Donald Trump thinks dead voters are going to cost him the election

(Image credit: Sarah Rice/Getty Images)

published 18 October 2016

Donald Trump's latest "rigged" election theory involves people without a pulse. At a campaign rally in Green Bay, Wisconsin, on Monday night, Trump floated the idea that "1.8 million deceased individuals" will vote for "somebody else," insinuating those votes could cost him the presidential election. "People who died 10 years ago are still voting," Trump said, hours after he tweeted that Republican leaders "deny" that there is "large scale voter fraud happening on and before election day."

Talking Points Memo concluded Trump pulled that "unfounded yet oddly specific prediction" from a Pew study done in 2012. The study found voter databases were so outdated that they included "1.8 million active voter registrations" from people who were deceased. While Trump got the figure right, what he failed to note is that there wasn't actually any evidence these deceased voters cast fraudulent ballots.

His theorizing didn't stop there. Trump also suggested Monday that the only reason President Obama won North Carolina in 2008 was because of votes from undocumented immigrants — a problem Trump claimed still exists today. "We have voters all over the country where they are not even citizens of the country and they are voting," he said, a claim, The Guardian noted , that was "without evidence."