Analysis: Mike Johnson promotes one of Trump’s most laughable election lies

By Daniel Dale, CNN

(CNN) — President Donald Trump has promoted dozens of different lies about American elections. Some of them are relatively sophisticated. Some are transparently silly.

House Speaker Mike Johnson is now promoting one of the very most laughable.

In an interview that aired Monday, Trump said Republicans should “take over the voting” in at least “15 places” because of supposed corruption he has shown no evidence of. Then Johnson told reporters Tuesday:

“In some of the states – like in California, for example. I mean, they hold the elections open for weeks after Election Day. That’s just one thing that bothers so many people. We had three House Republican candidates who were ahead on Election Day in the last election cycle, and every time a new tranche of ballots came in, they just magically whittled away until their leads were lost. And no series of ballots that were counted after Election Day were our candidates ahead on any of those counts. It just – it looks on its face to be fraudulent. Can I prove that? No, because it happened so far upstream.”

Even with Johnson’s un-Trumpian admission that he doesn’t have proof of fraud, this is a lot of nonsense.

A Democrat taking the lead in a vote count is not a sign of fraud

There is nothing magical and nothing fraudulent “on its face” about a Republican having an early lead in a California vote count and then losing that lead as more votes are counted – just as there is nothing magical or fraudulent on its face about a Democrat having an early lead in a vote count in another state and then losing that lead as more votes are counted.

All that happens in both cases is that … legitimate ballots are legitimately counted.

In the presidential swing state of Arizona, mail-in ballots must arrive at elections offices by the time the polls close on Election Day. Because mail-in votes tend to favor Democrats these days, in part because Trump has repeatedly discouraged his supporters from voting this way, Arizona’s Democratic candidates may have illusory big leads when mail-in votes that arrived early are quickly added to the vote totals on Election Night – but they may lose those leads or see them narrow as the votes that are cast in-person or dropped off on Election Day are fully counted over the coming days.

Conversely, California allows mail-in ballots to arrive up to seven days after Election Day as long as they are postmarked on or before Election Day – and the Democratic-dominated state with the country’s largest population has a huge volume of mail-in ballots to count, around 13 million out of roughly 16.1 million votes in the 2024 election. California’s rules for processing mail-in ballots and for mail-in voters fixing issues with their signatures also contribute to a slower count than in other states. So: California’s Republican candidates may have illusory big leads in the early count from in-person votes, then lose those leads or see them narrow as mail-in ballots are fully counted.

None of this should be remotely complicated to anyone as heavily involved in US elections as the speaker of the House is. And media outlets have been explaining it to the public for years.

Californians have to vote on or before Election Day

Johnson didn’t explain exactly what he meant by “they hold the elections open for weeks after Election Day,” but he certainly left open the impression that Californians are allowed to vote after Election Day. They aren’t. California voters must vote in person or send in their mail-in ballot on Election Day or earlier.

It is true that California tends to take weeks to finish its vote count. That process could get a bit faster after Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a 2025 bill to try to get counties to speed it up. Regardless, a slow count is a sign of a slow count, not a sign of fraud. And contrary to what appears to be a widespread perception, vote-counting continues for days after Election Day in states throughout the country – even when media outlets have already “called” the winner.

Those media calls are informal projections, not final results, and do not end the count even in landslide victories in which the general public quickly stops paying attention to candidates’ precise numbers. It would be unfathomable for Johnson not to know this.

Mel Levey is the registrar of voters in Merced County, California, which sits in the House district that had the closest race in the country in 2024, where a Republican candidate was initially leading in the count but the Democrat ended up winning by 187 votes. Levey said in a statement to CNN that observers and lawyers from both the Republican and Democratic campaigns “observed every single aspect of the canvass” in 2024 and that neither side requested a recount after the certification of the razor-thin result; “they knew the results were fair and accurate,” Levey said.

“I invite Speaker Johnson to visit my office to observe how elections are actually conducted in California. There is nothing ‘magical’ about it,” Levey said. “Just a lot of hard work and long days from non-partisan election officials who live and work in the communities for whom they help administer elections.”

The-CNN-Wire
™ & © 2026 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.