As Election Day approaches, protecting against misinformation is more vital than ever.

In the coming days and weeks, election officials across the country will count millions of ballots and declare winners and losers. This means your social media feed will likely be full of baseless claims of fraud – many of which we’ve seen before. Some common narratives:

• The election was stolen because of voter fraud

• Non-citizens vote in large numbers

• Votes have been added/subtracted due to car “hacking”.

• The change in vote totals proves that cheating took place

• Partisan election officials distorted the number of votes

• There were more votes than registered voters

USA TODAY has debunked dozens of such claims in recent election cycles. Here’s a rundown of what those narratives are missing, so you’re ready when they pop up again.

Request no. 1: voter fraud

Experts call allegations of widespread voter fraud deep exaggerated.

“For the most part, fraud is largely a made-up problem,” he said Paul Smithsenior vice president at the Campaign Legal Center, a government watchdog organization.

There were no indications of systemic problems with voter fraud in any of them the 2020 election or the midterm two years lateraccording to state-level analyzes of these elections. However, former President Donald Trump and his allies in the Republican Party did persistent, baseless claims about.

Many states driven by election-related changes to address these concerns. Some now ask voters to show photo ID. Others they created state level units to look for potential problems.

Trump also raised questions about mail-in voting, claiming there was no basis in a February 20 interview with Fox News that “if you vote by mail, you automatically have fraud.” Not true: Postal voting comes with some additional security measures to prevent fraud. These range from verifying that the only people who can request ballots are registered voters, to a process that links each ballot to an eligible voter, as USA TODAY previously reported.

Trump has since then reverse course and expressed his support for mail-in voting, even as GOP advocates continue to fight it, as USA TODAY previously reported.

Prior checks on voter fraud:

Statement no. 2: Large number of non-citizens voting

This specific type of voter fraud deserves separate mention because claims about it have been so prevalent in the 2024 race, with many of those claims being related to crisis at the US southern border.

Trump, for example, asserted without grounds in January that Democrats encouraged migrants to enter the US illegally to register to vote. Some House Republicans then threatened to shut down the government if Democrats disagreed legislation that says non-citizens can’t vote – Even if they are already banned from voting in federal and state elections.

Anyone caught lying about their citizenship status when registering to vote faces penalties that include fines, imprisonment and deportation. States must audit their voter rolls and remove anyone who is ineligible, including immigrants in the country illegally.

That’s what it does remarkably rare for non-citizens to vote.

“I looked. You’re literally more likely to be struck by lightning in Ohio than to find a non-citizen voting there,” he said. David Beckerthe executive director of the nonprofit Center for Innovation and Election Research.

Of the 23.5 million votes in the 2016 presidential election that were counted in 42 jurisdictions studied, researchers from Brennan Center for Justice they found only 30 suspicious cases of non-citizen voting. Other studies and ANALYSIS across the country they found similarly low levels. That includes Georgia, where an audit of the state voter lists by Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger just found 20 non-citizens among the state’s 8.2 million registered voters.

“Despite its resurgence as a problem, it has been extremely rare in Pennsylvania,” said Secretary of State Al Schmidt.

However, it remains a key point of discussion and has been the subject of several lawsuits after Republican-led states have tried to remove non-citizen suspects from their voting lists in the weeks before the election. For example, GOP officials in Virginia on October 28 sought permission from the Supreme Court to conduct a sweep of voter records for those suspected of being non-citizens.

Prior fact checks regarding non-citizen voting:

Statement no. 3: elections are “hacked”

Federal, state and local election officials have guarantees in place in three stages – before, during and after election day – to prevent hacking, according to the federal Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. The agency was part of a joint statement of November 2020 calling that year’s election “the safest in American history.”

“There are multiple layers of security there that we’re constantly checking,” he said Lawrence Nordenthe senior director of elections and government at the Brennan Center for Justice.

Among them, according to CISA: States routinely test and certify their voting machines and perform verifications to ensure that ballots are counted correctly before election results are finalized. And the vast majority of people who vote do so on paper. Becker said 97 percent of all ballots are paper. This creates a document trail that can be checked for accuracy.

“We audit those paper votes after the election to make sure they match what the machine tells us is the vote total,” Norden said.

To further limit the possibility of cyber interference, many states do not allow voting machines to connect to the Internet or even be equipped with modems.

Concerns about hacking have sparked false claims from conservative experts that the voting machines erased Trump’s votes and changed them to President Joe Biden. This led to lawsuits from voting technology companies such as Dominion Voting Systems, which sued Fox News for defamation and eventually settled the case for $787.5 million.

Previous fact-checks on hacking allegations:

Statement no. 4: Rapidly changing vote totals

A sudden increase in a candidate’s vote count as ballots are counted on Election Day does not mean that something fraudulent has occurred. It’s important to note that not all votes are counted at the same time, experts say.

Several factors can affect the tabulation time, according to CISA. These include state or local administrative policy changes and protocols put in place during the pandemic. The agency noted that all election night results are unofficial as the various reviews and double checks have not yet been completed.

The pace at which votes come in for both parties also changes depending on when a state is allowed to begin counting their postal ballots.

False claims of “vote grabs” circulated in 2020 after mail-in ballots were counted late in the day in the battleground states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. With a few exceptions, those states do not allow workers to open mail-in ballots before Election Day.

“It was a natural phenomenon of different voting categories coming up at different times in a world where mail-in voting … was very skewed (Democrat) because Republicans were told not to do it,” he Smith said.

While mistakes do happen when the votes are counted, they are usually a simple result human errorthey do not foul play and there are processes in place to catch and fix them, officials said. Sometimes that happens on election day. Sometimes mistakes are not detected until the canvas, whichh is part of the certification process. These usually take place in the days or weeks following the election.

Previous fact checks on vote totals:

Statement no. 5: Partisan electoral officials

No two states run their elections exactly the same, and there’s even a lot of variation between configurations within a state. But experts point out established checks and balances which prevents election officials from taking partisan action.

In most states, voters chooses the chief electoral official. This is most often the secretary of state, but in some states it is the lieutenant governor or someone appointed by the governor, lawmakers, or the state board of elections.

Seventeen states and the District of Columbia have a board or commission that oversees elections. They are built to keep politics out and have both parties represented, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

“The election administration is — even if there is a top official — run in a bipartisan way,” Norden said. “And you have, again, multiple, multiple checks to make sure no one person can do anything that’s going to cause problems in the system.”

Many states incorporate partisan balancing at various stages of the process. For example, Arizona requires pairs of a Democrat and a Republican to review each absentee ballot that the tabulator cannot read to determine how it should be counted.

Prior checks of electoral officials:

Statement no. 6: More votes than voters

Several versions of this claim have circulated since 2020. All are baseless and tend to be based on numbers that are incomplete or simply wrong.

“To suggest that there are more votes cast than registrations is absurd and has never happened,” Smith said.

For example, Trump’s false claim that Pennsylvania’s 2020 voter turnout exceeded the number of eligible voters by more than 200,000 was based on an incomplete voter registration database that was missing the state’s two largest counties—Philadelphia and Allegheny – The New York Times reported in 2021.

Some of these claims fail to account for states that allow same-day voter registration, so they compare vote totals to outdated registers. Sometimes a claim is both false and based on an inadequate set of data.

For example, a US Senate candidate from Ohio wrongly claimed that 5 million more votes were cast in 2020 than voters and pinned the claim on US Census Bureau data, according to a PolitiFact fact check. in reality, office numbers it shows 168 million registered voters and 155 million votes, a difference of about 13 million.

But there’s a better source of election-related numbers than the Census Bureau: The US Election Assistance Commission collects data directly from states and reports over 209 million active registered voters that year, compared to 161 million ballots cast.

Previous checks on the number of voters:

Contributors: Sarah D. Wire, Erin Mansfield

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Electoral disinformation is everywhere. Here’s how to discover it