In the opinion of most of the mainstream media, one of the worst sins you can commit these days is to ask any questions about the security of the electoral process, particularly when it comes to the upcoming midterm elections or the results of the 2020 elections. If you attempt to station election monitors near ballot drop-boxes, Democrats will take you to court. If you ask for a hand count of ballots so they can be compared to the machine count, you will similarly find yourself in front of a judge. But even those efforts at suppressing any and all questions are not enough.

With only days to go before the voting concludes, the Associated Press felt compelled to publish a handy guide to the types of “misinformation” you should expect to see on November 8th. They list any number of possible complaints about the voting process and then proceed to attempt to “prebunk” them. All of these issues are conveniently swept up into the category of “conspiracy theories” and the reader is generally assured that none of this could possibly happen. But even a casual glance at recent history makes this analysis look like what a certain president would generally call malarkey.

Misinformation about the upcoming midterm elections has been building for months, challenging election officials and tech companies while offering another reminder of how conspiracy theories and distrust are shaping America’s politics.

The claims are fueling the candidacies of election deniers and threatening to further corrode faith in voting and democracy. Many of them can be traced back to 2020, when then-President Donald Trump refused to accept the outcome of the election he lost to Joe Biden and began lying about its results.

“Misinformation is going to be central to this midterm election and central to the 2024 election,” said Bhaskar Chakravorti, who studies technological change and society and is the dean of global business at the Fletcher School at Tufts University. “The single galvanizing narrative is that the 2020 election was stolen.”

Here are some of the issues that the AP lumps into the categories of “baseless rumors” and “wild theories.”

• Dead people voting
• Security of mail ballots and drop boxes
• Ineligible people voting

Let’s start with an old favorite from that list, specifically the idea of “dead people voting.” What a bunch of nonsense, right? That can’t possibly happen. It’s all propaganda being spread by the mega-MAGA army to undermine democracy. Except for the awkward fact that it happens during almost every election. A Pennsylvania man was sentenced to five years probation last year for casting a ballot in the name of his deceased mother. (That link comes from the well-known, Trump-loving outlet CNN.) During the 2020 election in New York’s 22nd Congressional District, three people were charged with casting ballots for dead relatives.

And do you know how those people were caught? If you think that it was some inherent safety feature in the voting system that prevents such fraud from taking place, think again. The perpetrators were only identified because the GOP stationed election monitors at some polling places and they Googled the names on all of the mail-in ballots and looked for matching obituaries. If they hadn’t done that, those votes would have been counted. And they didn’t have enough volunteers to do this at nearly all of the polling places. In other words, those few people were only the ones that managed to get caught.

How about those ballot drop boxes that the Democrats don’t want people monitoring? Just this week a voter found one of them with the keys left in the lock so anyone could have accessed it. But perhaps you won’t believe that story because the link goes to that well-known right-wing rag… CBS News.

Surely there are no ineligible people voting though, right? Of course not. Unless, of course, you count the ones that were immediately identified in Florida shortly after the first time a thorough review of the voter rolls and voting records was undertaken. Granted, most of those people likely were unaware that they were ineligible, but that doesn’t change the fact that the votes were fraudulent and should not have been counted. And yet again, those are just the people from a couple of counties in one state who managed to be discovered.

The list goes on. Voter fraud takes place in every election. The only question is how widespread it actually is and we don’t really have any idea. So before you allow the AP or any other outlet to “prebunk” all of these voter fraud issues for you, just let this information sink in first.