Consistency has never been President Donald Trump’s strong suit, but he has been consistent about one thing: If Republicans do poorly in Tuesday’s midterm elections, as polls suggest they will, he is prepared to blame Democratic cheating. Over and over, Trump has outlined — falsely — the ways he says Democrats will manipulate the vote.

On Aug. 5, for example, Trump was already warning of a rigged election in Michigan. Commenting on the vote count in the Democratic Senate primary, he wrote about Wayne County: “Don’t discount all of those fake mail-in ballots that will ‘surprisingly’ show up at the last moment. Get ready for another Rigged Election.”

Two months later, he released a video with a different message: “Vote early, vote by mail or vote in person on Election Day.”The caption went further: “Whether you vote early, absentee, by mail, or in-person, we must ‘swamp’ the Radical Left Dumocrats with massive turnout!”When I ran The Washington Post Fact Checker, I compiled scores of prewritten fact checks, totaling 30,000 words, based on my familiarity with things Trump said and his habit of uttering exaggerated, misleading or fully made-up statements.

So here, as a prebuttal, are five accusations that Trump will likely make after Election Day, based on a review of his election-related statements in speeches, news conferences and Truth Social posts in 2025 and 2026.

Myth No. 1: Late-counted mail ballots erased Republican victories Media coverage of vote counting can create the impression that candidates are jockeying for position in real time when, in fact, the votes have already been cast and are simply being counted and reported. A candidate might surge ahead only because of the order in which votes are counted. For instance, Democrats might show early leads in areas where mail and early in-person votes are counted first, and the Republican candidate narrows the gap because GOP voters tend to vote in person on Election Day. But Trump often seizes on these shifts to claim that some nefarious maneuver, usually involving mail ballots, has overturned a Republican lead.

In April, when Virginia voters approved a change in the state’s congressional map — later invalidated by the Virginia Supreme Court — Trump wrote that Republicans were winning “until the very end when, of course, there was a massive Mail In Ballot Drop!…the Democrats eked out another Crooked Victory!”Similarly, in June, Trump complained about “the very late and massive numbers of MAIL IN BALLOTS” in California.

Most states allow voters to cast ballots by mail without providing an excuse. That includes Florida, where Trump cast his own ballot by mail last month. State laws governing when those ballots can be counted vary greatly. Some states prevent election workers from tallying mail ballots that arrived early until Election Day, while other states begin counting mail ballots ahead of time and report those results as soon as polls close. A changing lead is not evidence of fabricated votes.

Moreover, election night results are unofficial. States have different rules for counting mail ballots, provisional ballots, and votes cast by military and overseas voters. The bottom line is the same: A changing lead is not evidence of fabricated votes.

When Trump says that mail ballots changed the result, remember this: The Brookings Institution examined reported cases of mail voting fraud in four general elections between 2016 and 2022 and found that it was exceedingly rare, accounting for just 0.000043% of mail ballots cast, or about four cases out of every 10 million votes cast by mail.

The Trump administration also tried to give the U.S. Postal Service greater authority to restrict mail voting, an effort the Supreme Court blocked for the midterms. Trump’s attacks on mail voting may be having an impact, with more voters this election turning toward early in-person voting.

Myth No. 2: Noncitizens are voting When Trump lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton in 2016, he falsely said that her margin of victory was due to noncitizens casting ballots. He’s still singing the same tune, even though there is virtually no evidence of systematic or orchestrated noncitizen voting. Many defendants cited confusion about voting rules, as documented in a recent Post examination of 180 cases brought under the Trump administration.

Yet in July, Trump said that approximately 278,000 noncitizens were registered nationally. In New Jersey, he alleged 35,152 registrations and asserted that all were Democrats. Both figures are dubious, unsupported by publicly disclosed evidence of how they were calculated. In New Jersey, for instance, the state’s preliminary account identified roughly 6,600 improper registrations and up to 400 voters.

“The number of votes was too small to change the outcome of any federal election in New Jersey,” FactCheck.org concluded.

Myth No. 3: Duplicate and replacement ballots enabled Democrats to vote repeatedly Trump falsely says that Democratic states rig the results by sending multiple ballots to Democrats while withholding ballots from Republicans.

“Democrats get sometimes six or seven ballots in one household. And Republicans are calling for their ballot. They’re saying, please send me my ballot. Very unfair, but I hate, I hate that,” he said in a March speech to the National Republican Congressional Committee.

In May, after Maryland officials sent replacement primary ballots to correct a printing error, Trump said that the move was designed “so any Republican running in Maryland doesn't have a chance!”But receiving multiple ballots does not mean a voter can cast multiple votes. In Maryland, for instance, return envelopes have unique identifiers to ensure that only one ballot per voter is counted.

Myth No. 4: Foreign actors or voting machines manipulated the election Trump has long rejected evidence that Russia used social media to try to help him win the 2016 election. But foreign efforts to influence voters are not the same as manipulating vote totals, and there is no credible evidence that a foreign government has flipped votes in a U.S. election. Yet in a primetime speech in July, Trump warned of “shocking vulnerabilities in our election infrastructure” without offering evidence that fraud had occurred. The speech appeared designed to lay the groundwork for blaming future Republican losses on foreign access to voter data or vulnerabilities in voting machines.

Myth No. 5: Opposition to voter ID proves Democrats intended to cheat A major Trump legislative priority this year — stalled in the Senate — was the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, or SAVE America Act, which would have required documentary proof of citizenship to to vote and government-issued photo identification to cast a ballot, whether in person or by mail. Democrats argued that the measure would make voting more difficult for low-income and rural voters while imposing additional administrative burdens. Trump has portrayed Democratic opposition as evidence of an intent to cheat.

“The Democrats refuse to vote for Voter I.D., or Citizenship. The reason is very simple — They want to continue to cheat in Elections,” he posted in February.

But states without photo ID requirements have alternative identity verification procedures, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Opposing a proposal does not establish fraudulent intent — except in Trump’s mind.