Later this week, President Donald Trump is expected to sign an executive order calling for a federal investigation into widespread voter fraud - voter fraud for which is there no evidence whatsoever - and the investigation could zero in  on New York. NY1's Bobby Cuza filed the following report.

It's a claim with no basis in reality. President Donald Trump says 3 to 5 million illegal votes cost him the popular vote.

Even his own election lawyers rejected the notion of fraud, though the White House now says they only looked at states Trump contested, not states he lost like New York.

"You look at California and New York, I think when you look at where a lot of potential, a lot of these issues could have occurred, in bigger states, that’s where I think we’re going to look," said White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer.

Voting rights expert Jonathan Brater says while voter registration rolls are woefully out of date, fraud is a different story.

"There is no evidence of massive voter fraud. None," Brater said. "There was a look just in 2016 at potential illegal voting, and it turned up not millions, not thousands, not hundreds, but four documented cases of voter fraud."

The New York City Board of Elections has had its problems. The Justice Department says it broke federal law by mistakenly purging 120,000 Brooklyn residents from the voter rolls.

But cases of fraud are exceedingly rare, though not unheard of. One poll worker was charged last year after voting for her brother. Assembly candidate Hector Ramirez pleaded guilty to submitting dozens of forged absentee ballots in 2014. And a conservative activist group caught Board of Elections Commissioner Alan Shulkin on hidden camera claiming fraud in minority neighborhoods. 

"I think there's a lot of voter fraud," Shulkin says in the video. "Certain neighborhoods in particular, they bus people around to vote."

But Shulkin later distanced himself from those claims.

As for one study supposedly backing Trump's claims - Spicer said that "There was one that came out of Pew in 2008 that showed 14 percent of people who have voted were non-citizens" - Spicer actually confused two different studies, neither of which showed anything like that.

One of the studies' authors tweeted this week, "I'm aware of no Pew report, including the ones I wrote when I was there, which support any findings of voter fraud."