On Jan. 6, Congress certified the results of the 2024 presidential election, affirming President-elect Donald Trump’s victory. A day later, however, Trump said the vote counting continues.
“We had a landslide election,” Trump said at the Jan. 7 press conference at Mar-a-Lago, his private club in Palm Beach, Florida. “We won every swing state. We won the popular vote by millions and millions of people. Nobody even knows how many people, millions, and they’re still counting in some areas.”
Trump said, “We’ve got to fix the election so that we get honest counts and they get done by 10 o’clock in the evening or something thereabouts. There are places where they’re still counting votes.”
Trump’s comments create the impression that presidential race ballots are still being counted. We asked his presidential transition team for his evidence and got no reply.
The votes have been counted. The states have certified the votes, the Electoral College has voted and Congress has accepted the results. States set deadlines to certify results in November or December. And we do know how many more people voted for Trump than voted for Vice President Kamala Harris — about 2.3 million — although the Electoral College, not the popular vote, determines the outcome.
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“All the votes in the general election have been counted,” said Mark Lindeman, policy and strategy director at Verified Voting, a nonprofit group with election technology expertise. “All this is exactly how presidential elections are supposed to work.”
California is often the last state to finish counting ballots because of its law’s long timelines and because it mails ballots to all active voters. By law, its county elections officials have 30 days to count ballots after Election Day. California’s secretary of state certified the statewide results Dec. 13.
When federal lawmakers convened Jan. 6, they read aloud the tally of electoral votes from each state and certified the election results.
“I know of no place that hasn’t finished their initial count long ago,” said David Becker. executive director and founder of the Center for Election Innovation & Research, a nonpartisan organization that works with election officials from both political parties.
It is possible for races with close margins to end in litigation months after Election Day — it took about eight months to resolve the 2008 Minnesota Senate race.
One prominent down-ballot race, for a seat on the North Carolina Supreme Court, remains officially unsettled. That’s because the Republican candidate is challenging the certified results.
On Jan. 7, the North Carolina Supreme Court, controlled 5-2 by Republican justices, blocked state election officials from certifying Democratic Supreme Court Justice Allison Riggs as the winner. The court ruled that more time was needed to investigate claims by the Republican challenger, state appellate judge Jefferson Griffin, who is seeking to have more than 60,000 ballots tossed. WRAL, PolitiFact’s North Carolina partner, reported that the State Board of Elections in December rejected Griffin’s claims.
That litigation is unrelated to Trump’s victory. The North Carolina state board of elections certified Trump’s win Nov. 26.
In Florida, litigation filed by the Republican opponent of Democratic Rep. Kathy Castor continues. Castor, who won about 57% of the vote, was sworn into Congress on Jan. 6. Certified state house races in Minnesota and Georgia also remain in litigation, according to Democracy Docket, a voting rights news platform that tracks election litigation. These lawsuits do not mean that election officials are still counting votes, it means they are fighting over election procedures or which votes should have been counted.
Some states audit their results after the election, even after those results were officially finalized, said Tammy Patrick, an elections expert at the National Association of Election Officials, a professional organization for state election directors.
“But they are not ‘still counting’ ballots in any jurisdiction in the union,” Patrick said.
Trump’s mention of a 10 p.m. deadline for counting harks back to his 2024 campaign calls to have all ballots counted on election night.
Media outlets project election winners; when the margins are wide enough, they could make such calls comfortably on election night or the next day. But state laws — not the White House or Congress — dictate state processes that yield final, certified election results. Those laws include when mail ballots, including those from overseas service members, must be received and when election officials can start processing and tabulating ballots. If some states take longer to finish counting, it doesn’t signal wrongdoing.
Our ruling
Trump said, “They’re still counting the (2024 election) vote in some areas.”
He gave the impression that two months after Election Day, ballots are still being tabulated in the presidential race. That’s not happening.
States certified their results by December, and Congress accepted the Electoral College results the day before Trump made this claim.
Some state and local races remain under litigation, but that is not the same as counting ballots.
We rate this statement False.
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