Fact check: 12 election lies Trump is using to set the stage to dispute a potential 2024 defeat

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

65% : (Recent polls suggest the race is very close, and Trump could certainly still win.)
52% : "DeJoy became postmaster general in June 2020 after being selected by the bipartisan USPS Board of Governors, whose members were all appointed by Trump.
51% : (Trump earned about 74 million votes in 2020.)
48% : False claim: Trump won Minnesota in 2020Trump declared in March and May that he won Minnesota in the 2020 election.
42% : (California's large population means that a candidate's vote totals there have a significant influence on the national popular vote -- which Trump has baselessly cast doubt on for years, even when he won the presidency in 2016.)
36% : But we're not going to let it happen again," Trump said.
35% : Trump has a long history of blaming electoral losses on undocumented immigrants.
34% : While it's also entirely possible that Trump wins legitimately, he could not possibly know for sure at the time of these comments that he already had "all the votes you need.
33% : Trump said in September that "if I ran with an honest vote counter in California I would win California, but the votes are not counted honestly."
33% : Trump never presented any evidence for that claim, let alone for suddenly making the vice president the target of the claim after months of directing it at the president.
32% : Trump, who wrongly insists the 2020 election was marred by massive fraud, said at a debate in June that he will accept the 2024 results regardless of who wins "if it's a fair and legal and good election."
31% : "Trump has made at least 12 distinct false claims over the last two months that raise baseless doubts about the validity of a potential victory by Vice President Kamala Harris.
30% : "They are going to use UOCAVA to get ballots, a program that emails ballots overseas without any citizenship check or verification of identity, whatsoever," Trump claimed.
28% : David Becker, founder and executive director of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation & Research, who regularly advises state and local election officials from both parties, blasted Trump on social media for "actively spreading false information about a bipartisan program.
25% : False claim: The US Postal Service admitted it is 'a poorly run mess'In a social media post in mid-September, Trump claimed that the US Postal Service "admitted that it is a poorly run mess that is experiencing mail loss and delays at a level never seen before" and asked "how can we possibly be expected to allow or trust the U.S. Postal Service to run the 2024 Presidential Election?"Facts First: Trump's claim is false.
25% : Trump has continued raising unfounded doubts about mail-in voting, predicting in a recent interview with a right-wing radio host that USPS "will lose hundreds of thousands of ballots, maybe purposely.
25% : Asked by CNN in August why he made the false claim, Trump said he "can't say what was there, who was there" and could only speak about his own large crowds.
24% : And while Biden certainly faced heavy Democratic pressure to leave the race after his poor performance in a debate against Trump in June, the decision to drop out was his alone; he could have kept running if he had chosen to do so.
24% : "Our elections are bad, and a lot of these illegal immigrants coming in, they're trying to get them to vote," Trump said.
24% : In July, when Biden dropped out of the race and Harris became the Democratic candidate, Trump began claiming she was the one behind the cases.
23% : False claim: There is no identity verification for overseas and military votersTrump rolled out a new lie in late September about military and overseas voting.
22% : False claim: Harris can only win through cheatingFor months, starting long before any votes were cast in the 2024 general election, Trump repeatedly claimed that he already has enough votes to win and simply needs to ensure Democrats don't cheat -- insinuating that the only way he could possibly lose is through fraud.
22% : Trump loses California because it is an overwhelmingly Democratic state that no Republican presidential candidate has carried since 1988.
21% : Trump lost the state in 2020, fair and square, by more 5 million votes and more than 29 percentage points.
21% : "So what was Trump referring to?Trump and his campaign didn't specify what interview he was talking about.
20% : Trump claimed in a social media post in September that an "election expert" interviewed by right-wing commentator Tucker Carlson had suggested a large percentage of mail-in ballots in Pennsylvania are fraudulent.
19% : In a social media post two days later, Trump baselessly accused Democrats of using this program "to CHEAT" in the election.
18% : Trump said at an August rally in Arizona: "The only way they can do anything is if they cheat like hell, and we've been victims of that. ...
17% : False claim: Voting by non-citizens is a widespread problem in US electionsTrump and his allies have repeatedly raised concerns that the 2024 election will be tarnished by widespread voting by non-citizens and undocumented immigrants.
17% : False claim: California's vote counts are dishonestTrump has wrongly claimed for years that US vote counts are plagued by major fraud.
16% : THEREFORE SHE AND HER CAMPAIGN WERE ILLEGALLY SPYING ON ME," Trump posted on Truth Social in mid-September.
12% : Trump has lied about the legitimacy of the vote counts in key states, the reliability of mail-in and overseas ballots, the size of Harris' crowds at rallies, and more.
12% : The state hasn't chosen a Republican for president since 1972, and Trump has consistently trailed in opinion polls against Harris -- whose running mate is the sitting Minnesota governor, Tim Walz.
11% : Even after the US announced that the leaks were part of a Kremlin plot to interfere with the US election, Trump and his campaign built a strategy to capitalize off Russia's illegal actions and used the emails to attack Clinton on a near-daily basis.
11% : "False claim: Biden or Harris orchestrated Trump's legal casesTrump has repeatedly claimed this year that "all" of the legal cases against him, including local and state cases, were all orchestrated by Biden for the purpose of "election interference," to help Democrats win the election.
9% : The Harris campaign's condemnation of Iran and refusal to use the stolen material is a stark contrast to how Trump embraced Russia's hack-and-leak against his Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton during the 2016 campaign.
9% : In August, Trump launched an attack on Harris' crowd sizes.
9% : Garland has said he would resign if Biden ever asked him to take action against Trump, but expressed confidence that Biden would never put him in that position.
7% : At the presidential debate earlier this month, Trump similarly accused Harris and Democrats of plotting to tip the election with illegal voters.
6% : Nonpartisan democracy experts say they're seeing many of the same warning signs that were blinking red before Election Day four years ago, when Trump flooded the zone with election lies and conspiracy theories that he amplified after losing to Joe Biden.
6% : The false claim that the Harris campaign was pushing fake images of this Michigan crowd had been circulated by some far-right influencers before Trump adopted it.
2% : There is no sign that either Biden or Harris had any role in bringing charges against Trump in Manhattan, New York (where Trump was convicted of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records) or Fulton County, Georgia (where an election subversion case against Trump is on hold over a battle about whether the district attorney should be disqualified).

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