Honestly – even though we're about to give you even more proof that widespread election fraud didn’t happen in 2020 – we shouldn’t need to because the entire thing can be discredited by common sense alone. For one, because our elections are highly decentralized, the United States doesn’t have just one voting system, we have fifty-one. Actually, since counties usually fund and administer elections at the local level, we have thousands.

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…and doesn’t it strike you as odd that voter fraud only affected Donald Trump in 2020 but no other Republicans down ballot? Plus, the only states accused of massive fraud were the battleground states that Trump thought he was going to win but ultimately lost? Would he really have us believe that the states he won are the only ones that miraculously experience no fraud. Come on now, people.

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You may ask us, if The Washington Post is to be believed, Donald Trump has told tens of thousands of lies. So why are y'all  dedicating an entire section to this one? Answer: Because this lie is wildly un-American and incredibly damaging. At its core, it’s a dagger through the very heart of American democracy itself. Out of everything anyone in American politics has ever lied about, it is by far the most potentially destructive. This is a lie that must be stopped.

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Let’s please, please, please take the advice of the eight prominent, lifelong conservatives – which include three retired federal judges, a former Solicitor General, a leading election lawyer, two former senators, and a longtime congressional staff chief – who released the report Lost, Not Stolen because they had “become deeply troubled by efforts to overturn or discredit the results of the 2020 presidential election.”

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Their warning was clear: “There is no principle of our republic more fundamental than the right of the people to elect our leaders and for their votes to be counted accurately. Efforts to thwart the people’s choice are deeply undemocratic and unpatriotic. Claims that an election was stolen, or that the outcome resulted from fraud, are deadly serious and should be made only on the basis of real and powerful evidence. If the American people lose trust that our elections are free and fair, we will lose our democracy.”

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To put the controversy to rest once and for all, the group examined “every claim of fraud and miscount put forward by former President Trump and his advocates” and found that “Donald Trump and his supporters had failed to present evidence of fraud or inaccurate results significant enough to invalidate the results of the 2020 presidential election.” In the end, their “conclusion was unequivocal: Joe Biden was the choice of a majority of the Electors, who themselves were the choice of the majority of voters in their states.”

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That said, Donald Trump and his allies had plenty of opportunities to plead their case, taking their 2020 voter-fraud allegations to courts in multiple states. Well over 60 cases were dismissed, and 86 judges on all levels of the court system – from the lowest levels to the U.S. Supreme Court – rejected this nonsense.

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But pushback against the 2020 voter fraud claims started well before the first court appearance. Almost immediately after the first election fraud accusation, 59 of America’s leading computer scientists and election security experts called Donald Trump’s claims of voter fraud “unsubstantiated” and “technically incoherent.” These 59 people are not part of some conspiracy or members of some kind of “Deep State.” They are experts from both political parties. In part, their letter said, “Anyone asserting that a U.S. election was ‘rigged’ is making an extraordinary claim, one that must be supported by persuasive and verifiable evidence.” Without evidence, they say, the claims are “simply speculation.” In conclusion, they wrote, “To our collective knowledge, no credible evidence has been put forth that supports a conclusion that the 2020 election outcome in any state has been altered through technical compromise.”

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That was just the beginning of the pushback. After Donald Trump tweeted that voting machines made by Dominion Voting Systems “deleted 2.7 million Trump votes nationwide,” the Election Infrastructure Government Coordinating Council (GCC) Executive Committee – which includes top officials from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, the National Association of Secretaries of State, National Association of State Election Directors, and members of the Election Infrastructure Sector Coordinating Council – released this statement: “The November 3rd election was the most secure in American history. All of the states with close results in the 2020 presidential race have paper records of each vote, allowing the ability to go back and count each ballot if necessary. This is an added benefit for security and resilience. This process allows for the identification and correction of any mistakes or errors. There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.”

 

< COMMERCIAL BREAK: In March 2021, Dominion Voting Systems sued Fox News for defamation – to the tune of $1.6 billion – claiming the network spread disinformation about the company and its voting machines in the wake of the 2020 election. In the initial complaint, Dominion’s attorneys said: “The truth matters. Lies have consequences. Fox sold a false story of election fraud in order to serve its own commercial purposes, severely injuring Dominion in the process. If this case does not rise to the level of defamation by a broadcaster, then nothing does.”

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Thomas Clare, a Dominion attorney, added, “The best way to vindicate the truth is in the courts where there’s cross-examination where we have the opportunity to take discovery, where there are rules, where evidence is required to be submitted.  And that is the process that we are very much looking forward to in order to vindicate the company and to get the truth out there.”

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Boy was he right about that! Dominion’s case against Fox News went to trial in the courtroom of Delaware Superior Court Judge Eric Davis on April 18, 2023. From the beginning, the case was limited because Judge Davis issued several pretrial rulings that strengthened Dominion’s position. In one, he wrote that “the evidence does not support that Fox News Network conducted good-faith, disinterested reporting.” In another, he wrote that the “evidence developed in this civil proceeding demonstrates that it is crystal clear that none of the statements relating to Dominion about the 2020 election are true” …both of which proved brutal against possible Fox defenses.

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Even before opening statements began, Fox News agreed to pay Dominion Voting Systems $787.5 million, the largest monetary settlement ever disclosed in a U.S. defamation case.

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But even more damaging to Fox and its chairman Rupert Murdoch were the hundreds of thousands of pages of internal emails, texts, and other communications that Fox was forced to give Dominion in the pretrial discovery process. The mountain of evidence provided showed that practically everyone at Fox, including Murdoch and high-level executives and producers, believed the claims of election fraud were false but allowed Fox hosts and guests to perpetuate them to maintain its viewership. (there is much more on this – including parts of the official transcripts – in the Media section)

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Dominion also sued right-wing networks Newsmax and One America News Network (OAN) for similar claims. In August 2025, Dominion settled with Newsmax for $67 million. The OAN lawsuit is still pending. Additionally, former Dominion executive Eric Coomer sued Newsmax, OAN, and the "MyPillow Guy" Mike Lindell for defamation, saying the defendants had characterized him as a “traitor,” a claim that had led to him receiving “multiple credible death threats.” Coomer’s case against Lindell went to trial in the summer of 2025, with a jury finding Lindell liable for defamation and ordering him to pay Coomer $2.3 million in damages. In August 2023, OAN reached a settlement with Coomer.

 

Dominion also sued former Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani for defamation, claiming over $1.3 billion in damages. Dominion CEO John Poulos explained this decision this way: “Rudy Giuliani actively propagated disinformation to purposefully mislead voters. Because Giuliani and others incessantly repeated the false claims about my company on a range of media platforms, some of our own family and friends are among the Americans who were duped.”

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Dominion also sued former Trump attorney Sidney Powell, former Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne, and Mike Lindell for defamation. On March 22, 2021, Powell – who once called the “stealing” of the 2020 election “the greatest crime of the century if not the life of the world” – petitioned a federal court to drop the case against her and, get this: In the filing to dismiss, her attorneys argued that “reasonable people would not accept [such statements she made against Dominion] as fact but view them only as claims that await testing by the courts through the adversary process.” Essentially, her defense was that surely no one was stupid enough to believe a word she says. Dominion’s lawsuits against Giuliani, Powell, Byrne and Lindell are ongoing.

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Then there is Smartmatic USA Corporation, another election technology company that sued Newsmax and OAN for basically the same reasons Dominion did. Even though the facts of the Smartmatic case are like the ones in the Dominion case, Dominion’s technology was used in 24 states in the 2020 election while Smartmatic only provided election services for Los Angeles County. In the end, Smartmatic settled its cases with Newsmax and OAN through confidential settlements. 

 

Smartmatic also sued Fox Corporation for defamation (focusing on hosts Maria Bartiromo, Lou Dobbs and Jeanine Pirro), plus Rudy, Sidney, and the My Pillow and Overstock guys. In September 2025, a judge ruled that Lindell defamed Smartmatic. All the other cases are still pending. Regarding these cases, Smartmatic argues that Rudy and Sidney “created a story about Smartmatic” and that “Fox joined the conspiracy to defame and disparage Smartmatic and its election technology and software. The story turned neighbor against neighbor. The story led a mob to attack the U.S. Capitol.”

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In a statement, Smartmatic chief executive Antonio Mugica said, “Fox is responsible for this disinformation campaign, which has damaged democracy worldwide and irreparably harmed Smartmatic and other stakeholders who contribute to modern elections… Mr. Giuliani and Ms. Powell needed a platform to use to spread their story. They found a willing partner in Fox News.” COMMERCIAL BREAK OVER! >

 

After the Election Infrastructure Government Coordinating Council (GCC) statement was released, Christopher Krebs, then the head of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) – a division of the Department of Homeland Security that helps states secure the voting process – went on to call the claims of election fraud “nonsense” and “farcical.”

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In an interview with 60 Minutes, Krebs reiterated that 95 percent of the ballots cast had paper records backing them up and, in states where there were hand recounts, the results were virtually the same as when the machine counted them. Although Donald Trump had already fired Krebs (by Tweet) for saying the election fraud claims were “nonsense” and “farcical,” after the 60 Minutes interview Trump attorney Joseph diGenova said on Newsmax that Krebs should be “drawn and quartered, taken out at dawn and shot.”

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Krebs sued the Trump campaign, diGenova, and Newsmax for defamation. According to the lawsuit, diGenova accused Krebs of, among other things, treason, leading to “an avalanche of despicably offensive and frighteningly threatening statements” against Krebs… to the point that one of Krebs’ five young children said, “Daddy’s going to get executed?” In April 2021, Krebs settled the lawsuit with diGenova. 

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< Sidebar: In April 2025, President Trump directed the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate Chris Krebs and revoked all of Krebs’ remaining security clearances. During the announcement in the Oval Office, Trump called Krebs a “wiseguy,” and said, “He came out right after the election, which was a rigged election, a badly rigged election… this guy Krebs was saying, ‘Oh, the election was great, it was great.” The president also suspended any security clearances held by SentinelOne employees. SentinelOne is a prominent cybersecurity firm where Krebs served as chief intelligence and public policy officer (Krebs’ company Krebs Stamos Group was sold to SentinelOne in 2023). > 

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On November 29, 2020, Donald Trump, in quite possibly the longest run-on sentence in history, said on Fox News that “(the election) is total fraud. And how the FBI and Department of Justice – I don’t know – maybe they’re involved, but how people are getting away with this stuff – it’s unbelievable. … You would think, if you’re in the FBI or Department of Justice, this is – this is the biggest thing you could be looking at. Where are they? I have not seen anything. … It’s an embarrassment to our country.” 

 

But two days later, none other than the Trump administration’s Attorney General Bill Barr – who long before had proven to be a Trump sycophant – reiterated that, although the Justice Department had followed-up on complaints of voter fraud, his department had not seen “fraud on a scale that could have affected a different outcome in the election.” Barr continued, “There’s been one assertion that would be systemic fraud and that would be the claim that machines were programmed essentially to skew the election results. And the Department of Homeland Security and Department of Justice have looked into that, and so far, we haven’t seen anything to substantiate that.” 

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Well over a year later, Barr went on to tell the House Oversight Committee investigating the January 6th Capitol attack that he told Donald Trump that his unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud were “bullshit,” and that he “did not agree with the idea of saying the election was stolen.” He closed by saying, “Frankly a year and a half later, I’ve seen nothing to change my mind on that.”

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Seven months after the election, the U.S. Justice Department released a treasure trove of emails to the House Oversight Committee. The emails detail how Donald Trump, his chief of staff Mark Meadows, and a few other minions relentlessly pressured the U.S. Justice Department to help overturn the legal election results. Meadows went as far as asking then-acting Attorney General Jeffery Rosen (Barr had resigned) to investigate already discredited conspiracy theories like the one claiming that someone in Italy somehow remotely changed the election results in America. Mr. Rosen joined Bill Barr, acting Solicitor General Jeffrey Wall, and White House counsel Pat Cipollone in refusing to indulge Donald Trump’s obsession on any level.

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When it was clear that Mr. Rosen was not going to break the law for him, Donald Trump decided he would replace Rosen with one of his faithful worker bees, Jeffrey Clark – an idea that was squelched only when multiple senior Justice Department officials threatened to resign en masse. After Rosen forwarded Mark Meadows’ email about the Italian nonsense to his acting deputy Richard Donoghue, Donoghue replied, “Pure insanity.”

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In October 2021, the Senate Judiciary Committee issued a report called Subverting Justice: How the Former President and His Allies Pressured the Department of Justice (DOJ) to Overturn the 2020 Election. The Republican ranking member of the Committee was Lindsey Graham, and other Republican members included Chuck Grassley, John Cornyn, Mike Lee, Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, Tom Cotton John Kennedy, Thom Tillis and Marsha Blackburn.​​

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​Key findings of the Senate Judiciary Committee majority staff report included the following:

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+ President Trump repeatedly asked DOJ leadership to endorse his false claims that the election was stolen and to assist his efforts to overturn the election results.

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+ White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows asked Acting Attorney General Rosen to initiate election fraud investigations on multiple occasions, violating longstanding restrictions on White House-DOJ communications about specific law-enforcement matters.

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+ After personally meeting with Trump, Jeffrey Bossert Clark pushed Rosen and Donoghue to assist Trump’s election subversion scheme – and told Rosen he would decline Trump’s potential offer to install him as Acting Attorney General if Rosen agreed to aid that scheme.

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+ Trump allies with links to the “Stop the Steal” movement and the January 6 insurrection participated in the pressure campaign against DOJ.

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+ Trump forced the resignation of U.S. Attorney Byung Jin (“BJay”) Pak, whom he believed was not doing enough to address false claims of election fraud in Georgia. Trump then went outside the line of succession when naming an Acting U.S. Attorney, bypassing First Assistant U.S. Attorney Kurt Erskine and instead appointing Bobby Christine because he believed Christine would “do something” about his election fraud claims.

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+ By pursuing false claims of election fraud before votes were certified, DOJ deviated from longstanding practice meant to avoid inserting DOJ itself as an issue in the election.​​​​​​​​​

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All this severely damage Donald Trump’s voter fraud claims, but nowhere did the allegations fare worse than in American courts. Although anyone can say anything on cable television, social media or at a press conference (even if they eventually get sued), the standard of proof is a little different in a court of law, to say the least. Attorneys are bound by a strict code of professional responsibility, which includes duty of candor to the courts and the duty to avoid frivolous claims.

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… which means lawyers can’t just make stuff up, and they certainly can’t lie to a judge… which means most all of them bolted from Team Trump almost immediately. Two large law firms withdrew as counsel only days after filing lawsuits. This led to several new lawyers joining the team, but they also resigned within days.

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This exodus of qualified attorneys left as Trump’s lawyers only the self-named “elite, strike force team” – which included Rudy Giuliani, Jenna Ellis and, for a while, the aforementioned kook Sidney Powell – whose collective conduct former Republican governor of New Jersey and then Trump ally Chris Christie called “a national embarrassment.” Christie didn’t stop there: “This is outrageous conduct by any lawyer. They allege fraud outside the courtroom but when they go inside the courtroom, they don’t plead fraud and they don’t argue fraud. We cannot continue to act as if something happened here that didn’t happen. You have an obligation to present the evidence.  The evidence has not been presented…. as much as I’m a strong Republican – I love my party – it’s the country that has to come first.”

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As we all know, you need a little something called evidence in a court of law. Unfortunately for Donald Trump and his attorneys, they had none. Zero. Nada. This led to humiliating moments for them.

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One of the worst came two days after the election in Philadelphia. The Trump campaign filed an emergency petition to stop the vote count, claiming Republican observers had been unfairly banned from the room where votes were being counted. Under intense questioning by Judge Paul S. Diamond, a U.S. District Judge appointed by President George W. Bush, Trump campaign attorney Jerome Marcus admitted that Republicans did, in fact, have a “nonzero number of people in the room,” which is a ridiculous way to say there were, in fact, Republicans allowed in the room. Seemingly annoyed and still unsatisfied with the answer, Judge Diamond then said: “I am asking you as a member of the bar of this court, are people representing Donald J. Trump for President, representing the plaintiff, in that room?” To which Marcus had to answer, “Yes.” Judge Diamond then responded, “I’m sorry, then what’s your problem?”

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Elsewhere in Pennsylvania, the Trump legal team conceded in a joint stipulation of facts in Bucks County that the “petitioners do not allege, and there is no evidence, that any of the challenged ballots were cast by, or on behalf of, a deceased person.”  They also conceded there was no “fraud,” “misconduct,” or “impropriety” in connection with the ballots they were challenging. Because the question was answered before the case even started, the Honorable Robert O. Baldi stopped the farce, saying: “The parties specifically stipulated in their comprehensive stipulation of facts that there exists no evidence of any fraud, misconduct, or any impropriety with respect to the challenged ballots. There is nothing in the record and nothing alleged that would lead to the conclusion that any of the challenged ballots were submitted by someone not qualified or entitled to vote in this election.”

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Judge James C. Crumlish III rejected a Trump campaign petition that aimed to invalidate nearly 8,349 mail-in ballots because the voter failed to enter certain information, such as their address. During a hearing, Judge Crumlish asked Trump attorney Linda Kerns: “Would you agree with me that you are not proceeding based on allegations of fraud or misconduct; is that correct?” She answered, “I am not proceeding on those allegations,” which led Judge Crumlish to rule that the Trump campaign was “not contending that there has been fraud, that there is evidence of fraud or that the ballots in question were not filled out by the elector in whose name the ballot was issued.”

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Rudy Giuliani was in Pennsylvania when he stood outside the now infamous Four Seasons Total Landscaping Company and said, “This is a gross miscarriage of the process that would assure that these ballots are not fraudulent. It’s a fraud, an absolute fraud.” Then – we're not making this up – he went right into a federal courtroom just days later and at first alleged “widespread, nationwide voter fraud” and that local election officials were part of a “little mafia,” but then admitted to U.S. District Judge Matthew W. Brann that “this is not a fraud case.”

 

< COMMERCIAL BREAK. We'd like to take this opportunity to thank Rudy for the comic relief he so selflessly provided us throughout this horrid episode in American history, including his Borat appearance and his (literal) hair dye meltdown. It’s really a shame that he lost his New York law license thanks to his blatant lies about the 2020 election, plus was forced to file bankruptcy after a jury found him liable – to the tune of $148 million – for outrageously defaming Ruby Freeman and her daughter Shaye Moss, two innocent, hard-working Georgia election workers. 

 

After Rudy loudly accused these two women of passing USB drives around when counting ballots “like vials of heroin or cocaine” – when Ruby was actually passing Shaye a mint – both women received threatening messages like “hope they lock you up and throw away the key, you disgusting b*tch traitor” and “pack your s–t. They are coming for you. I’m not far behind. I’m coming for you also. Trash will be taken to the street in bags.” They were both forced into hiding for their safety. Boo-freak’n-hoo, Rudy. For the damage you tried so hard to inflict on America – as well as Americans like Ruby and Shaye – you deserve every single consequence that has come your way. >