US election results: Trump draws on article in UK paper to bolster his voting fraud claim

Donald Trump sparked confusion in the UK by tweeting that the “best pollster in Britain” had concluded the US election was “stolen”.

Mainstream polling organisations were left scratching their heads over who he might be referring to, as most surveys released in the run-up to voting day had given comfortable leads to the eventual victor Joe Biden.

It appears that the outgoing president was in fact referencing an opinion piece in the Sunday Express penned by the director of the right-of-centre Washington DC-based Democracy Institute thinktank, Patrick Basham.

The paper has run a series of polls by the Democracy Institute over the past few months which diverged strongly from the bulk of the industry by predicting a landslide Trump victory.

Watch: What's next for Donald Trump?

Some of the polls have been retweeted by Mr Trump himself.

A flurry of tweets from the White House today included a message from Trump saying: “We believe these people are thieves. The big city machines are corrupt. This was a stolen election.

“Best pollster in Britain wrote this morning that this clearly was a stolen election, that it’s impossible to imagine that Biden outran Obama in some of these states.

“Where it mattered, they stole what they had to steal.”

Mr Basham’s article was entitled “Stalin said it’s not important who votes but how they do the counting”.

He said that the Soviet dictator’s remark “rings eerily true” after the US election.

Stating that the Institute’s polling “pretty much nailed the 2020 election”, he said that other surveys which predicted a Biden victory had overestimated Democrat support and overlooked “five million new Trump voters”.

And he said: “I wrote last Sunday that, should our Biden popular vote projection be off by a couple of points, it would reflect voter fraud rather than our having missed a Biden landslide. My words were prescient.

“Biden did poorly in Florida, Texas, and Ohio, lacked a get-out-the-vote campaign, suffered lower student and minority turnout, and marshalled the most apathetic supporters in memory. “Trump’s party held the Senate, gained numerous House seats, and didn’t lose a state legislature.

“It therefore defies logic Biden secured more votes than Barack Obama. If only valid votes are counted, Trump and Biden share the popular vote.”

Responding to Mr Trump’s original tweet, Joe Twyman of UK-based Deltapoll joked: “Devastated to discover Trump does not think I am the ‘Best pollster in Britain’. Seriously though, while it would be/is easy to make a joke out of this, I really have no idea what he is referring to.”

When the Basham column was identified as the source of the president’s claim, Twyman tweeted: “Needless to say the pollster in question is not British, he's American. Unsurprisingly the rest of the claims are similarly weak in terms of their accuracy.”

Watch: How the US election unfolded

Read More

Trump news - live: President heads to golf course insisting he won

Romney predicts Trump will eventually ‘accept the inevitable’

Trump supporters take to the streets to cry voter fraud as Biden wins

Trump team’s Four Seasons blunder compared to The Thick of It