Don't be fooled on Election Day: 6 false voting claims to look out for

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With Election Day bearing down, guarding against misinformation is more vital than ever.

Joedy McCreary USA TODAY

In the coming days and weeks, election officials across the country will tally millions of ballots and declare the winners and losers. That means your social media feed likely will be filled with baseless claims of fraud – many of which we've seen before. Some common narratives:

The election was stolen due to voter fraud
Noncitizens are voting in large numbers
Votes were added/subtracted due to the "hacking" of machines
Changing vote totals prove cheating occurred
Partisan election officials skew vote tallies
There were more votes than registered voters

USA TODAY has debunked dozens of such claims in recent election cycles. Here's a rundown of what these narratives miss, so you're prepared when they crop up again.

Claim No. 1: Voter fraud

Experts call claims of widespread voter fraud deeply exaggerated.

"By and large, fraud is largely a made-up problem," said Paul Smith, senior vice president at the Campaign Legal Center, a government watchdog organization.

There were no indications of systemic problems with voter fraud during either the 2020 election or the midterms two years later, according to state-level reviews of those elections. Still, former President Donald Trump and his allies in the Republican Party made persistent, baseless claims about it.

Many states pushed through election-related changes to address those concerns. Some now require voters to show photo identification. Others created state-level units to look for potential problems.

Trump also raised questions about voting by mail, baselessly claiming in a Feb. 20 interview with Fox News that "if you have mail-in voting, you automatically have fraud." That's not true: Mail-in voting comes with several additional security measures to prevent fraud. Those range from verifying that the only people who can request ballots are registered voters, to a process that links every ballot to an eligible voter, according to previous USA TODAY reporting.

Trump has since reversed course and voiced his support for voting by mail, even as GOP lawyers continue fighting against it, as USA TODAY previously reported.

Prior fact checks on voter fraud:

2022 claim: Democrats used 47 million mail-in ballots to steal every U.S. midterm election (False)
2022 claim: The 2020 election was declared ‘illegal’ (False)
2020 claim: The Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled that the 2020 election was rigged (False)

Claim No. 2: Large numbers of noncitizens voting

This specific type of voter fraud merits separate mention because claims about it have been so prevalent in the 2024 race, with many of those claims linked to the crisis at the southern U.S. border.

Trump, for example, baselessly asserted in January that Democrats have encouraged migrants to flow into the U.S. illegally to register them to vote. Some House Republicans then threatened to shut down the government if Democrats didn't agree to legislation saying noncitizens couldn't vote – even though they are already barred from voting in federal and state elections.

Anyone caught lying about their citizenship status when they register to vote faces punishments that include fines, incarceration and deportation. States must audit their voter rolls and remove anyone who is ineligible, which includes immigrants in the country illegally.

That makes it remarkably rare for noncitizens to cast ballots.

"I looked it up. It's literally more likely that you'd get hit by lightning in Ohio than find a noncitizen voting there," said David Becker, the executive director of the nonprofit Center for Election Innovation and Research.

Of the 23.5 million votes in the 2016 presidential election counted across 42 jurisdictions studied, researchers at the Brennan Center for Justice found just 30 suspected cases of noncitizens voting. Other studies and analyses around the country found similarly low levels. That includes Georgia, where an audit of the state voter rolls by Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger found just 20 noncitizens among the state's 8.2 million registered voters.

“Despite its resurgence as an issue, in Pennsylvania it was extremely rare," said Secretary of State Al Schmidt.

Yet it remains a key talking point and has been the subject of multiple lawsuits after Republican-led states attempted to remove suspected noncitizens from their voting rolls in the weeks before the election. For example, GOP officials in Virginia on Oct. 28 asked the Supreme Court for permission to proceed with a purge of voter registrations for those suspected to be noncitizens.

Prior fact checks on noncitizens voting:

2024 claim: Biden's executive order allowed ineligible convicts and 'illegal immigrants' to vote (False)
2024 claim: Biden opposing SAVE Act is 'cheating'; Walz is allowing 'illegals' to vote in Minnesota (False)
2020 claim: Joe Biden received extra votes in battleground states from noncitizens (Missing context)

Claim No. 3: The election is ‘hacked’

Election officials at the federal, state and local levels have safeguards in place at three stages – before, during and after Election Day – to prevent hacking from taking place, according to the federal Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. The agency was part of a joint statement in November 2020 calling that year's election the "most secure in American history."

“There are multiple layers of security there that we’re constantly checking,” said Lawrence Norden, the senior director of elections and government at the Brennan Center for Justice.

Among them, according to CISA: States routinely test and certify their voting machines and conduct checks to make sure ballots are properly counted before election results are finalized. And the overwhelming majority of people who vote do so on paper. Becker said 97% of all ballots cast are paper ones. That creates a document trail that may be checked for accuracy.

“We audit those paper votes after the election to make sure that they match what the machine is telling us the vote total is,” Norden said.

To further limit the possibility of cyber interference, many states do not allow voting machines to connect to the Internet or even be equipped with modems.

Concerns about hacking sparked false claims from conservative pundits that voting machines deleted Trump votes and changed them to President Joe Biden. That led to lawsuits from voting technology companies such as Dominion Voting Systems, which sued Fox News for defamation and ultimately settled the case for $787.5 million.

Prior fact checks on hacking allegations:

2024 claim: Voting machines in Georgia are changing people’s votes
2022 claim: 'Corrupt electronic voting machines’ gave Tammy Duckworth a vote spike, helping her win reelection (False)
2023 claim: Malware, remote access caused printer problems; 200,000 'ejected' ballots in Arizona (False)
2022 claim: Results of Arizona gubernatorial race aired ahead of Election Day show attempt to steal election (False)

Claim No. 4: Rapidly changing vote totals

An abrupt increase in a candidate's vote count as ballots are tallied on Election Day does not mean something fraudulent happened. It's important to remember that not all votes are counted at the same time, experts say.

Several factors can affect tabulation times, according to CISA. Those include administration policy changes at the state or local level and protocols put into place during the pandemic. The agency noted that all election night results are unofficial, having not yet completed the various reviews and doublechecks.

The pace at which votes come in for both parties also changes based on when a state is allowed to begin counting its mail-in ballots.

False claims of “ballot dumps” circulated in 2020 after mail-in ballots were counted late in the day in the battleground states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. With few exceptions, those states do not allow workers to open mail ballots before Election Day.

"It was a natural phenomenon of different categories of votes showing up at different times, in a world in which mail voting ... was skewed very (Democratic) because the Republicans had been told not to do it," Smith said.

While mistakes do happen at times when votes are counted, those are typically a result of simple human error, not foul play, and there are processes in place to catch and fix them, officials said. Sometimes, that happens on Election Day. Other times, mistakes aren’t spotted until the canvass, which is part of the certification process. Those typically take place in the days or weeks that follow the election.

Prior fact checks on vote totals:

2022 claim: The U.S. ‘could easily count every vote in every state on election night until a few years ago’ (False)
2022 claim: Biden announced ‘they are going to cheat by dumping ballots’ (False)
2022 claim: Ballots found in Pennsylvania drop boxes show cheating in the election (False)
2020 claim: 100K votes in Michigan were 'magically' added to Biden's vote tally during the night (False)

Claim No. 5: Partisan election officials

No two states run their elections exactly the same way, and there's even plenty of variation between the setups within a state. But experts point to established checks and balances that prevent election officials from taking partisan actions.

In most states, voters choose the chief election official. That is most often the secretary of state, but in some states it's the lieutenant governor or an appointee of the governor, lawmakers or the state’s elections board.

Seventeen states and the District of Columbia have a board or commission that oversees elections. Those are constructed to keep out politics and to have both parties represented, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

“Election administration is – even if there is a top official – conducted in a bipartisan way,” Norden said. “And you have, again, multiple, multiple checks to ensure that no one person can do anything that’s going to cause problems in the system.”

Many states incorporate partisan balance into various stages of the process. For example, Arizona requires pairings of one Democrat and one Republican to review each absentee ballot that the tabulator can't read to determine how it should be counted.

Prior fact checks on election officials:

2024 claim: Votes cast on ballots marked by poll workers are disqualified (False)
2023 claim: A software company's contract allows officials to override election results (False)
2023 claim: Maricopa County, Arizona, officials admitted to breaking the law, improperly certifying machines that failed during election (False)
2020 claim: Video of election workers filling out blank ballots in Delaware County is voter fraud (False)

Claim No. 6: More votes than voters

Several versions of this claim have circulated since 2020. They’re all baseless, and they tend to rely on numbers that are incomplete or just plain wrong.

"To suggest that there's more votes cast than registrations is absurd, and it has never happened," Smith said.

For example, Trump’s false claim that the number of votes in Pennsylvania in 2020 exceeded the number of voters by more than 200,000 was based on an incomplete voter registration database that was missing the state's two largest counties – Philadelphia and Allegheny counties – The New York Times reported in 2021.

Some of these claims fail to factor in states that allow same-day voter registration, so they're comparing vote totals to outdated registries. Sometimes, a claim is both false and based on an inadequate set of data.

For example, a U.S. Senate candidate in Ohio wrongly asserted that in 2020 there were 5 million more votes cast than voters, and pinned the claim on U.S. Census Bureau data, according to a PolitiFact fact check. In reality, numbers from the bureau show 168 million registered voters and 155 million votes, a difference of about 13 million.

But there's a better source of election-related figures than the Census Bureau: The U.S. Election Assistance Commission collects data directly from the states and reported more than 209 million active registered voters that year compared to 161 million ballots cast.

Prior fact checks on voter counts:

2024 claim: 105% of Michigan's population is registered to vote (False)
2022 claim: A New Hampshire Senate candidate won 1,100 votes from a town with fewer than 700 people (False)
2022 claim: Washington state had 590,000 'excess votes' in the 2020 election (False)
2020 claim: Pennsylvania recorded more mail-in votes than ballots requested (False)
2020 claim: Wisconsin shows more counted votes than registered voters (False)
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