Don’t fall for these false claims as you wait for 2024 election results – Poynter

On election night in 2020, then-President Donald Trump made an early statement hours after the polls closed, saying, “We already won.”

He hadn’t and we rated it Hot Pants. When Trump began speaking at 2:21 a.m. ET in the early morning hours of Nov. 4, states were still following normal procedures for counting ballots. It wasn’t until Saturday, November 7, that the Associated Press had enough unofficial results to call the race for Joe Biden.

In the past, when the polls closed, politicians and social media influencers spread lies about the voting and vote-counting process. As votes are counted this year, we’re likely to see lies similar to those in 2020.

Voters looking for reliable sources about election results can follow the reports at the following addresses: state election officials Nationwide, compiled by the National Association of State Election Directors. access point is among the news organizations to announce projected winners based on unofficial results, but many states there will be no election night.

Here are some lies that may be revealed after the polls close.

A zombie claim we see every election season: very large numbers The number of dead votes! And they are all Democrats! Neither is true.

As vote counting continued in November 2020, X posts mistakenly said: 14,000 dead people Voted in Wayne County, Michigan.

Typically, when voters die, it is rare for their relatives to contact their local election office to request that their names be removed from the voter rolls. But election offices routinely obtain death records from state and federal sources and remove the names of deceased voters from voter rolls. Some are still on the charts.

From time to time, people vote by mail in the names of relatives who died illegally. a Republican did In Nevada in 2020. This voter was charged with felonies.

Although election officials spend years preparing for presidential elections, mistakes sometimes happen. These are not signs of fraud.

We’ve seen a limited number of incorrect ballots so far this year: typo on some ballot papers In Palm Beach County, Florida. County officials said 257 overseas voters opened an email containing a ballot that read “Tom” Walz instead of Tim Walz, the running mate of Democratic presidential candidate Vice President Kamala Harris.

Some precincts experienced mishaps on Election Day 2020, such as a water leak at Atlanta’s State Farm Arena at 6 a.m. when election officials 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 refuted the claim He said election officials used the incident to bypass processes and remove ballots stored in “suitcases” that were “all for Biden.”

Officials in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, said in an initial statement on Oct. 25 that they were investigating 2,500 “ballots,” but a county spokesman later said that statement was an error and that the investigation was related to voter registration applications.

Trump days later he said wrong “We got them by 2,600 votes,” he said at a rally in Allentown, Pennsylvania. …And every vote was written by the same person.” He also made similar comments to X about “fake ballots and forms” in Pennsylvania.

Pennsylvania Attorney General Michelle Henry, Democrat in question “The investigations are about voter registration forms, not ballots,” he said Oct. 31, and was ongoing in four counties.

Authorities do not place people with questionable records on the voter rolls; This means there are no thousands of fake votes.

as Kentucky’s Republican Secretary of State Michael Adams wrote on X on November 2“A gentle reminder that vote switching is fiction.” connected to 2008 Video of Homer Simpson He’s trying to vote for Barack Obama, but he repeatedly votes for former Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz.

Election officials who have encountered reports of ballots being “flipped” or “switched” said it is sometimes user error, and when voters bring it to their attention, officials ensure voters can vote with the choices they want.

That’s what happened in Tarrant County, Texas. One person out of more than 100,000 voters He reported that when the ballot paper was printed, the votes cast for Trump were changed to Harris. Local election officials stated that the voting machines did not change the candidates and claimed that the voters made a mistake in choosing their preferred candidates. That ballot was destroyed and the voter was allowed to vote again.

One October Instagram post He said voting machines in Shelby County, Tennessee, changed the vote from Harris to Trump. Election officials said there was no malfunction in the voting machine. Voters had accidentally touched the wrong area of ​​the ballot while using touch-screen voting machines.

Embers And his supporters They falsely claimed that Democrats were behind a scheme aimed at luring noncitizens to the United States to vote in federal elections. This is not happening. Federal law prohibits noncitizens from voting in federal elections.

Non-citizens sometimes end up on the voter rolls, often by accident, when obtaining a driver’s license. But it is rare for noncitizens to vote in federal elections. biggest case We found convictions by federal prosecutors in North Carolina in 2020 accused 19 people Voter fraud occurred mostly after voting in the 2016 election. For context, more than 4.5 million people in North Carolina voted in the 2016 presidential election.

If you’re an election official committing election fraud, you probably don’t film yourself opening mail ballot envelopes, shouting the votes on those ballots, cursing at a candidate, and tearing up ballots marked for that candidate.

But what is this one? funny viral video This apparently leads X users to claim that their mail-in ballots voting for Trump in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, were destroyed. Federal officials said Russian actors produced and powered the video.

Allegations regarding multiple ballots in 2020 found in garbage either made up or almost spoiled Legally destroyed ballots.

It is common for a candidate to get ahead in early results but not become the winner because more votes are counted. For example, if vote counting in left-leaning Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, takes longer than in the more right-leaning part of the state, it is possible for Trump to lead the state early in the night but see the margins slide later.

Embers He tweeted the claim. On November 4, 2020, he wrote, “Last night, I was generally leading solidly in most key states, with Democrats running and controlling them in almost all cases. Then they started magically disappearing, one by one, as the surprise votes began to be counted.”

In some states, Trump initially led but eventually saw Biden take the lead. But in other states, Biden led and Trump came back to take the lead.

There it’s not a bad thing About local election officials updating results in the hours and days after polls close. Essentially, this means they counted all legitimate votes. State law determines the process, including when officials can begin opening mail ballots. This means it will take time to finish the count. Some states, such as Pennsylvania, do not allow election officials to process mail ballots until Election Day, while other states allow it to begin weeks earlier.

After the polls closed in 2020, a series of social media images and photos allegedly appeared to show poll workers and others committing voter fraud. But the posts mostly showed this: Election officials doing their job.

The election system in our country makes such a robbery both impossible and incredibly detailed.

“We should call it this: It’s setting the stage for Trump to cast doubt on the 2024 results if he doesn’t win,” said Joanna Lydgate, CEO of the nonpartisan United States Center for Democracy. he told PolitiFact At the beginning of October.

To build a sufficient Electoral College margin, bad actors would need to cooperate in a coordinated but covert manner across battleground states, and hundreds would risk felony charges for the same purpose.

Achieving this would require thousands of illegal votes. A database maintained by the Conservative Heritage Foundation shows: 1,300 convictions due to decades of voter fraud. Billions of votes were cast during that period.

Speaking at the White House just hours after the polls closed in 2020 Trump said“We want all voting to stop. We don’t want them to find a ballot at 4 a.m. and add it to the list, okay? It’s a very sad moment. … And we will win this.”

There is no state or federal law that says vote counting must stop several hours after polls close. Election officials would be violating the law if they stopped counting legitimate votes.

Official results won’t be known for weeks after Election Day because state law sets the certification deadline in November or December. But media outlets will likely predict a winner long before that.

This fact check was initially Published by PolitiFactPart of the Poynter Institute. See sources for this fact check Here.