The vice chair of President Donald Trump’s voter integrity commission said Wednesday he isn’t sure if Hillary Clinton won the popular vote in the 2016 presidential election.
In fact, she won by 2.9 million votes, according to revised and certified final election results from all 50 states and the District of Columbia. That’s a clear 2.1% margin.
But when asked by NBC’s Katy Tur if he was suggesting that Clinton did not win the popular vote, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach provided an ambiguous response.
“We may never know the answer,” Kobach said.
Kobach repeated this claim when pressed, later conceding that, “Based on the data, you could make some very educated guesses.”
He applied a similar skepticism to the votes cast in favor of Trump, which Kobach said were “absolutely” in doubt as well.
Kobach rejected the notion that the President’s voter commission — which met for the first time Wednesday morning — is a means of validating Trump’s claims that he lost the popular vote because of millions of illegally-cast votes.
“Even if you could prove that a certain number of votes were cast by ineligible voters, for example, you wouldn’t know how they voted,” Kobach said.
Kobach has already received a lot of pushback from lawmakers on both sides of the aisle. Many state representatives decried his request last month for certain voter registration data.
On Tuesday, four top Democratic lawmakers sent a letter to Pence requesting Kobach’s removal from the voter commission, and more than 70 lawmakers signed a letter to Kobach urging him to withdraw his information request due to security and privacy concerns.