Trump is RIGHT that illegal voting hit the presidential election, say experts - even if it wasn't in the millions, his critics have NOT proven he was wrong 

• e-mail

Donald Trump was vilified for his tweet saying '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.'

It was dubbed 'false' by CNN, 'bogus' by the Washington Post, and rated as 'pants on fire' by Politifact.

But experts warn today that the rapid media condemnation of the president-elect is itself flawed - and that he was at the very least partially right in his claims.

They said it is certain that - among other things - non-citizens were registered to vote and cast ballots.

It is also certain that there were other instances of illegal voting, including people who vote under false identities, and people who cast ballots in multiple states, which most attacks on Trump's tweet chose to ignore, they warned.

SCROLL DOWN FOR VIDEO 

More right than wrong: Experts say the rush to rubbish Trump's claims about illegal voting obscures that he is correct that it happens and that it is only the scale which is in doubt

Illegal backing? Hillary Clinton, who is ahead in the popular vote - and who appeared with Katy Perry in new York on Tuesday night - may have benefited, experts say

Voting under way: This was the scene in Los Angeles on the day America decided 

But the experts spoken to by DailyMail.com questioned Trump's estimate that 'millions of people' cast illegitimate ballots for Clinton, noting that the lack of polling on illegal voting trends makes it difficult to estimate how many people vote illegally in the presidential election.

'We know for certain there are non-citizens registered and voting across the country,' said Hans von Spakovsky, a former Federal Election Commission official and manager of the Election Law Reform Initiative at the Heritage Foundation. 

'There's been a great deal of controversy over how big are those numbers.'

Trump has faced widespread media criticism for his comments, with 'fact-checking' websites like Politifact saying that there is 'zero evidence' that millions voted illegally for Clinton.

But the lack of evidence is hardly a surprise or an indication that Trump is wrong: there is a lack of reliable data - and a lack of any investigation so far into this cycle's elections.

Compiling information on the subject can be difficult, since people who have voted illegally can be reluctant to admit it to pollsters.

The most recent serious attempt to measure the number of non-citizen voters found that illegal voting is a widespread problem, although not as prevalent as Trump's comments suggested.

The 2013 study was conducted by Jesse Richman, a professor at Old Dominion University. 

The report was based on surveys by the Cooperative Congressional Election Studies in 2008 and 2010, which asked respondents for citizen status and whether they had voted.

Hacked? Jill Stein is claiming the voting machines in Pennsylvania may have been vulnerable to electronic interference

Based on the data, Richman estimated that 6.4 percent of non-citizens voted in the 2008 presidential election, which would translate to around 1.2 million votes. According to Richman, about 80 percent of these non-citizens voted for Barack Obama against John McCain.

But the professor says his findings still wouldn't account for Hillary Clinton's entire 2.2 million lead against Trump in the popular vote.

According to Richman, if the numbers for 2008 also held true for 2016, non-citizen voters 'would add only 834,318 votes to Clinton's popular vote margin. This is little more than a third of the total margin.'

For Trump's claims to be accurate under that scenario, over one million of Clinton's votes would have had to be cast through other illegal means -- such as people voting for her under false names or multiple times.

The study is well-known and has been widely-publicized, which suggests that claims that Trump based his tweet on 'a rumor that initially spread because of one guy on Twitter' - Gregg Phillips, a conservative activist - are themselves baseless.

That allegation was made by the Huffington Post which, in the article making the claim conceded that its assertion was being made without any evidence.

'It doesn’t seem far-fetched to think that Trump, an avid Twitter user, might have first encountered the claim somewhere on social media,' it said, presenting no evidence that he had been inspired by the 'one guy'.

The Heritage Foundation's von Spakovsky said that what is clear is that Trump is more right than those calling his claim 'false'. 

'Trump is a lot more right than his critics who try to claim there is absolutely no voter fraud and no voting by non-citizens,' said von Spakovsky. 'We know that that is absolutely not true.'

Another 2013 study on Hispanic adults by pollster John McLaughlin found that 13 percent of non-citizens responding to the survey said they were registered to vote in the United States. However, the study did not ask whether these people actually voted in an election.

Although there have been more recent claims about 'millions' of non-citizens voting in the 2016 election, these have yet to be substantiated by published data.

Another election monitoring group called True the Vote says it has been investigating illegal voting and voter fraud as well. The group said it supports Trump's statement about the 'impact' of illegal voting, but stopped short of backing Trump's claim on the specific numbers.

'True the Vote absolutely supports President-elect Trump's recent comment about the impact of illegal voting, as reflected in the national popular vote,' said the group.

Evidence: Richman estimated that 6.4 percent of non-citizens voted in the 2008 presidential election, which would translate to around 1.2 million votes.  According to Richman, about 80 percent of these non-citizens voted for Barack Obama against John McCain.

While True the Vote has not yet published a review of the 2016 election, it said it is compiling data and would release a 'comprehensive study' in several months.

Others disagree that voting fraud is a large-scale problem in the United States.

The Brennan Center for Justice released a study in 2007 called 'The Truth About Voter Fraud,' which contended that allegations of illegal voting were 'greatly exaggerated.'

According to the study – which was based on anecdotal media accounts of voter impersonation, not any other sort of fraud – rates of illegal voting in the U.S. were between 0.00004 percent and 0.0009 percent.

And Richman's study itself has been questioned by one of the academics who was involved in producing the data that it used for its analysis.

Brian Schaffner, a a political science professor at University of Massachusetts-Amherst, wrote in Politico that people who self-identified as non-citizens and were recorded in the data as having voted were likely to simply have filled the survey incorrectly, making any conclusions irrelevant.

Richman has published an academic paper refuting that assertion - another layer of claim and counter-claim over the numbers.

Disgrace: DailyMail.com highlighted a series of vote fraudsters, among them Sister Marguerite Kloos, a 55-year-old nun in Delhi Township, Ohio, who voted in a dead nun's name in 2012, and Kent Hallum, the father of a state representative in  Marion, Arkansas, who was involved in a vote-buying ring

In fact, due to the lack of polling data, much of the reporting and studies on illegal voting have relied on anecdotal evidence - and it suggests the problem is real.

Dailymail.com has reported on a number of recent voting fraud convictions, including elaborate vote-buying schemes. In some cases, bribery rings and state officials offered cocaine, alcohol and chicken dinners in exchange for votes or bundles of false absentee ballots. 

Others voted on behalf of dead or incapacitated friends and relatives, or filled out false ballots in the names of unsuspecting handicapped people and Alzheimer's patients.

Even a nun was convicted of voting in someone else's name - in the swing state of Ohio.

Ironically, Trump and his supporters aren't the only ones who have raised concerns about vote integrity since the election. 

Green Party candidate Jill Stein has pushed for recounts of the presidential race in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, alleging that voting machines in the Keystone State may have been susceptible to hacking.

According to an affidavit filed in Pennsylvania on Monday by attorneys for Stein, the state's electronic voting machines have 'serious cybersecurity problems' and could be manipulated by a hacker 'infecting the machines with malware.' They said this could be done by a foreign government or domestic hackers.

The case will be heard next Monday at the commonwealth court in Harrisburg, according to an attorney for Stein.