Trump says people wear disguises to vote multiple times in Florida, without giving any evidence

Illegal voters in Florida use disguises to cast multiple election ballots, Donald Trump has claimed, without providing any evidence.

The US president’s latest inflammatory claims of voter fraud come as the sunshine state grapples with six federal lawsuits prompted by full recounts of the Senate and gubernatorial elections that must be completed on Thursday.

Mr Trump made similar unsubstantiated claims of fraud during the 2016 presidential election. After losing the popular vote but winning the White House, the-then president-elect and aides repeatedly asserted that people had been bussed into key areas to cast votes for Hillary Clinton illegally.

He has since incorporated the claims into his rhetoric on immigration, accusing Democrats of encouraging undocumented migrants to vote. The president made immigration his key campaign point during the midterm elections, in which the Democrats seized control of the House of Representatives and Republicans gained two seats – so far – in the Senate.

On Wednesday Mr Trump suggested that Republicans were regularly disadvantaged by illegal voting.

“When people get in line that have absolutely no right to vote and they go around in circles. Sometimes they go to their car, put on a different hat, put on a different shirt, come in and vote again. Nobody takes anything. It’s really a disgrace what’s going on,” he told the right-wing Daily Caller website.

Mr Trump called for new national identification laws by adding: “If you buy a box of cereal, you have a voter ID.”

The billionaire has employed such claims to fire up his supporter base over the last two years.

The state’s election department and the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, both run by Republican appointees, said they have not seen any evidence of voter fraud of that kind.

However, it has emerged that a top attorney at the Florida Department of State sent a letter last week asking federal prosecutors to investigate whether Democrats distributed false information that could have resulted in voters having mail-in ballots disqualified over mismatched signatures.

Four county supervisors turned over information showing Democratic Party operatives had changed official forms to say voters had until two days after the election to fix any problems with mail-in ballot signatures. Under current law, a voter has until the day before Election Day to fix a problem.

Both the midterm races, for senator and governor, were very close in Florida. A few tens of thousands of votes – or even less – separated Rick Scott and Bill Nelson in the former, and Ron DeSantis and Andrew Gillum in the latter. Republicans Scott and DeSantis held the lead going into the recount.

But some of Florida’s ageing vote-counting machines overheated, forcing some 174,000 ballots to be re-tallied.

Both Mr Scott and Mr Nelson have filed lawsuits in an acrimonious count process which had uncomfortable echoes of the 2000 presidential election contest between George W Bush and Al Gore.

Additional reporting by agencies