of people come in at the last moment," as the President once again repeated a conspiracy theory that voters from Massachusetts and other states came en masse to New Hampshire to vote against him in 2016.

Granite State officials said last year there was no evidence to support Mr. Trump's claim of fraud.

Back in 2018, Mr. Trump told reporters that Massachusetts voters came 'by the hundreds' in buses to vote against him - this time, he said it was in the 'thousands.'

"Thousands and thousands of people, coming in from locations unknown," the President added, as he ignored questions from reporters about where the illegal voters were from.

In 2018, New Hampshire Secretary of State Bill Gardner undertook a full review of the votes cast in New Hampshire in the 2016 election - flagging 142 cases of possible fraud, not the 'thousands' President Trump has talked about.

The New Hampshire Attorney General's office in 2018 found there were examples of buses with out-of-state license plates transporting voters to the polls - but no evidence that the voters on board those buses were from actually from Maine, Vermont, or Massachusetts.

During his time in office, President Trump has repeatedly raised questions about voter fraud, claiming in February of 2019 that there was widespread evidence in California of illegal voting.

"They found a million fraudulent votes," the President told reporters at the White House, after being asked about a GOP election fraud case which invalidated a Congressional race won by Republicans in North Carolina.

But instead of fraudulent votes being cast, California has been removing over 1 million 'inactive' voters from the rolls - people who were registered to vote, but who had not cast a ballot in several elections.

Just this week, the President re-tweeted a claim from a conservative activist, Charlie Kirk, that said the state of California has more people registered than the number of eligible voters.

But the facts don't back that up.

"I'll retweet this stupidity and debunk it, only because the President retweeted it," said elections expert Tom Bonier on Tuesday, as he showed how Kirk was talking about 'inactive' registered voters.

"Inactive, meaning they haven't voted (and often their mail ballots have been returned as undeliverable)," Bonier tweeted.

Cox Media Group