For months, Donald Trump projected confidence on the campaign trail that he was ready to defeat Vice President Kamala Harris. But with less than a week until Election Day, he’s planting the seeds to say the election was stolen if he loses.

The former president stepped up his rhetoric this week to sow doubts about the integrity of the result, particularly in the key battleground state of Pennsylvania, where Trump and Harris are at the core. bound in surveys. He held a press conference Tuesday at Mar-a-Lago, saying there were “some bad places in Pennsylvania where some serious things have been caught or are in the process of being caught.” On social media, he claimed York County received “THOUSANDS of potentially FRAUDULENT Voter Registration Forms and Mail-in Vote Requests from a third-party group.” Lancaster County, he added, was “caught with 2,600 fake ballots and forms.” On Wednesday, his campaign sued Bucks County, outside Philadelphia, for allegedly denying Trump voters mail-in ballot applications. “Pennsylvania is cheating and being caught, on a scale rarely seen before,” he said. POSTED on Truth Social.

This is not an accurate characterization of the facts. York County officials confirmed a suspicious delivery of election-related materials, including voter registration forms and vote-by-mail applications, to the county clerk’s office, but set them aside for examination. Lancaster County law enforcement and election officials also confirmed “incidents of suspected voter registration fraud” likely stemming from a “large-scale canvassing operation,” they said, setting in motion an investigation. It is not yet known which organizations submitted the electoral materials or which candidate they are supporting. In any case, election experts say, the incidents prove the opposite of cheating by Pennsylvania officials. Rather, they show that they successfully prevent electoral evil.

“The system is working in this case,” says Tammy Patrick, who heads the National Association of Election Officials, “because the registration applications that were submitted that were questionable were isolated and are being investigated.”

Bucks County officials denied GOP claims, widely circulated on social media, that Trump supporters were prevented from requesting mail-in ballots Tuesday in one jurisdiction evenly divided among registered Democrats and Republicans. But he admitted to a “miscommunication” earlier in the day. Many voters, they said, thought they were in line to vote in person, rather than requesting a mail-in ballot, which they could either fill out and submit locally or return before election day. Videos show officials at one location tried to part with a long line and told people they would not be able to vote, causing confusion among some voters. There were clips of the ordeal boosted by right-wing influencers, including billionaire Elon Musk, who has more than 200 million followers on X, formerly known as Twitter, sparking a torrent of outrage online. On Wednesday, a Pennsylvania court ruled in the Trump campaign’s lawsuit, issuer an order which extends until Friday the deadline to apply for mail-in ballots in Bucks County.

Harris campaign spokesman Ian Sams on Wednesday scoffed at Trump’s allegations of cheating. Posting a screenshot on X of one of his social media posts. “This is not what someone posts if they are actually confident about their position in Pennsylvania,” Sams wrote.

The melee is a sign of the high-stakes race in Pennsylvania that could ultimately decide the election, and the extent to which Trump and his allies are laying the groundwork to challenge the result there if it falls short. The former president is less than half a percentage point ahead of the current 538 average of state polls and many experts say he needs to win the Keystone State to win the Electoral College.

In 2020, President Joe Biden won Pennsylvania by less than one percentage point. Now, a network of pro-Trump organizations is pouring millions into the commonwealth to boost the GOP’s turnout. During the last election period, Musk donated more than $118 million to his political action committee, America PAC, to encourage low-to-moderate Trump supporters to vote early in the critical state.

Read more: In Pennsylvania, Musk is deploying his fame and fortune for Trump

The effort marks a departure for Republicans from four years ago, when Trump told his followers to vote on Election Day and avoid mail-in ballots, a system he has lambasted as rife with fraud. This time, Trump’s top campaign lieutenants convinced him that it was self-defeating to break early voting because it allowed the opposition to gain a competitive advantage by discouraging his supporters from voting.

While Trump’s camp, along with allied groups, has built an infrastructure to avoid repeating the same mistake, critics say his preemptive complaints of “cheating” follow a familiar playbook. “It’s simply a rehash of 2016 when he said Ted Cruz’s victory in the Iowa caucuses was due to fraud and 2020 when he said Joe Biden’s victory in the presidential race was due to fraud,” says Whit Ayres, a veteran. Republican strategist. “It’s par for the course.”