Information Regarding Claims of a Stolen or Fraudulent 2020 Presidential Election 

By Dr. Brad Agle, Professor of Ethics and Leadership at Brigham Young University

 

In 2020, President Donald J. Trump made many claims that there was significant fraud involved in the presidential election and that unlike what was being reported by the states, he had actually won the election.  The following information examines these claims.  It does so in the following order: 1) examines the veracity of those making the claims, 2) examines the evidence of the claims, and 3) provides polling data showing the beliefs of various demographic groups on these claims. 

 

The short version of what you will find below is as follows: 

 

  1. Donald Trump was the source of the claims of voter fraud.  He claimed it before it ever happened and stoked his followers to report anything they considered questionable.  Virtually all claims were found to be false, with very minor problems that didn’t affect the election.  All of those in Trump’s inner circle of lawyers who continued to make false claims after the legal challenges had been completed have all been sanctioned in one way or another.
  2. Despite Donald Trump and his followers making multiple claims of election fraud and continually promising more evidence, almost four years after the fact, no evidence has been uncovered of election fraud sufficient for any court in the United States.  Rather, courts have repeatedly rejected these claims and multiple studies by highly credentialed groups have demonstrated that there is no truth to the claims.
  3. Despite the lack of evidence, Republicans’ belief in voter fraud in the 2020 Presidential elections is virtually unchanged from 2021 at over 60%

Source of the Claims

Donald Trump

Donald Trump’s Attorneys

  • KEY FACTS about TRUMP ATTORNEYS (Forbes article): kenneth-chesebro-charged-in-wisconsin-here-are-all-the-former-trump-lawyers-now-facing-legal-consequences (All of the following is directly from the article).
    • “Rudy Giuliani: Giuliani, who led Trump’s post-election efforts, was formally disbarred in New York after previously having his law license suspended. The former New York City mayor has also been criminally charged in Arizona for his role in trying to overturn the 2020 election—where he initially tried to evade being served—after already being charged in Georgia, and he’s also been sued for defamation by voting machine companies Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic. He was ordered to pay $148 million to Georgia election workers whom he defamed, which resulted in Giuliani declaring bankruptcy.
    • Kenneth Chesebro: The attorney, who is described as the architect of the Trump campaign’s “fake electors” scheme—in which GOP officials in battleground states submitted false slates of electors to Congress claiming Trump won—was criminally charged in Wisconsin on one count of forgery, after previously being indicted in Georgia, though he took a plea deal right before his case went to trial.
    • James Troupis: Troupis was also reportedly charged in Wisconsin Tuesday; another Trump attorney who helped organize the false electors scheme, the lawyer had previously avoided criminal charges in other states and settled a civil lawsuit regarding the electors plot in Wisconsin in March.
    • Jenna Ellis: Ellis has been charged in Arizona after previously being indicted in Georgia and taking a plea deal in that case, and has been suspended from practicing law for three years as a result of her Georgia guilty plea. The Colorado Supreme Court previously publicly censured Ellis for violating rules that attorneys must not “knowingly [engage] in any [noncriminal] conduct that involves dishonesty, fraud, deceit, or misrepresentation,” with the attorney admitting in court she had made “misrepresentations” while representing Trump after the election that were “reckless” and had a “selfish motive.”
    • John Eastman: Eastman was also reportedly charged in Arizona, after already being indicted in Georgia and having 11 charges filed against him by counsel for the California State Bar stemming from his efforts to challenge the election results with Trump. A judge recommended in March that Eastman be disbarred and sanctioned $10,000 for his post-election efforts, which the lawyer intends to appeal.
    • Christina Bobb: Bobb was reportedly charged in Arizona, the first charges the attorney and former One America News anchor—who now serves as an attorney for the Republican National Committee—has so far faced. The lawyer joined Trump’s legal team in November 2020, according to the Washington Post, and the indictment cites a text message that ties the lawyer to the “fake elector” scheme in which GOP officials submitted false slates of electors to Congress claiming Trump won their states.
    • Jeffrey Clark: Former DOJ attorney Clark, who faced charges from the D.C. bar for aiding Trump’s post-election efforts from within the agency, broke at least one rule of professional conduct related to his actions after 2020 election, a D.C. ethics committee found in a preliminary ruling, setting the stage for possible punishment or even disbarment—Clark was also criminally charged in Georgia.
    • Sidney Powell: A judge dismissed an attempt by the Texas State Bar to discipline Powell in February after the bar alleged Powell’s post-election efforts had violated rules for professional conduct, though she now faces a separate disciplinary investigation in Michigan after being sanctioned for her post-election lawsuit in that state. After advising Trump and bringing her own post-election lawsuits in four states, Powell also still faces defamation lawsuits from Dominion and Smartmatic, a reported federal investigation into her organization’s fundraising arm and was criminally charged in Georgia, though she later reached a plea deal.
    • Michael Cohen: Trump’s longtime attorney served a three-year sentence in prison and home confinement for tax evasion and campaign finance-related crimes, after he orchestrated a series of “hush money” payments to adult film actress Stormy Daniels and former Playboy model Karen McDougal over allegations they had affairs with Trump.
    • Alina Habba: Habba, who’s representing Trump in many of his post-presidency legal battles, has been sanctioned multiple times in Trump’s failed lawsuit against Hillary Clinton; she was first ordered to pay with her co-counsel $50,000 in sanctions and $16,274 in attorneys’ fees to one defendant in the case, and she and Trump were then sanctioned in January for nearly $1 million payable to Clinton, her campaign and other Democratic operatives.
    • Cleta Mitchell: Mitchell, who participated in Trump’s phone call in which he urged Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” enough votes to overturn the state’s election results, resigned from her law firm Foley & Lardner in January 2021, saying she left the firm due to a “massive pressure campaign” against her from the left to oust her over her associations with Trump.
    • Other Georgia Attorneys: Attorneys Ray Smith and Robert Cheeley were also indicted as part of the Georgia case against Trump and his allies, after Smith worked on behalf of the Trump campaign in Georgia and Cheeley pushed false claims of election fraud at a legislative hearing in the state.”
    • Trump nearly appointed Jeffery Clark as Attorney General. “Just hours before the attack on Jan. 6, 2021, Trump nearly made Clark the acting attorney general but backed off when Justice Department leadership threatened to resign en masse.” https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/justice-department/election-denier-trump-wanted-take-doj-pleads-5th-disbarment-hearing-rcna145341
    •  

 

Information Regarding the Evidence of the Claims

  • Claim: Courts failed to address or properly review allegations of fraud.
  • Claim: The Department of Justice ignored evidence of election fraud.
  • Claim: There was evidence of voter fraud. https://youtu.be/JZXlfsjBKZw?si=KbNFiI_TKRzbVM7o
  • Claim: Beliefs about election fraud are new and unique to the 2020 election.
    • Evidence: The research indicated that beliefs in election fraud are stable and part of a recurring pattern of election-related conspiracy theories.
    • Source:  
      • Enders, A., Uscinski, J., Klofstad, C., Premaratne, K., Seelig, M., Wuchty, S., Murthi, M., & Funchion, J. (2021). The 2020 presidential election and beliefs about fraud: Continuity or change?. Electoral Studies. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.electstud.2021.102366.
  • Claim: Trump’s claims about the election being stolen are supported by facts.
  • Claim: Dominion voting machines changed/deleted votes (Trump tweeted “REPORT: DOMINION DELETED 2.7 MILLION TRUMP VOTES DATA ANALYSIS FINDS 221,000 PENNSYLVANIA VOTES SWITCHED FROM PRESIDENT TRUMP TO BIDEN. 941,000 TRUMP VOTES DELETED. STATES USING DOMINION VOTING SYSTEMS SWITCHED 435,000 VOTES FROM TRUMP TO BIDEN.”
    • Related claims:
      • 6000 Trump votes were flipped to Biden in Michigan
      • Dominion manual tells workers how to change votes
    • Claims Supporting:
      • Trump tweet: Anonymous blog post supported by One America News Network 
      • 6000 Michigan votes: Preliminary tallies from Antrim County Michigan (not final tallies, which showed that Trump won the county)
      • Dominion manual: Ron Watkins who was an expert witness in Sidney Powell’s failed Georgia lawsuit
    • Evidence: “The “report” Trump mentions in his tweet was aired on the conservative television network One America News Network, which promoted a theory posted to a pro-Trump blog that claimed that millions of votes were switched or deleted in Biden’s favor. The TV network did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The anonymous commenter who posted the theory claimed the findings are supported by data from the polling firm Edison Research. Yet the company has not produced such a report, said Larry Rosin, the president of Edison Research.” (AP News) 
      • About the 6000 votes in Michigan: “Election officials said it was the result of human error that was quickly discovered and corrected. Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson explained in a statement on November 6 that an election worker had made “an honest mistake” and failed to update the software to properly combine the electronic totals, “even though the tabulators counted all the ballots correctly.” “Election clerks work extremely hard and do their work with integrity. They are human beings, and sometimes make mistakes. However, there are many checks and balances that ensure mistakes can be caught and corrected,” Benson said, including a bipartisan commission that canvasses the results. The official results show Mr. Trump won Antrim County with 9,748 votes to Mr. Biden’s 5,960.” (CBS)
      • Dominion manual: “Dominion says it provides voting systems in 28 U.S. states and has supported “tens of thousands of elections.” It says all of its machines have undergone “certification and logic accuracy testing before the election,” publicly and with the oversight of bipartisan election inspectors. The company also says all votes counted by the system can be easily checked with hand audits.” (CBS)
        1. Dominion filed a defamation suit against both Powell and Fox News. The Powell suit hasn’t been settled, but Fox paid a $787.5 million settlement to Dominion
        2. Also filled law suit against Newsmax https://www.cnn.com/2023/09/18/media/dominion-newsmax-defamation-lawsuit/index.html

 

Miscellaneous Claims From Various Sources

 

The Movie “2,000 Mules”. 

  • Claim: Cell phone data showing individuals moving between a nonprofit and a ballot box repeatedly, along with a whistleblower report from one individual who assumed that payments were being made to mules, proves that mules were illegally participating in ballot harvesting in swing states.
  • Claim: There is video evidence showing ballot “mules.”
  • Claim: “Mules” wore gloves to prevent their fingerprints from being on the ballots and took pictures before dropping them to get paid. 

 

CBS News demonstrates the lack of evidence for other claims that people made based on videos that circulated:

    • “A number of videos went viral after the 2020 election purporting to show fraudulent handing of ballots, but they were misleading.  In one video, an election worker in Georgia was seen throwing away a piece of paper. Social media posts accused him of throwing away a ballot when he was actually tossing a list of instructions, as proven by the Fulton County Elections Supervisor Richard Barron. Another video showed a man in Detroit taking a box from a white van and moving it into a polling center. While many speculated the box had ballots that were going to be counted after polls had closed, it turned out the man seen in the video was a cameraman from a local news station who was loading equipment.  

 

    • In Washington state, radio station KOMO reported that two trash bags filled with mail, including several unopened ballots, had been found along a road in October. Those ballots, according to officials, were returned to the post office and re-sent to recipients. Yet another viral video misrepresented a shot of Georgia election workers pulling a case of ballots out from under a table. It wasn’t fraud or fake ballots — it was a routine part of the legitimate vote-counting process, which was entirely video-recorded for security, explained state voting official Gabriel Sterling.” https://www.cbsnews.com/news/presidential-election-2020-conspiracy-theories-debunked/  

 

Claims from Stealing your Vote by Christina Bobb – “Christina Bobb’s Stealing Your Vote is the first and only investigative report into what truly happened in the 2020 elections and the cover-up that followed” (from the Amazon book description)

  • Claim: “I started tracking the secretary of state’s website in Michigan and the vote tally was completely wrong. The numbers Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson was reporting did not match what was on the website, which didn’t match what was being reported.”
    • Evidence: No clue where she got this claim? Despite looking into this claim, we couldn’t find anything other than that preliminary results weren’t always the same as the finalized ones
  • Claim: “Why were none of these states insisting that the vote count continue? We had counted through the night before, what was so different this time? Citizens needed their state leaders to step up and stop these rogue practices, yet no one did. Arizona, Wisconsin, Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Michigan all have Republican majority legislatures. Yet no one, on election night, successfully demanded a stop to the illegal practices of excluding Republicans from the process, accepting ballots after Election Day, and using unlawful main-in ballots.”
    • Evidence against: 
      • “CNN visited four polling locations in Phoenix during the early-voting period and saw Republican and Democratic observers at all of them. On Election Day, CNN saw accredited poll observers with clipboards at polling places including the GOP stronghold city of Surprise, as well as the heavily Latino and blue-leaning city of Tolleson. David Eppihimer, the Arizona GOP chairman for blue-leaning Pima County, said his party had about 300 observers at polling and counting locations on Election Day. “Things went pretty smoothly,” he said on Friday.” (CNN)
      • “Overnight, Biden took the lead in Georgia as more mail ballots were tallied. As election workers in Clayton County finished counting a very Biden-friendly batch of absentee ballots late on Thursday night, there were nearly as many GOP observers in the room as election workers, according to CNN reporters who were also in the room during the vote count.” (CNN)
      • “There were at least 256 Democratic poll challengers and 225 Republican poll challengers inside Detroit’s TCF Center on Wednesday while election workers counted the last absentee ballots, officials told CNN. There were so many poll challengers from both sides that officials were worried about overcrowding.” (CNN)
      • “Trump campaign lawyers claimed in lawsuits that GOP poll observers hadn’t been allowed to watch ballot counting in Philadelphia or weren’t close enough to election workers in the room. But at a court hearing Thursday, Trump’s lawyers admitted, and a federal judge confirmed, that this wasn’t true. The judge pressed Trump campaign lawyer Jerome Marcus to answer whether Trump observers were allowed in, and Marcus acknowledged, “There’s a non-zero number of people in the room.” City officials also told the judge there were Trump observers in the room.” (CNN)
      • “At Milwaukee’s central count location, where volunteers tallied the remainder of the city’s roughly 169,000 absentee votes on Tuesday and Wednesday, the city allowed 15 Republican, 15 Democratic and 15 nonpartisan observers at any given time. Individual observers were swapped out throughout the day.” (CNN)
      • “The allegation that Conservatives were barred from coming inside is misleading: Republican and Democrat challengers were allowed inside the room but people from both sides were blocked from re-entering because maximum capacity had been reached.” (Reuters)
      • “Reuters and the Detroit Free Press reported that confusion arose on the afternoon of Nov. 4 as city election officials blocked 30 people, mostly Republicans but also some Democrats, from re-entering the vote-counting room (here , here) . This was due to capacity restrictions to fight the spread of COVID-19. The decision angered the crowd outside, who were mostly Republicans, and led to posts on social media suggesting it was a partisan decision to prevent Conservatives from viewing the counting process. However, the City of Detroit’s corporation counsel, Lawrence Garcia, the official spokesman on this issue, told Reuters by text message: “Both Republicans and Democrats were inside the ballot-counting room. Officials just had to stop letting more in because the room was well beyond capacity of both Republican and Democrat,” he wrote. “There was never a policy of blocking only one party’s election challengers from entering the CCB (Central Counting Board). When we realized we had far more than one challenger per counting board per party – for both parties – we temporarily stopped admitting all challengers regardless of party.”” (Reuters)
    • Sources
  • Claim: “We watched as President Trump’s attorney, Pam Bondi, got a court order to be allowed inside the Philidelphia counting facility, but the sheriff refused to enforce the court order.”
    • Evidence
      • “Thursday morning a Pennsylvania appellate court granted the Trump campaign the right to observe ballot counters in Philadelphia after campaign officials said they were prevented from overseeing the process. Later in the afternoon, former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi and Trump campaign adviser Corey Lewandowski told reporters that the city was in defiance of the court order and observers were still being shut out. They announced they were filing a complaint in federal court seeking immediate injunctive relief to stop the counting of ballots. The order allowed the president’s reelection campaign to immediately begin watching election workers count votes from 6 feet away, in accordance with public health rules.” (NBC)
    • Sources
  • Claim: “Judges and secretaries of state were laughing at Republicans as they were excluded from the election process, and no one stood up to protest our most sacred democratic process, our right to free and fair elections.”
    • Evidence: Similar to claim 2
  • Claim: “Most major news networks didn’t skip a beat. Even on election night, with plenty of videos of networks subtracting votes from Republican candidates, including President Trump, on live television, they all seemed to be acting like this was normal, nothing to worry about.”
    • Evidence: Does Christina think the networks control vote counts?
  • Claim: “The mayor’s team held similar hearings in Pennsylvania, Arizona, Georgia (twice), and Michigan. These hearings allowed the public to learn about the hundreds of poll workers and volunteers who were excluded from meaningful participation, the bullying and physical removal of Republicans from the process, and a number of mathematical anomalies discussed by experts.”
    • Evidence: Reiteration of claims 2, 3, and 4

Polling Data on Beliefs Regarding the Claims

Source: https://www.prri.org/spotlight/after-three-years-and-many-indictments-the-big-lie-that-led-to-the-january-6th-insurrection-is-still-believed-by-most-republicans/

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