Conservatives are taking advantage of President-elect Donald Trump’s 2024 election victory to once again assert that the 2020 election was fraudulent.

“Kamala got 60 million votes in 2024,” said Dinesh D’Souza he wrote around 8 a.m. ET Nov. 6 on X. “Does anyone really believe Biden got 80 million in 2020? Where did the 20 million Democratic voters go? The truth is they never existed. I think we can put the lie about Biden’s 80 million votes to rest once and for all.”

D’Souza was behind widely discredited The 2022 film “2,000 Mules” which highlighted an unfounded effort by “mules” to illegally deposit ballots into ballot boxes to influence the 2020 election.

I’ve seen similar claims from conservative commentator Benny Johnson, who called 2020 to 2024 vote count gap “very high,” short for suspect, and JR Majewski, an Ohio Republican running for Congress unsuccessful in 2022 and 2024WHO declared the results proved that “2020 was stolen”.

These statements are a renewed version of persistent lie that the 2020 elections it was fraudulentwhich PolitiFact has debunked numerous times.

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We attempted to contact D’Souza through his online store and Instagram account and did not hear back prior to publication.

The 2020 election was not stolen. President Joe Biden won the 2020 election. States certified the results, Congress accepted the results, and Biden was inaugurated in January 2021. Election security officials — including republicans and people in Trump’s own administration — said the 2020 election was safe. When fraud occurred, it was isolated and did not change the results. In four years, Trump and his allies have produced no evidence widespread fraud.

Across the country, Trump and his allies have lost more than 60 processes challenging the outcome of the 2020 election. A panel of Republicans, including former federal judges, examined claims by Trump and his allies of fraud and miscounting and concluded that they “did not present evidence of fraud or inaccurate results ‘significant enough to invalidate the results.’

Trump’s victory in 2024 did not change these facts.

It’s not uncommon for millions of voters to switch their support from one party to another from election to election, experts told PolitiFact.

Kim Wyman, a bipartisan policy center senior mansaid that about 40 percent of U.S. voters consider themselves independent, and “elections are won and lost by that 40 percent.”

“Those middle voters are voting all over the map and they’re the ones who decide the outcome,” she said.

Wyman, a Republican, served as Washington’s secretary of state from 2013 until 2021, when she resigned in take a stand as a senior advisor to the Cyber ​​Security and Infrastructure Security Agency. She said the explanation for the 2024 results will be in the election results data.

“Democrats didn’t suddenly lose 20 million voters,” she said, outlining potential explanations for the 2024 outcome.

First, she said, 20 million Republican or independent voters who either did not vote in the 2020 presidential election or voted for Biden in 2020 may have chosen to vote for Trump in 2024.

Second, solid Democrats who didn’t want to vote for Trump or Harris may not have voted in 2024 or chosen another candidate, such as Green Party candidate Jill Stein. Potentially, “the 20 million is a combination” of those two results, Wyman said.

Jordan Barth, a former state and national Democratic Party staffer, said that even though the final vote count shows 20 million more people voted for Biden in 2020 than voted for Harris in 2024, that would not prove that the 2020 election was fraudulent.

“We saw some pretty significant changes in 2016 with the electorate,” Barth said. Places that voted for Democratic President Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012 went for Trump in 2016. Then in 2020, at least some of those voters “flip back to Biden.”

Wyman said election officials used the same processes and protocols during the 2020 and 2024 elections.

“While some states have changed some laws, security controls have remained consistent,” she said. “Just because voters show up and vote differently four years later doesn’t mean there’s fraud or suppression. It could just mean the voters changed their minds.”

William Adler, associate director of the Bipartisan Policy Center’s Election Project, said the stolen claims about the 2020 election overlook a misleading and basic detail: The popular vote is not yet known.

Although the state margins, in terms of percentage points, could be close to the final results, the current claims about the actual number of voters carry little weight.

“As the counting continues, the gap between the number of votes Biden received and the number Harris received is guaranteed to shrink,” he said.

This is already being played. By November 6 at 2 p.m. ET, the Harris vote totals that Johnson, Majewski, and D’Souza listed in their X-posts had been exceeded: Harris had received more than 67 million votes — and that was with incomplete counts in several heavily Democratic states, including California, Oregon and Washington.

“California is currently only 60 percent reported,” Charles Stewart III, director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Election Science and Data Lab, told PolitiFact around 12:30 p.m. ET. States including Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Mississippi, Oregon, Utah and Washington “have at least 20 percent of the vote left to report.”

D’Souza argued that the 2024 election results show that Biden’s 80 million votes in 2020 was a “lie”.

Republican federal and state officials said the election was safe and dozens of judges have dismissed Trump’s lawsuits alleging widespread fraud in the 2020 election.

From election to election, voters switching their support from one party to another — or dropping out — is not unusual or a sign of fraud, experts said. They also cautioned that votes are still being counted, and the margin of votes separating Harris’ 2024 total and Biden’s 2020 total is likely to shrink.

We rate this statement Pants on Fire!

PolitiFact Senior Correspondent Amy Sherman and PolitiFact Researcher Caryn Baird contributed to this report.

This fact check was initially published by PolitiFactwhich is part of the Poynter Institute. See the sources for this fact check Here.