One vote, one value?

White House press secretary Sean Spicer has had a busy week. Having just put the inauguration numbers squabble behind him, he found himself defending Donald Trump’s reprise of his earlier assertion that "millions" of illegal immigrants voted for Hillary Clinton. This time the president is reported to have been more precise: there were three to five million of them - and, according to a tweet late last year, Clinton won three states with their help, "Virginia, New Hampshire and California." If those figures were accurate, they would represent a high proportion of the total nineteen million turnout in those states. Strategically subtract five million votes across the three states and they all move to Trump’s side of the ledger. But the most important driver of the new estimate, of course, is the amount by which Clinton outpolled Trump across the nation: 2.9 million. The number of fraudulent votes needs to be bigger than that.