There is a strong argument to make that Donald Trump won the presidency by scraping out wins in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

In all three states, Trump won by less than a percentage point. (Michigan 0.2, Pennsylvania 0.7, and Wisconsin 0.8.) Put another way, calculates The Fix's Philip Bump, “but for 79,646 votes cast in those three states, [Hillary Clinton] would be the next president of the United States.”

Put another way, each of these light blue dots on the graphic Bump made below represent 20,000 votes cast for president. The itty bitty, teeny-tiny four dark blue dots in the middle represent Trump's margin of victory in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, three states that helped him win the election.

(Philip Bump / The Washington Post)

Put another way, the 2016 election was a remarkably close election decided by a remarkably small fraction of people.

Which brings us to: Why we can definitely say there was no widespread voter fraud

Voters in Illinois on Election Day. (Seth Perlman/AP)

Just because the election was close doesn't mean it was rigged, like people on both sides have been insinuating or, in Trump's case, outright saying.

Three Dartmouth College political scientists just finished an extensive study of voter fraud in the election, and they wrote about it for The Washington Post. Their aim is to definitively answer whether there is any evidence of widespread voter fraud. (Short answer: No.) I summarize their findings below:

1) Did a lot of dead people vote for Clinton? No. Trump actually performed better than Clinton in counties that have a higher proportion of recently dead people.

2) Did “millions” of illegal immigrants vote for Clinton? No. In the parts of the nation where Clinton's share of the votes was unexpectedly high, there weren't any more or less illegal immigrants of voting age than the rest of the nation. The same is true for where Trump's voter share spiked.

3) Did election officials rig the vote totals? Also, no. Among the counties that flipped for either candidate late in the game (exactly where you'd expect corrupt officials to step in), Trump actually gained a net 33,000 votes in battleground states.

“In other words,” these Dartmouth political scientists write, “this is the opposite of what we would expect if the results were rigged against Trump.”

4) I'll add a fourth rebuttal to any widespread fraud claims: It's virtually impossible for Russia or other foreign countries to have hacked our election results, in part because many of our vote-counting machines aren't even connected to the Internet.

Trump just got a lesson in promises (that you should keep them)

Donald Trump on Thursday at the Carrier manufacturing plant in Indiana. (Daniel Acker/Bloomberg)

One August night, on a stage before thousands in Indiana, Candidate Trump expressed dismay that a manufacturing plant in the state was planning to ship jobs to Mexico. “We're not going to let Carrier leave,” he said.