As ballot counting was under way in November 2020, X posts falsely said that more than 14,000 dead people voted in Wayne County, Michigan.
Typically when voters die, it’s rare that their relatives contact local elections offices to ask that their names be removed from voter rolls. But election offices routinely receive death records from state and federal sources and then remove dead voters’ names from voter rolls. Some still end up on the rolls.
Occasionally, people illegally cast mail ballots in dead relatives’ names, as a Republican did in 2020 in Nevada. That voter was charged with felonies.
Claims that ballot errors and election site mishaps equal fraud
Although election officials spend years preparing for presidential elections, errors sometimes occur.
They are not a sign of fraud.
So far this year, we have seen a limited number of ballots with errors, such as a typo in some ballots in Palm Beach County, Florida. County officials said 257 overseas voters opened an email with a ballot that said “Tom” Walz instead of Tim Walz, Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris’s running mate.Some election sites have mishaps, such as a 6am water leak on Election Day in 2020 at Atlanta’s State Farm Arena, where election workers were counting absentee ballots. Arena staff repaired the leak in about two hours and no ballots or machines were damaged. State and county election officials debunked the claim that election officials used the event to circumvent processes and pull out ballots stored in “suitcases” that were “all for Biden”.
Claims of thousands of fake votes in Pennsylvania
Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, officials said in an initial October 25 statement that they were investigating 2,500 “ballots”, but a county spokesperson later said that word was a mistake and the investigation was into voter registration applications.
Days later, Trump falsely said at an Allentown, Pennsylvania, rally: “We caught them with 2,600 votes. … And every vote was written by the same person.” He made similar comments on X about “fake ballots and forms” in Pennsylvania.
Pennsylvania Attorney General Michelle Henry, a Democrat, said in an October 31 statement: “The investigations regard voter registration forms, not ballots” and were under way in four counties.
Officials do not place people on voter rolls if their registration is suspect, so that means that there were not thousands of fake votes.
Claims about machines flipping votes
As Kentucky’s Republican Secretary of State Michael Adams wrote on November 2 on X: “Gentle reminder that vote-switching is fiction.” He linked to a 2008 video of Homer Simpson trying to vote for Barack Obama but repeatedly voting for former Senator John McCain, R-Ariz.
Claims of early victory
Speaking at the White House hours after the polls closed in 2020, Trump said: “We want all voting to stop. We do not want them to find any ballots at 4 o’clock in the morning and add them to the list, OK? It’s a very sad moment. … And we will win this.”
There is no state or federal law that says vote counting must stop a few hours after the polls close. Election officials would have violated laws if they simply stopped counting legitimate ballots.
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