FACT FOCUS: Trump repeated election lies in his interview with Joe Rogan. Here are the facts

In his three-hour interview with podcaster Joe Rogan, Donald Trump discussed his false claims about elections, voter fraud and his defeat in the 2020 presidential election. Rogan has helped promote some of these claims.

The interview, published late Friday, came the same day the former president reposted it on his social network Threats to prosecute lawyers, voters and election officials he believes “cheated” in the 2024 election.

Here's a look at some of the Republican presidential candidate's claims and the truth.

Trump lost the 2020 election

WHAT TRUMP SAID: “I won by liking – they say I lost by liking – I didn’t lose.”

THE FACTS: Trump actually lost to Democrat Joe Biden in 2020. Trump's claims that fraud cost him the race have been repeatedly investigated.

Trump's own Attorney General said there was no evidence of significant fraud. The Republican-led State Senate In Michigan, one of the swing states where Trump claimed fraud took place, a lengthy investigation came to the same conclusion. An investigation by the nonpartisan Legislative Audit Bureau in Wisconsinordered by the state's Republican-controlled legislature in another state that Trump claimed he was cheated on winning, also found no material fraud.

Rogan laughed as Trump rightly argued that his loss was imminent. Trump narrowly lost the election in six swing states. If about 81,000 votes had been cast, Trump could have won Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and Wisconsin and received enough support in the Electoral College to remain president.

Trump incorrectly reported this margin as 22,000 votes.

Judges repeatedly ruled against Trump in the case

WHAT TRUMP SAID: “What happened is the judges don’t want to touch it. They would say, ‘You have no standing.’ They haven’t decided the matter.”

THE FACTS: That's not true. Trump and his supporters lost more than 50 lawsuits tried to overturn the election.

A group of Republican election lawyers and legal scholars reviewed all 64 Trump lawsuits challenging the 2020 election and found that only 20 of them were dismissed by judges before a hearing on the matter. In 30 cases, the verdicts against Trump came after hearings on the matter.

In the remaining 14 cases, according to the report from Stanford University's Hoover Institution, Trump and his allies dropped their lawsuits before they even reached the merits stage. “In many cases, after making extravagant claims of misconduct, Trump’s legal representatives appeared in court or in government proceedings empty-handed and then returned to their rallies and media campaigns to repeat the same unsubstantiated claims,” the report said.

Almost every state already uses paper ballots

WHAT TRUMP SAID: “We should move to paper voting.”

THE FACTS: Trump and Rogan both argued that voting machines are unreliable and that the United States should rely on paper ballots. Trump even pointed to his billionaire tech mogul backer Elon Musk's enthusiasm for such a change.

However, almost the entire country has already made this change.

According to the Brennan Center for Justice, more than 90% of voting precincts in the U.S. used paper ballots in 2020. The next year, the Federal Election Assistance Commission changed its guidelines and recommended every jurisdiction use paper.

The only state that does not use an election system with paper ballots or paper trails of any kind is the Republican-led state Louisiana.

Republicans and Democrats promoted mail-in voting during the pandemic

WHAT TRUMP SAID: “They used COVID to cheat.”

THE FACTS: Trump's central argument is that a vast Democratic conspiracy changed voting procedures during the coronavirus pandemic to make mail-in voting more popular, and that the conspirators then used those mail-in votes to rig the election against him. That didn't happen.

When the pandemic first erupted during the 2020 presidential primary in March, Republican and Democratic election officials quickly moved to encourage mail-in voting to avoid crowded polling places. This was relatively uncontroversial until Trump opposed it, claiming it would lay the groundwork for possible fraud.

With that, Trump returned to his usual approach and claimed that any election he didn't win was fraudulent. He made this claim in reference to the first contest he lost, the 2016 Republican caucus in Iowa. He even claimed he lost the 2016 popular vote because of illegal immigrants voting, although a presidential commission he set up to find evidence of this was disbanded without finding any evidence of this.

The 2020 election was free of any significant fraud

THE FACTS: Voter fraud has been occurring sporadically for a long time, but in modern times it has not reached the level required to influence a national election. An Associated Press review found fewer than 475 cases Trump lost in all six contested states by a total of more than 300,000 votes – far too few to change the result.