Just a few hours after the polls closed in the 2020 US presidential election, while millions of votes were still being counted, Donald Trump gave an extraordinary speech.

“We prepared to win this election — frankly, we won this election,” the then-president told reporters in the early hours after Election Day, claiming that “serious fraud” had been committed.

“We want all voters to stop. We don’t want them finding ballots at 4 a.m. and adding them to the list,” he said.

Trump's premature – and false – claim of victory over his Democratic challenger Joe Biden, who ultimately won the 2020 election, capped weeks of untrue election fraud allegations from the Republican incumbent.

Four years later, with the 2024 race between Trump and Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris still too close, experts are again stressing that the vote count could take days — and that's not a sign of wrongdoing.

“Just like in 2020, it is completely normal for the vote count to take several days,” said Sophia Lin Lakin, director of the Voting Rights Project at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

That's especially true “in closely contested states where things are closely scrutinized and you have to count a lot of votes before you have a sense of who's going to win those states.”

“It will take time and that is because of the built-in verification steps in the counting process to ensure accuracy,” she told Al Jazeera.

Different procedures

Vote counting takes time in the United States for a variety of reasons, including the way elections are conducted and how ballots are processed.

Each U.S. state conducts elections in its own way, and therefore it takes different amounts of time to count votes in each state, explained Ciara Torres-Spelliscy, a law professor at Stetson University College of Law in Florida.

For example, the battleground states of Pennsylvania and Wisconsin do not allow mail-in ballots to be processed before Election Day, meaning their respective counts will likely take longer.

“Others are getting a head start by starting the counting process earlier during the early voting period,” Torres-Spelliscy said in an email to Al Jazeera.

“And states have very different population sizes. Wyoming has a tiny population, while California has more people than Canada. The larger the number of voters, the longer it takes to count their ballots, which can run into the millions.”

Meanwhile, states must also sort through so-called provisional ballots. These are ballots from people whose voter registration status must first be verified before their vote is counted, which takes a little longer.

The fact that the counting of votes after election day can take hours or even days is ultimately not a sign of illegal activity, said Torres-Spelliscy. “Just because a populous state takes a few days to count millions of votes is not evidence of fraud.”

Misjudgments, misinformation

Still, misinformation can spread quickly in the time it takes to tally votes — and between the polls closing and the announcement of a projected winner.

While it may take weeks for states to release their official voting results, U.S. media organizations are making projections based on their own methods as well as preliminary results.

This “election call” – a news outlet announcing a projected presidential winner – can occur on election night. But for closer contests, like the race between Trump and Biden in 2020, it may take a few days.

Most polls leading up to this year's Election Day showed Harris and Trump locked in a race that is too close to call and will likely depend on how the candidates perform in seven battleground states: Pennsylvania, Georgia, North Carolina , Michigan, Arizona, Wisconsin and Nevada.

The potential for misinformation is particularly high at this time in a polarized country where Trump has now claimed for years that the 2020 election was stolen from him and the electoral system as a whole is rife with fraud.

These beliefs are held by many Americans: According to a September 2023 Public Religion Research Institute poll, 66 percent of Republican voters said they believed the “Big Lie” that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump.

A phenomenon known as a “blue shift” can also contribute to the false perception that something nefarious is going on, as was the case in 2020.

The term refers to a moment in US elections when results begin to shift in Democrats' favor as more mail-in ballots are counted throughout the day. In general, more Democratic voters have voted by mail than Republicans, but it remains to be seen whether that will be the case again this year.

In 2020, Trump “used this change in numbers throughout the day … to create the idea that something was wrong,” the ACLU's Lakin said.

“But it was normal processing of ballots; It was just a feature of the way people chose to vote in that particular year.”

“Scream fraud and irregularities”

Despite countless experts debunking Trump's claims of fraud, the former president continued to make false accusations throughout the 2024 campaign.

During the campaign, the former president repeatedly warned of voter fraud, including the possibility that non-citizens would vote as part of a Democratic conspiracy to skew the results in Harris' favor – a claim that experts have called untrue.

His team has filed a series of lawsuits alleging irregularities in voter rolls, the lists of people eligible to vote.

And Trump also seized on the slogan “too big to manipulate” to urge his supporters to cast so many votes that “we guarantee we win by more than the margin of fraud.”

“He kind of announced he was the winner before the ballots were even counted. That's the same claim he made in 2020: If he's not the winner of the official count, it can only be because of fraud,” said James Gardner, a professor at the University of Buffalo School of Law in upstate New York.

“He has already laid the groundwork for screaming about fraud and irregularities just because he might not win. If that’s your starting point, the fact that counting ballots is taking a while is just one of a million different things you can say.”

According to Gardner, “The root of the problem is that the Republican Party under Trump is unwilling to play by the rules of democracy.”

“She believes she deserves to be in power regardless of the election outcome. Therefore, it does not adhere to the ethics of democratic fair play. Democracy is based on fair rules of fair competition, and the Trump Republican Party is not beholden to them.”

Potential for violence

Torres-Spelliscy noted that even if Trump said he won before all the votes were counted, such a statement “makes no difference legally.”

“What matters is which states and DC certify and which candidate wins 270 Electoral College votes,” she explained.

However, if Trump prematurely announces his victory over Harris and ends up losing after the votes are counted, it would increase the distrust, anger and feelings of injustice already prevalent among many of the former president's supporters.

“What's going to happen this time – what's already happening – is that the media is going to make all sorts of outlandish claims, and that's going to at least enrage Trump's supporters,” Gardner said. “And who knows what they’ll do.”

Amid Trump's false claims of fraud after the 2020 vote, a crowd of his supporters stormed the US Capitol in Washington, DC, to try to stop Congress from certifying Biden's election victory.

The January 6, 2021 insurrection continued to reverberate across the country, Lakin said, as the false claims of a stolen election “created this great divide in this country and ultimately led to violence.”

“It would be unfortunate if this happened again,” she said. “It would be a travesty for democracy if we couldn’t figure out how to get back to a peaceful transfer of power.”