Donald Trump has claimed 5,000 dead people voted in 2020 in Georgia, a key state he lost to Joe Biden on his way to national defeat.

He was off by 4,996.

As the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported on Monday, state officials have confirmed four cases of dead people voting.

All involved family members submitting votes for the deceased, cases in which the state has the power to levy fines.

In one case detailed by the paper, a widow submitted an absentee ballot for her husband after he died in September, two months before polling day.

An attorney for the 74-year-old woman reportedly told officials her husband “was going to vote Republican, and she said, ‘Well, I’m going to cancel your ballot because I’m voting Democrat.’ It was kind of a joke between them. She received the absentee ballot and carried out his wishes.

“She now realises that was not the thing to do.”

Even if Trump’s claim about dead voters were true, it would not have saved him from being the first Republican to lose Georgia since 1992. Biden won the state by nearly 12,000 votes. Nor could Georgia alone have overturned Trump’s electoral college defeat, by 306-232.

But Trump included his claim in a notorious call in which he pushed the Georgia secretary of state, Republican Brad Raffensperger, to “find” enough votes to give him victory.

“Dead people,” Trump said. “So dead people voted, and I think the number is close to 5,000 people. And they went to obituaries. They went to all sorts of methods to come up with an accurate number, and a minimum is close to about 5,000 voters.”

He also claimed that “a tremendous number of dead people” voted in Michigan, adding: “I think it was … 18,000. Some unbelievably high number, much higher than yours, you were in the 4-5,000 category.”

Referring to a claim of “upward of 5,000” dead voters he said was presented to Georgia officials, Raffensperger, said: “The actual number were two. Two. Two people that were dead that voted. So that’s wrong.”

Trump insisted: “In one state, we have a tremendous amount of dead people. So I don’t know – I’m sure we do in Georgia, too. I’m sure we do in Georgia, too.”

Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows, told Raffensperger: “You say they were only two dead people who would vote. I can promise you there are more than that.”

Raffensperger refused to help Trump, prompting threats to his safety. But the call also placed Trump in legal jeopardy, as a district attorney investigates whether he broke electoral law.

The call was part of scattershot attempts to overturn a defeat Trump insists in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary was the result of electoral fraud.

A few days after the call, on 6 January, Trump told supporters in Washington to “fight like hell” in his cause. Rioters then attacked the US Capitol, seeking to stop certification of Biden’s win, in some cases seeking to capture or kill officials including Trump’s vice-president, Mike Pence.

Five people died.