VoteStand: Donald Trump relies on unknown app to back up claims of voter fraud

The President is relying on one unknown man and an unused app to justify his claim of millions of illegal votes

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump and his wife Melania Trump cast their votes on Election Day at PS 59 November 8, 2016 in New York City (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

Donald Trump is relying on a bizarre, unused app to justify his claims of election fraud.

After weeks of claiming that illegal voting was rife throughout the election, and a promise to launch an inquiry into how that was able to happen, the new President tweeted to say that he had evidence that millions of people had done so.

To do so, he relied on estimates from Gregg Phillips and an app that he created called VoteSound. But there is nothing to suggest that either Mr Phillips or his app are able to demonstrate that voter fraud actually took place.

"Look forward to seeing final results of VoteStand," Mr Trump tweeted, apparently in reference to seeing final data from the app. "Gregg Phillips and crew say at least 3,000,000 votes were illegal. We must do better!"

But VoteStand is an amateur app that allows people to send in their own reports of voter fraud. The app has been downloaded just a few thousand times and is barely used.

When people do use the app, they can only send in a report of a problem, many of which are impossible to verify and might not depict voter fraud at all. One Twitter user pointed out how the app claims to show an instance of voter fraud in a picture of some wires surrounding a voting booth, for instance – but on closer inspection those wires are simply the power cables for a fan that was in the room.

Even if the app detected genuine instances of voter fraud, so few people use it that it would be impossible for three million infractions to have taken place.

The Google Play store shows just a few thousand downloads, and though the iOS App Store doesn't give numbers for downloads it has received only six ratings, suggesting that it has barely been used. The VoteStand Twitter account has only 614 followers.