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When Donald Trump tweeted that "millions" of people voted illegally in the presidential election, headline writers were quick to point out that he had no evidence. The US
president-elect had not given his source but fact-checking websites and newspapers traced it to a two-week-old "random tweet" by a little known former Republican party official in
Texas. Gregg Phillips claimed on 12 November to have found "more than three million votes cast by non-citizens" – but he too failed to provide data. Accused of the very topical sin
of spreading fake news, all the way to the White House, Phillips is unrepentant. He stands by his original assertion, though he still offers no evidence, and denies that he was Trump's
inspiration in any case. "The tweet that I put out had died down; nothing else was being said," Phillips told the Guardian on Tuesday. "And then when Mr Trump came out with
his tweet, it seemed to erupt again because somebody erroneously linked me to Mr Trump's tweet. The campaign came out and cleared that up: what he was talking about was a Washington
Post article." Indeed, when asked to explain Trump's claim of illegal voting, his transition team pointed journalists to a 2014 article in the Washington Post by two academics –
which the Post's website has since prefaced with a disclaimer – along with a 2012 Pew Research study. Neither proved that non-citizens voted in 2016. Media analysts still believe,
however, that Phillips's "Twitter-born conspiracy theory", as the Washington Post put it, is the most likely explanation for Trump's unsubstantiated outburst on 27
November. The episode offers a study in the power of lone activists to make claims that soon become reported with the confidence of facts on myriad websites. It also illustrates the blowback
they can endure when, rightly or wrongly, Trump is perceived as having recycled those claims to serve his dangerously selective worldview. Phillips, a 56-year-old grandfather based in
Austin, Texas, said: "I'm on the edge and you can probably hear it in my voice. In the last couple of days I've been called a child molester. Somebody posted something up
there that I've been arrested for armed robbery; it turned out that if you drilled into that it was some black guy that was 15 years younger than me. They've accused me of being a
Nazi, a fascist, a Russian spy, an Israeli spy – they've called me all sorts of words that I won't even repeat on here." Phillips is no political novice. The former Republican
official in Alabama and Mississippi was managing director of a Super Pac that supported Newt Gingrich's 2012 campaign for president. He has worked for the state governments of
Mississippi and Texas and now runs a company that provides data analytics and fraud protection to healthcare providers. He has also long taken an interest in the issue of voter fraud and
says he is on the board of True the Vote, a conservative campaigning organisation focused on US electoral standards. So it did not come out of the blue when Phillips tweeted four days after
the election: "Completed analysis of database of 180 million voter registrations. Number of non-citizen votes exceeds 3 million. Consulting legal team." Phillips did not provide
any data to support his assertion and still declines to do so. The website PolitiFact rated the claim of 3 million illegal aliens casting votes in the election as false. Other fact-checkers
concurred. But a tweet can travel halfway round the world while the truth is putting on its shoes. On 14 November Infowars, a conspiracy-laden site run by Austin-based shock jock Alex Jones,
ran a story that began: "Three million votes in the US presidential election were cast by illegal aliens, according to Greg Phillips of the VoteFraud.org organisation." An exact
text search for the phrase "according to Greg Phillips of the VoteFraud.org organization" in Google shows it has been incorporated into hundreds, if not thousands, of versions of
the story. Dan Cassino, a political scientist at Fairleigh Dickinson University, said the involvement of Infowars gave the Phillips's assertion the momentum of a runaway train.
"There are whole parts of the internet where it then becomes accepted by lots of people. It essentially becomes non-falsifiable at that point." The Infowars story made it to the
top headlines on the hugely influential Drudge Report: "CLAIM: 3 Million Votes in Presidential Election Cast by Illegals..." Finally Trump, stung by his 2 million popular vote
deficit to Hillary Clinton and efforts for a recount in three states, lashed out by apparently recycling the story for his own ends. "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. Articles by the the Washington Post, Austin American-Statesman and others drew a
causal link between Trump and Phillips, who was bewildered to find himself in the eye of a storm. "I'm just an ordinary guy who has an interest in free and fair elections,"
he said on Tuesday. "This has been a passion in my life. This is not something I decided to do on 12 November. I'm not a public figure, I'm not an elected official, I have no
authority in the world about this. I'm doing this on my own dime." Phillips, who voted for Trump, denies that what happened is an example of the so-called "post-truth"
era in which mainstream media is distrusted. "This is not false news," he said. "Just because you haven't seen it and just because the haters on Twitter haven't seen
it doesn't make it false." "Some of these nutbags who already talking about killing me; if I release the data does that mean they're really going to do it? Who knows,
right? This is absurdity. This is the land of the absurd. But this stuff's real. This is not a joke. I've been doing this for seven years. It's real." Phillips claims to
have started building a database in 2009 of all voter registrations in the US with details including geocoding. "We know where everyone lives, we can look at it on a map, we can see
shifts, we can see how things go, move and operate. If I'm wrong, it's a matter of degree: is it bigger, is it smaller. What we know is that non-citizens voted. If only people
would put the passion they've had about my tweet into agreeing to sit down and fix the frigging problem." Until Phillips can back his claims, concerns will persist that Twitter
rumours can start a rightwing media firestorm that bears little relation to reality and engulfs even the White House. Cassino said: "It's incredibly difficult to counteract because
the ones to whom it appeals the most are the ones who least trust the mainstream media who are doing the debunking. "It needs media on the right, people like Rush Limbaugh, to take a
stand about the truth so those people will listen. The establishment media has been declawed as a fact checker."