Misinformation about the 2020 election is spreading like wildfire across the internet. Here are the facts:
FACT: 2020 is the most secure election in American history, according to the Department of Homeland Security.
MYTH: The 2020 election was riddled with voter fraud.
Get The Facts: A statement from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has dismissed claims of widespread fraud in the 2020 election as unfounded. Experts say that the 2020 American election was the most secure in our nation’s history and cite pre-election testing of voter equipment and paper ballots as reasons to have confidence in election results.
You can read the full statement here.
FACT: Arizona election departments count all ballots, regardless of what writing implement is used to fill them.
MYTH: Sharpiegate - Ballots were thrown out because voters signed with a Sharpie.
Get The Facts: Elections departments across Arizona have confirmed that this claim is unfounded and that processes are in place to ensure ballots are counted, regardless of what kind of writing implement is used to fill them out.
Maricopa County released a Twitter video that explained that the county’s machines only read the ovals, so any ink that bleeds through isn’t a problem. The new ballots also have off-centered columns, so bleed-throughs won't impact counting.
Meanwhile, Pima County tweeted that the felt-tip pen ballot controversy is false. "All ballots in which voter intent can be discerned will be counted. That's also in the manual. No ballots will be discarded because of the method used to color in the ovals.”
FACT: Wisconsin has 3,684,726 registered voters. 3,239,920 Wisconsinites cast their ballots.
MYTH: More people voted than were registered in Wisconsin.
Get The Facts: How is 102% voter turnout possible? It’s not. These are numbers from different years to make you think there’s fraud.
According to the Associated Press, the Wisconsin Elections Commission calculates voter turnout based on the entire voting-age population, not just registered voters.
3.24 million votes were cast in the 2020 election in Wisconsin, which puts voter turnout at roughly 71% of the voting-age population, well below the 102% number floating around on social media.
FACT: In Michigan, ballots postmarked by Election Day cannot be counted if they arrive after Election Day.
MYTH: Backdating ballots - A whistleblower within the USPS says he was ordered by his supervisor to illegally back-date newly found ballots to November 3rd, 2020.
Get The facts: Michigan requires that mail-in ballots be received by 8pm on Election Day in order to be counted. It doesn't make sense for postal workers to backdate ballots when election officials will reject them anyways.
FACT: Both the Trump and Biden campaigns were always allowed to have election observers in the room while ballots were being counted.
MYTH: The Trump campaign claimed that their election observers were not allowed to witness the counting of ballots in Philadelphia.
Get The Facts: The Trump campaign always had access to the counting process. Rather, their lawsuit sought to move their observers closer to the counting. In Pennsylvania, a state appellate court agreed to let the campaign watch the vote-counting process from a distance of 6 feet instead of the previous 20 feet. A federal judge accepted a resolution in which both campaigns agreed a fixed number of observers could be allowed inside.
In Michigan, a state judge announced she would deny a request from the Trump campaign to stop the vote count, as the count was nearly complete. There was no evidence observers were not allowed to watch the counting process.
FACT: Mail-in ballots that are postmarked by Election Day are legal in many states. Plus, these laws help our overseas service members vote!
MYTH: Votes that are appearing overnight are not legitimate votes.
Get The Facts: Mail-in ballots are legal votes. All states require that ballots must be post-marked by Election Day to be counted. 18 states (for domestic voters) and 28 states + Washington D.C. (for service members stationed away from home and overseas civilians) allow ballots sent before the polls closed to be counted if they arrive after Election Day. Deadlines for arrival are set by the state – in some like South Carolina it must be within 2 days, in others like Washington up to 20 days.
Another factor at play here is that some states do not allow mail-in ballots to be counted right away, and instead require that Election Day votes be counted first. For example, Pennsylvania did not allow mail-in ballots to be processed until Election Day, while Florida allowed for processing to begin much sooner.
It takes time to unseal the envelope(s), check the signature, feed it into the counter, check it, which is why we had results from Florida so much faster than Pennsylvania.
FACT: Duplicate voting is all but non-existent, and on the rare occasion when it does happen, states have robust security measures in place to reject them.
MYTH: People voted twice, dead people voted, and other claims of duplicate voting.
Get The Facts: Duplicate voting is very rare, just like other forms of voter fraud. In a study of three vote-by-mail states over the 2016 and 2018 general elections, the Washington Post found the rate of double-voting or voting in a dead person’s name to be just .0025%.
States have robust security measures in place to reject duplicate ballots. According to CISA, “election officials regularly remove deceased individuals from voter registration rolls based on death records shared by state vital statistics agencies and the Social Security Administration. While there can be some lag time between a person’s death and their removal from the voter registration list, which can lead to some mail-in ballots being delivered to addresses of deceased individuals, death records provide a strong audit trail to identify any illegal attempts to cast ballots on behalf of deceased individuals. Additional election integrity safeguards, including signature matching and information checks, further protect against voter impersonation and voting by ineligible persons.”
FACT: There’s no evidence of widespread fraud in the 2020 election, or of major problems with Dominion’s systems.
Myth: Dominion deleted 2.7 million votes for Trump across the country. Dominion switched votes from Trump to Biden in large numbers.
Get The Facts: CISA published a statement saying that there was no widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election, and a team of international election observers also said it saw no evidence of voter fraud.
Ellen Lyon, a spokesperson for the PA Department of States, said in an email that there is “no factual basis” for Trump’s claims that 221,000 votes were switched from Trump to Biden in Pennsylvania.
Learn more about how our votes are counted and verified here.