On election night 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 “Pants on Fire.” 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 for information about election results can follow reports from state election officials across the country compiled by the National Association of State Election Directors. The AP is among the news organizations that will announce projected winners based on unofficial results, but in many states that won’t happen on election night.

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

Allegations regarding thousands of dead voters

This is a zombie claim we see every election cycle: Too many dead people are voting! And they are all Democrats! Neither is true.

As vote counting continued in November 2020, X posts incorrectly said that more than 14,000 dead people had 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.

Sometimes people illegally vote by mail in the names of dead relatives, as one Republican did in Nevada in 2020. This voter was charged with felonies.

Claims that ballot errors and election website mishaps equal fraud

Although election officials spend years preparing for presidential elections, mistakes sometimes happen.

These are not signs of fraud.

So far this year, we’ve seen a limited number of erroneous ballots, such as typos, on some ballots 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, such as a 6 a.m. water leak at Atlanta’s State Farm Arena on Election Day 2020, 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 have refuted the claim that election officials used the incident to bypass processes and remove ballots stored in “suitcases” that were “all for Biden.”

Claims of thousands of fake votes in Pennsylvania

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.

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

Democratic Pennsylvania Attorney General Michelle Henry said in a statement on Oct. 31: “The investigations involve voter registration forms, not ballots,” and were 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.

Allegations about machines that translate votes

As Kentucky’s Republican Secretary of State Michael Adams wrote about X on November 2: “A gentle reminder that vote switching is fiction.” He linked to a 2008 video in which Homer Simpson tried to vote for Barack Obama but repeatedly voted 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, when one person out of more than 100,000 voters reported that his vote for Trump had changed to Harris when his ballot was printed. Local election officials said the voting machines did not change the candidates and suggested that voters made a mistake in selecting their preferred candidates. That ballot was destroyed and the voter was allowed to vote again.

An Instagram post published in October noted that voting machines in Shelby County, Tennessee, switched votes 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.

Excessive voting by non-citizens is not happening

Trump and his supporters falsely claimed that Democrats were behind a scheme to lure non-U.S. citizens to vote in federal elections. This is not happening.

Federal law prohibits noncitizens from voting in federal elections.

Non-citizens sometimes accidentally get on the voter rolls when getting a driver’s license. But it is rare for noncitizens to vote in federal elections. The largest conviction case we found was in North Carolina in 2020, when federal prosecutors charged 19 people with voter fraud after they voted, mostly in the 2016 election. For context, more than 4.5 million people in North Carolina voted in the 2016 presidential election.

Allegations that election officials tore up or threw away ballots

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 that’s what a ridiculous viral video shows; It leads X users to claim that mail-in ballots voting for Trump in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, were destroyed. Federal officials said Russian actors produced and amplified the video.

Claims about large numbers of ballots being found in trash in 2020 were either fabricated or related to spoiled ballots that were legally destroyed.

Allegation that election officials secretly entered ‘ballot papers’ late at night

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.

Trump tweeted the claim on November 4, 2020: “Last night, I was leading generally solidly in most key states, with Democrats running and controlling in almost all cases. “Then, as the surprise votes started being counted, they started to magically disappear one by one.”

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’s nothing wrong with 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.

Allegations that mass voter fraud influenced the election outcome in 2020

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 election officials doing their jobs.

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

“What should we call this: It’s setting the stage for casting doubt on the 2024 results if Trump doesn’t win,” Joanna Lydgate, CEO of the nonpartisan United States Center for Democracy, told PolitiFact in early 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 nearly 1,300 convictions for voter fraud over the decades. Billions of votes were cast during that period.

Early victory claims

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