Rallies are being organized across the U.S. around a slogan that insinuates this year’s presidential election was rife with fraud. The slogan is “stop the steal.”
The groups believe the election is being stolen from President Donald Trump through means of election fraud. However, there isn’t evidence to these claims.
Here’s a breakdown of some of their more common claims.
CLAIM: Widespread fraud swung the election away from President Trump and toward President-elect Biden
This is the broadest of the claims being made. There is no evidence to suggest this despite ongoing attempts to prove it.
The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, a federal agency with Department of Homeland Security oversight created during the Trump administration, released a statement on Wednesday that said, “The November 3rd election was the most secure in American history.”
They added, “When states have close elections, many will recount ballots. All of the states with close results in the 2020 presidential race have paper records of each vote, allowing the ability to go back and count each ballot if necessary. This is an added benefit for security and resilience. This process allows for the identification and correction of any mistakes or errors. There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.”
They also have a page where they’ve fact-checked many of the claims of fraud made already.
Voter fraud is a federal crime. The Justice Department has made no announcements of any discoveries, arrests or convictions of voter fraud as of yet and neither has the FBI.
CLAIM: Election-swinging numbers of dead people voted
Once again, there’s no evidence to back up these claims. Much of the supposed evidence actually reflects errors and quirks in voting rolls that don’t actually prove a vote cast under a dead person’s name was counted.
The National Conference of State Legislatures explains states are required by law to regularly remove deceased people from voter rolls when they are discovered, and many states have systems in place to help identify and purge such people from the rolls.
The Michigan Department of State released a fact-check addressing general claims of mass dead-person votes in Michigan. They explained that various errors in the registered voter system may make it appear like a dead person voted when the vote was actually cast by a living person with a similar name or by a person whose birthday is incorrectly displayed. They added that, in the off chance someone does try to vote under a dead person’s identity, there are safeguards in place to prevent the vote from being counted.
CISA included this claim on their rumor control webpage. They explained many of the same things mentioned above and added, “additional election integrity safeguards, including signature matching and information checks, further protect against voter impersonation and voting by ineligible persons.”
CLAIM: Dominion voting machine glitch altered vote tallies
This claim was amplified when Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel said in a press conference, “there was a major software issue in Antrim County [in Michigan] that we have concerns could have had problems in other counties as well.”
The Department of State said, “The erroneous reporting of unofficial results from Antrim county was a result of accidental error on the part of the Antrim County Clerk. The equipment and software did not malfunction and all ballots were properly tabulated. However, the clerk accidentally did not update the software used to collect voting machine data and report unofficial results.”
They said the issue was corrected. “The software did not cause a misallocation of votes; it was a result of user human error. Even when human error occurs, it is caught during county canvasses.”
Later, a new claim shared by the president himself emerged. It alleged that the same company responsible for the Michigan voting machines, Dominion, was responsible for 2.7 million Trump votes nationwide being deleted.
Those making the claim say the data comes from Edison Research. But Edison Research’s president said in an email to VERIFY it never created any report or published any data that could have led to this claim.
The Wednesday press release from CISA specifically addressed this claim. It said, “There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.”
CLAIM: Some states have more votes than registered voters, others have unusually high turnout
A number of claims have tried to argue that there are more votes than registered voters in some key battleground states while other key battlegrounds have turnout unusually high above average.
We broke down the number of currently casted vote totals with the number of registered voters in eight states subject to these claims and found votes surpassed voters in none of the listed states. You can see the breakdown -- with links to the states' voter registration statistics -- in this spreadsheet.
Several of these states allow for voters to register to vote at the polls on Election Day. Those states, marked with green on the spreadsheet, haven't updated their voter registration numbers following Election Day as of yet, meaning their voter registration totals are already out of date.
Some of those states may disregard total registered voters when calculating turnout because they allow voters to register while voting. In Wisconsin, where people claimed turnout was unusually high, the Wisconsin Elections Commission says it "calculates voter turnout as a percentage of the voting-age population." The turnout this year isn't exceedingly greater than in past years when using their formula.
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