The Election Fraud Lie
It’s the whopper of a lie that just will not die. Mainly because its main champion Donald Trump refuses to let it… that is, until he wins back the presidency, then – POOF! – elections are suddenly perfect!
Love him or hate him, you gotta hand it to him: Donald Trump has knocked his election fraud lie out of the park. This lie should go directly into the Lying Hall of Fame. Best. Executed. Lie. Ever!
Being a masterful liar, Donald started early, railing against the “Deep State” and calling the media “fake news” and “enemy of the people.” So, by the time he needed to tell the Big Lie – meaning, when he wanted to save face after he lawfully lost the 2020 presidential election – many of his supporters had lost all trust in the media, as well as the people who work in every level of government and the agencies and institutions they work for. Again, genius.
But here is the truth about widespread U.S. election fraud: It is, in fact, a straight-up lie. Widespread voter fraud in the United States does not exist.
This is not our opinions, it’s a fact. There is overwhelming evidence to prove widespread election fraud untrue, and this proof doesn’t just come from the evil MSM. It comes directly from election experts and officials from both parties, transcripts from multiple courts of law and state legislatures, and from the mouths of judges themselves – many of whom were appointed by none other than Donald J. Trump.
Even a firm hired by the 2020 Trump campaign to prove election fraud/voting irregularities happened found virtually nothing. The Washington Post reports that, in the weeks after the 2020 election, the Trump campaign hired a company called East Bay Dispute and Advisory – a subsidiary of Berkeley Research Group – to analyze election results in six states. The Berkeley Research Group describes itself as a global consulting firm that helps organizations advance in disputes and investigations, corporate finance, and performance improvement and advisory. Federal Election Commission (FEC) filings revealed the Trump campaign paid East Bay Dispute and Advisory over $600,000 by the end of 2020.
Unsurprisingly, the results of the group’s “Project 2020” report were never released to the public because the firm could not prove anything that would have caused a change in the outcome of the 2020 election. However, the report ended up in the hands of the prosecutors investigating the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol then, in turn, into the hands of The Washington Post.
One source told the paper, “They looked at everything: change of addresses, illegal immigrants, ballot harvesting, people voting twice, machines being tampered with, ballots that were sent to vacant addresses that were returned and voted. Literally anything you could think of. Voter turnout anomalies, date of birth anomalies, whether dead people voted. If there was anything under the sun that could be thought of, they looked at it.” “Just like any election,” the source continued, “there are always errors, omissions and irregularities. It was nowhere close enough to what (the Trump campaign) wanted to prove, and it actually went in both directions.”
The Project 2020 report undercuts what Trump and his team were repeatedly saying not only after the 2020 election but through the 2024 campaign. For example, in Donald’s now infamous phone call on January 2, 2021 with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, Trump claimed that thousands of dead people had voted in Georgia: “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.”
However, the Project 2020 report, which is dated one day before the phone call, says that researchers at East Bay Dispute and Advisory had “high confidence” that there were only 9 dead voters in Fulton County, Georgia and that there was “potential statewide exposure” of just 23. < “Dead voters” means that ballots were cast in the name of a person that was dead on Election Day. But remember, there are instances when people vote early then, sadly, die.)
In Nevada, the dead voter “high confidence” number was 12 in Clark County, with the “high end potential exposure” of such votes being just 20 statewide. Although the Trump campaign was saying in court filings that they believed 42,284 people voted twice in Nevada – Trump lost the state by roughly 33,000 votes – the researchers reported that the “low end potential exposure” of double voters was 45 and the “high end potential exposure” was 9,063.
Other conservative politicians also investigated voter fraud in 2020. The Texas attorney general’s office almost doubled the number of hours its staff spent on tracking down election fraud than they did in 2018. Even after 22,000 hours of probing, Attorney General Ken Paxton’s office uncovered only 16 minor cases of voter fraud. All 16 cases involved people putting false addresses on their voter forms.
In reporting the story about the Texas attorney general’s election integrity unit, The Houston Chronicle revealed that “in its 15 years in existence, the unit has prosecuted a few dozen cases in which offenders received jail time, none of them involving widespread fraud.” Joseph Fishkin, a professor of election law at the University of Texas who was quoted in the article, put it this way: “This is not the only voter fraud effort to pour in a lot of resources and end up with a relatively small number of cases found. Finding very few defendants, even if they can charge some with multiple offenses, is consistent with the possibility that there just isn’t that much fraud to prosecute.”
The Associated Press conducted one of the most comprehensive examinations of suspected voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election, a process that took months and encompassed more than 300 local election offices. The AP’s review relied on information collected at the local level, where officials are required to reconcile their ballots and account for discrepancies, and includes a handful of separate cases cited by secretaries of state and state attorneys general.
The AP’s analysis of “every potential case of voter fraud in the six battleground states disputed by former President Donald Trump found fewer than 475 – a number that would have made no difference in the 2020 presidential election.” This represents just 0.15 percent of Joe Biden’s victory margin in these battleground states (and remember, this assumes all the disputed ballots were cast for Biden, which they most definitely weren’t).
The investigation also confirmed there was “no collusion intended to rig the voting. Virtually every case was based on an individual acting alone to cast additional ballots.” For instance, officials in Wisconsin charged one woman with voter fraud when she allegedly tried to use her dead partner’s name to vote. Michigan charged two people with fraud when they forged their daughters’ names to get ballots. One man was charged in Pennsylvania for using his dead mother’s name to vote for, you guessed it, Donald Trump. Wow, that’s one hell of a conspiracy.
…. and all of this is just what happened in the 2020 election. You may remember that Donald Trump also claimed election fraud in the 2016 presidential election. Even though he won the 2016 election, Donald Trump didn’t like that he lost the popular vote by 2.8 million votes so, of course, it had to be fraud – which is a tricky thing to claim when you won the Electoral College and, therefore, the presidency.
Ironically, even as Donald Trump was claiming – with zero proof – that between 3 million and 5 million ballots were illegally cast in the 2016 election, his own lawyers were adamantly claiming in a Michigan courtroom that “all available evidence suggests that the 2016 general election was not tainted by fraud or mistake” as they fought to block a recount effort by Green Party candidate Jill Stein.
Likewise, in a court filing in Pennsylvania, legal representatives for Donald Trump and his campaign said, “There is no evidence – or even any allegation – that any tampering with Pennsylvania’s voting systems actually occurred.” In this case, the Trump attorneys went further: “The absence of any evidence of tampering is no surprise. Before the election, Secretary of State Pedro Cortés assured Pennsylvanian voters that Pennsylvania’s voting systems are ‘secure,’ and criticized contrary suggestions as ‘not only wrong and uninformed, but also dangerous.’”
One of our favorite examples that proves the entire voter fraud ruse is complete b.s. is the fate of Donald Trump’s Presidential Commission on Election Integrity, which he convened after the 2016 election. The Commission met just twice and never issued a report on its findings. Maine’s secretary of state who was initially appointed to the Commission, Democrat Matt Dunlap, told author David Daley, “It was a dishonest effort from the very beginning. It was never really meant to uncover anything. It was meant to backfill an unprovable thesis that there’s voter fraud – then to issue a fake report justifying laws or executive orders that change the fundamental nature of how we run elections. I think that might have been the real danger that we averted.”
It wasn’t just Democrats who became disenchanted with the Commission. The effort got off to a rough start when Kris Kobach – the former secretary of state of Kansas and the vice chairman of the Commission (stay tuned for more on this genius) – demanded that state election officials give the Commission tons of voter data, to include Social Security numbers, party registration and voting history. Understandably, this request didn’t go down very well and most all the election officials involved seemingly felt the way Mississippi Secretary of State Delbert Hosemann, a Republican, did about the request: “They can go jump in the Gulf of Mexico.”
In the end, a court order forced the Trump administration to turn over documents from the Commission to Matt Dunlap, who promptly posted them on a website. Analysis of the documents by the Associated Press led the news agency to say, “The now-disbanded voting integrity commission launched by the Trump administration uncovered no evidence to support claims of widespread voter fraud.”
One of Donald Trump’s big accusations in 2016 was that there were thousands upon thousands of non-citizens voting, which is – surprise, surprise – untrue. On January 27, 2019, Donald Trump tweeted: “58,000 non-citizens voted in Texas, with 95,000 non-citizens registered to vote. These numbers are just the tip of the iceberg. All over the country, especially in California, voter fraud is rampant. Must be stopped. Strong voter ID!” – a premise that Texas Attorney General Paxton was more than happy – surprise, surprise – to help promote.
The truth – which neither Donald Trump nor Ken Paxton bothered to ever retroactively clarify – is that, yes, the Texas Department of Public Safety did indeed flag 95,000 names of potential non-citizens who were possibly registered to vote. But THEN, Texas and its 254 counties began clearing names from that list as the citizenship status of people on the list were confirmed. The Texas Tribune reported that, very quickly, “the number of registered voters flagged by the state began to plummet...Soon after, the citizenship review effort buckled, revealing itself as a ham-handed exercise that threatened to jeopardize the votes of thousands of legitimate voters across the state. The secretary of state’s office eventually walked back its initial findings after embarrassing errors in the data revealed that tens of thousands of the voters the state flagged were citizens.”
Things in Florida went about the same way when there was a similar accusation four years earlier. In 2012, there were reports that up to 200,000 registered voters in Florida may not have been U.S. citizens. After a thorough investigation by then Governor Rick Scott, a Republican, the actual number turned out to be 207.
Six years later, the same Rick Scott, now running for the U.S. Senate, claimed that the votes from Broward County (a county in Florida that generally votes Democratic) were nefariously tainted. Once again, this was proven false. On May 21, 2020, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement released a report that found “no evidence of fraudulent intent” and “no evidence of fraudulent intent to use the altered forms by the Florida Democratic Party after more than a year-long investigation into alleged vote-by-mail fraud.”
Another one of Donald Trump’s favorite fraud accusations in 2016 was his claim that “thousands” of people were “brought in on buses” to New Hampshire from neighboring Massachusetts to “illegally” vote. After a months-long investigation by the New Hampshire Secretary of State and the state’s Department of Justice, this was also proven false.
The Boston Globe reported that “the two state agencies found that among the approximately 743,000 voters who cast ballots in the 2016 general election, JUST FOUR appeared to have voted illegally, mostly out of confusion about where they were supposed to vote. For example, some said they were told to go to an incorrect location, others thought they were allowed to vote any place where they own property.”
The Globe continued, “Of the 6,000 who registered to vote on Election Day and signed an affidavit swearing to be a state resident, just 66 in 15 communities did not ultimately have their identities verified. While the state could not confirm exactly why they couldn’t contact those people, Associate Attorney General Anne Edwards cautioned: ‘No one should reach any conclusion that an unlawful vote was cast, because we have not been able to identify these voters.’”
Let’s now circle back to good ‘ol Kris Kobach from Kansas, the genius from Donald Trump’s Presidential Commission on Election Integrity. This is a guy who couldn’t win his campaigns for governor or the U.S. Senate, even with the advantage of trying to cheat. Kobach is super proud of the fact that changes he made in voter identification laws in Kansas when he was secretary of state – which were already some of the strictest in U.S. history – would probably, in his estimation, remove as many as 20,000 people from the voter rolls.
Problem is that, even after an extensive investigation by Kobach himself, he could only find 127 ineligible individuals who voted or tried to vote. In the end, Kobach obtained only 9 convictions and, as NBC News reports, “most were older individuals who had mis-understood their voting rights – and just one was a noncitizen.” That’s some impressive law enforcement there, buddy!
The Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law says that “allegations of widespread voter fraud often prove greatly exaggerated. It is easy to grab headlines with a lurid claim (‘tens of thousands may be voting illegally!’), but the follow-up – when any exists – is not usually deemed newsworthy. On closer examination, many of the claims of voter fraud amount to a great deal of smoke without much fire. The allegations simply do not pan out.”
Research from Columbia University found that “voter fraud is extremely rare…if we use the same standards for judging voter fraud crime rates as we do for other crimes, we must conclude that the lack of evidence of arrests, indictments or convictions for any of the practices defined as voter fraud means very little fraud is being committed.”
Rutgers University-Camden dug way back for their conclusion: “Are fraudulent voters undermining U.S. elections? The simple answer is no. Under Republican President George W. Bush, the U.S. Justice Department searched for voter fraud. But in the first three years of the program, just 26 people were convicted or pled guilty to illegal registration or voting. Out of 197,056,035 votes cast in the two federal elections held during that period, the rate of voter fraud was a minuscule 0.00000132 percent.”
Even when super conservative media outlets and think tanks have looked closely at voter fraud, they have, like all the rest, found very little. The Heritage Foundation – whose stated mission is to formulate and promote conservative public policies – has investigated fraudulent use of absentee ballots, ineligible voting, impersonation fraud at the polls, buying votes, ballot petition fraud, duplicate voting, false registrations, altering the vote count, and illegal assistance at the polls. The organization has discovered 1,567 proven instances of voter fraud nationwide – SINCE 1982!! That’s 43 years ago!