Two-and-a-half hours after polls closed in every state in the 2020 election, then-President Donald Trump declared victory and said he was going to ask the U.S. Supreme Court to stop states from counting any more legally cast ballots.

We want all voting to stop. We dont want them to find any ballots at four in the morning and add them to the list, Trump said before adding, Frankly, we did win the election.

As the hours turned into days before the presidential election was finally called for Democrat Joe Biden, Trump built his lie that the election was stolen from him. The late-counted, or overtime, ballots (generally mail ballots and provisional ballots) cast in heavily Black and Latino counties favoring Democrats were deemed fraudulent. Election workers had switched real votes for fake ones, whether by USB drive or ballot drop boxes, Trump and his allies claimed. And on and on. The claims referred to the presidential votes only, though, while Republican victories from the same ballots were accepted.

Of course Trump was going to contest the results at the time he was still disputing the outcome of an election hed won. He repeatedly claimed he actually won the popular vote in 2016 if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally. In 2018, he lied that Democrats were involved in a big corruption scandal having to do with Election Fraud, when ballots counted after Election Day favored Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.), who ultimately lost. He also falsely declared electoral corruption and called for a new Election when Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) defeated incumbent Republican Martha McSally after ballots counted after Election Day came in.

In each case, Trumps lies revolved around the mechanics of election administration: how voters cast their ballots and how states counted them. The counting of ballots after Election Day turned into evidence of fraud in his imagination. And though none of his claims were true and all were fact-checked by the press and election law experts and readily dismissed from the courts, the Republican Party grasped onto them and wont let go.

This presents the possibility of yet another nightmare following Election Day on Nov. 8. Little has changed in how the votes will be cast and how they will be counted in key states across the country. The same scenario that Trump used to lie about the election results in the past three elections will happen again. The only difference is that this year there are hundreds of Republicans who endorse his lies running for offices up and down the ballot.

Refusal To Accept Defeat