Trump falsely claims that in certain states there were more votes than voters

By Jon Greenberg -

In a post he made on Twitter around midnight on November 22, President Donald Trump highlighted an election statistic that he thought should raise alarm.

"In certain contested states there were more votes than people who did vote and in large numbers," Trump tweeted at 11:37 pm (ET).

"Doesn't that matter?"

It may be that Trump is recycling the incorrect claim that in some key states there were more votes than registered voters.

Accusations like that circulated quickly after Election Day, and they simply weren't true.

Trump did not specify which states he was referring to, and neither the White House nor his campaign answered our questions about it.

So we focus on the states where Trump's lawyers have most vehemently questioned the results:

In each of those states, there are many more registered voters than there are votes cast.

In Georgia, Michigan and Pennsylvania the difference is more than two million people in each state.

Wisconsin's gap of 387,612 is the smallest, but it doesn't include people who registered on Election Day, so the exact figure will change.

In any case, the number of registered voters is much higher than the number of votes counted.

Trump's Twitter post could also be construed as an accusation that many people voted twice: once by mail and once in person.

But there is also no evidence that this has happened "in large numbers."

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The National Association of Secretaries of State records the method each state uses to ensure that a voter does not cast two votes.

Basically, it relies on software that matches votes to voters, no matter how the vote is cast.

"States have databases that record a voter's receipt of a vote and mark that voter as someone who has already voted,"

said Philip Stark, an election security researcher at the University of California at Berkeley.

"If you vote by mail and your ballot is received you will not be allowed to vote in person at a polling station, you would be marked as 'already voted.'

There have been some instances where voters go to the polling stations before their vote by mail has arrived.

The same database process works here too.

The presence of the voter at the polling station is recorded and, if a vote by mail arrives, it is saved but not counted.

Our verdict

Trump said that in key contested states there were, "in large numbers," more votes than voters.

There is no proof of that.

If Trump meant that there were more votes cast than registered voters, the election data shows otherwise.

In the six key states we analyzed, there were between hundreds of thousands and two million more registered voters than votes cast.

If the president meant that there were many duplicate votes, his lawyers have given no evidence that this happened.

States use careful systems to prevent such double voting from happening.

Therefore, we qualify Trump's claim as

This article was translated by Pablo Medina Uribe thanks to the FactChat agreement, coordinated by the 

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