title:  Trump’s ‘Illegal Votes’ Lie Just Turned The Whole Recount Issue Into One Long Alex Jones Episode
text: By now, we ve all seen the tweet where Trump said that he won the popular vote in a landslide if  millions of illegal votes  are taken out of the count. We also all know that Trump wouldn t be saying a damn thing if he were confident that possible recounts didn t have a hope in hell of overturning the election results. Regardless, where in the name of all that s profane is he getting this idea that millions of illegal votes were cast?Trump is a conspiracy theorist. He believes people like Alex Jones. And Alex Jones is probably the most prominent person to  report  on these supposedly illegal votes right now. According to Politifact, about six days after the election, InfoWars published a story with a headline that reading:  Report: 3 Million Votes in Presidential Election Cast by Illegal Aliens. That s a rather serious claim to make. This is Alex Jones, though, so wondering if he has legitimate supporting evidence for that claim is pointless. He actually got his number from a pair of tweets from Gregg Phillips, the founder of VoteStand. VoteStand is a voter-fraud detection app, and he says he s gone through 180 million voter registrations and found 3 million  non-citizens  on the rolls:Completed analysis of database of 180 million voter registrations.Number of non-citizen votes exceeds 3 million.Consulting legal team.  Gregg Phillips (@JumpVote) November 11, 2016We have verified more than three million votes cast by non-citizens.We are joining .@TrueTheVote to initiate legal action. #unrigged  Gregg Phillips (@JumpVote) November 13, 2016Sprinkled throughout Phillips  Twitter feed are more tweets claiming he s got the evidence, but he won t release it to Politifact or anybody else. Yet, just the existence of tweets from an app founder who s paranoid as all fuck about voter fraud is enough for Jones, which is enough for Trump. So Trump will loudly proclaim he won the popular vote, because obviously.And there you have it. We have a president who s likely to turn the next four years into a giant InfoWars episode. It s enough to make us want to put our fists through a window.Featured image via Drew Angerer/Getty Images