There is simply no evidence of fraud in the 2020 presidential election of the magnitude necessary to shift the result in any state, let alone the nation as a whole.
There is simply no evidence of fraud in the 2020 presidential election of the magnitude necessary to shift the result in any state, let alone the nation as a whole.
C ontinuing allegations that the 2020 election was “stolen” are roiling our politics and dividing our country. Indeed, now a significant percentage of the American public doubts the legitimacy of our system.
That caused us, political conservatives who have spent most of our careers working to uphold the Constitution and the conservative principles upon which it is based, to delve deeply into those charges and gauge their accuracy. All of us have either worked in Republican Party politics at multiple levels and in various capacities or worked in the government as a result of Republican appointments. Indeed, one of us, Theodore B. Olson, successfully represented George W. Bush in a Supreme Court case that ended Al Gore’s unmerited challenge to the results of the 2000 presidential election. We have no affiliation with the Democratic Party. In our opinion, the most fundamental principle of our constitutional system is that the will of the people expressed through elections must prevail, whether “our side” wins or loses.
The source of the charges is not in dispute. Because allegations of fraudulent and rigged elections are so seriously affecting public opinion, especially among Republicans, we conducted an open-minded examination of the many claims by former president Trump and his supporters and allies who agree with him about the 2020 election and attempted to act on their beliefs. We take such claims seriously. Many of us have worked at polling places on Election Day as Republicans guarding against the kinds of fraudulent voting activity that Trump alleges occurred. Such a task is an important one in our system, yet is too often falsely derided as “voter suppression.” If, in fact, we had found evidence of the sort that has been alleged, we would be at the vanguard of those demanding corrective measures.
Therefore, we painstakingly surveyed each of the 187 counts in the 64 court cases brought on Trump’s behalf contesting the results of the 2020 election, the state recounts and contests brought in the name of the former president, and the post-election reviews undertaken in the six key battleground states (Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin) to determine whether there is any fire amidst all the smoke.
Our review has led us to conclude that there is simply no evidence of fraud in the 2020 presidential election of the magnitude necessary to shift the result in any state, let alone the nation as a whole. In fact, not even a single precinct’s outcome was reversed. Our report, “Lost Not Stolen: The Conservative Case that Trump Lost and Biden Won the 2020 Presidential Election,” shows that only in one Pennsylvania case, involving far too few votes to overturn the results, could Trump and his supporters claim even a technical victory where a judge granted a demarcation of vote-counting that Trump wanted but that the state had already begun.
Judges (some appointed by Trump himself), legislators, and other election officers, very often including members of his own party, gave the former president ample time and every opportunity to present proof of his claims of voter fraud, to no avail. Trump’s legal representatives frequently showed up in court or state proceedings empty-handed. Post-election audits or reviews in each state also failed to show any irregularities or fraud that would overturn the electoral results. Despite this near-total lack of evidence, Trump and his allies continue to advance the notion of a fraudulent election at rallies and via media campaigns, contributing to — and hoping to take advantage of — a widespread loss of faith in our country’s political institutions.
Take Nevada. In that state, Trump allies brought ten cases with 28 counts challenging the election results. One ally claimed to have “thousands and thousands of examples of . . . voter illegality” and called Nevada “the big treasure trove of illegal balloting in all of” the states Trump contested. Yet when given an opportunity to present evidence of these claims in court, Trump’s allies had none. Subsequent investigations by local election officials and the Nevada secretary of state, a Republican, found 100 cases of potential fraud across the entire state. Biden won Nevada by a margin of over 33,000 votes. The “treasure trove,” like the ones at the ends of rainbows, is the stuff of myth, not reality.
Or Georgia. There, Trump and his supporters brought eleven cases with 38 counts challenging results. Again, his team failed to present actual evidence sufficient to support any of those allegations. The Republican secretary of state conducted a full manual recount of all 5 million ballots and investigated numerous specific allegations of fraud with the assistance of the Georgia Bureau of Investigations. The results emphatically confirmed Biden’s victory. The best guess is that there were 64 instances of potential fraud, of which 31 were simply administrative mistakes. Put into perspective, that represents one half of one percent of Biden’s victory, merely a rounding error.
Our report takes a hard look at the serious charges made by Trump and his supporters. If proven true, these would rock the foundations of the republic and would show an electoral system in desperate need of repair. Given our backgrounds, we would be at the forefront of those demanding changes if Trump and his allies had produced credible evidence.
But they are not true. Let us be clear: Trump’s charges are false. Repeatedly and knowingly making false claims about election fraud does not make them true. But it does corrode our republic and its institutions. And it comes with a downside for those making such false claims. Americans do not like sore losers, especially after we have run the slow-motion replay and seen that the refs made the right call.
In our system of government, founded on the rule of law, judicial proceedings provide the proper forums for disappointed candidates to prove their claims. Questions of election legality must be resolved dispassionately in courts of law, not through rallies and demonstrations — and, most emphatically, not by applying political pressure and threats to induce Congress or state legislatures to ignore the electoral outcome for which the people voted and which the legal processes of the affected states had examined and confirmed. As our report shows, Trump’s efforts failed because of a lack of evidence, not because of erroneous rulings, unfair judges, or an insufficient opportunity to make his case. To have 30 percent of the country lack faith in election results based on unsubstantiated claims of a “stolen” election is unsustainable, and it discredits those making those charges.
We do not, however, believe that the lack of election-altering fraud in this election means that all efforts to improve election integrity are therefore inherently illegitimate. In fact, we support efforts to make it easy to vote and hard to cheat. But moving forward in a positive direction on such reforms, and in our country generally, requires admitting the truth: Trump did not win the presidential election in 2020. Biden won it, and he won it fairly.
Some self-interested, opportunistic actors will engage in all manner of obfuscation to avoid admitting this fact. Under the guise of just asking questions, they will attack us as messengers. They will cite and hype irrelevant or inconsequential post-election allegations in the contested states. They will make unsubstantiated claims about the possible effects of other factors in the election.
What they will not do is confront the information we provide in this report head-on; explain why, even in the states they allege were affected by other factors, other Republican candidates outperformed Trump on the same ballot; or acknowledge that Trump’s own claims about the 2020 election tend to be more grandiose and unprovable than their own, even as they attempt to provide cover for his unfounded views on this matter. Worst of all, they will invoke Trump’s own good-faith supporters as a kind of human shield for their efforts, attempting to cast any pushback against Trump’s false allegations as condemnation of the people who voted for Trump. (We intend no such condemnation.) Such deceptive rhetoric should be ignored.
By setting out the full record in this report, we want to restore faith in the reliability of our elections and encourage those making the charges to instead refocus their efforts on articulating conservative policy solutions for the urgent problems facing the country today. We have faith in the judgment of the American people when they are given the facts. We hope our great nation can begin to heal from the damage caused by these false accusations.
Thomas B. Griffith, J. Michael Luttig, and Michael W. McConnell are former federal appeals-court judges; Theodore B. Olson is a former United States solicitor general; Benjamin L. Ginsberg is a retired Republican election lawyer; Dave Hoppe is the former chief of staff to House speaker Paul Ryan and Senate majority leader Trent Lott.