Donald Trump's new explanation for losing the popular vote

Donald Trump lost the popular vote by 2.2 million votes. Photo / AP

Something has clearly been gnawing at Donald Trump. Sure, he won the electoral vote and therefore the presidency, but he lost the popular vote by 2.2 million votes - and counting.

Counting mostly in California, where Democrat Hillary Clinton won easily and where there are 1.4 million more ballots to tally.

Trump's victory is marred by that fact: He will be the president, but more people voted against him.

"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," he tweeted.

Clinton didn't really win the popular vote, he's arguing, because millions of votes were invalid.

This claim that millions of illegal immigrants voted is itself the result of a random tweet. On November 13, Gregg Phillips, a former Texas Health and Human Services Commission deputy commissioner, tweeted about there being three million votes that were cast by noncitizens. He has been asked to provide evidence, without having done so.

Regardless, the story was picked up by the conspiracy-theory hawking site InfoWars, a story that was linked out at the top of the Drudge Report on November 14.

The rumour-debunking site Snopes looked at Phillips' claim and found no evidence for it.

Also, Phillips made his claim only five days after the election. Meaning that his data apparently came in before any number of states certified their results. And one examination of a database of voter fraud found 56 cases of noncitizens voting, over 11 years.

But this isn't rooted in logic. Trump has been complaining about the voting process for years, and apparently winning the presidency isn't going to change that.

That's the broader point that's worth raising.

The President-elect of the United States is willing to embrace unproven and highly questionable data to raise questions about the electoral process even after he won simply to soften the blow of losing the popular vote.