The 2020 election: “stolen”?

Biden won the decisive states by margins in the tens of thousands: about 12,000 votes in Georgia, about 10,000 in Arizona, about 20,000 in Wisconsin. To overturn the result, fraud would have had to switch or invent tens of thousands of votes in several states at once, in a way recounts and audits could not see.

Georgia tested this directly. It counted every paper presidential ballot by hand in November 2020, and the hand count matched the machines. Georgia’s Republican secretary of state certified Biden as the winner. [1]

The courts tested it too. The Trump campaign and its allies filed dozens of suits. They lost almost all of them, often for lack of evidence. In Pennsylvania the Third Circuit, in an opinion written by a judge Trump appointed, said: “calling an election unfair does not make it so. Charges require specific allegations and then proof. We have neither here.” [2]

On 1 December 2020 William Barr, Trump’s own attorney general, told AP the Justice Department had not seen fraud “on a scale that could have effected a different outcome.” Trump’s response was to say Barr had not looked. Special Counsel Jack Smith’s later report describes Trump being told by his own officials, again and again, that specific claims were false. [3][4]

The most famous claim was that Dominion voting machines flipped votes. Hand counts, like Georgia’s, found no such thing. Dominion sued. In April 2023 Fox News paid $787.5 million to settle its case on the eve of trial; the judge had already ruled that the claims at issue were false. [1][4]

“2000 Mules,” the 2022 film, claimed cellphone data showed paid “mules” stuffing drop boxes. Its publisher, Salem Media, apologized in 2024 to a Georgia man the film showed as an example: investigators had found he was dropping off ballots for his own family, legally. Salem pulled the film. [2]

The State Farm Arena video, in which Ruby Freeman and her daughter Shaye Moss were accused of pulling “suitcases” of fake ballots, was reviewed by Georgia investigators, who found ordinary ballot handling. A federal jury ordered Rudy Giuliani to pay the two women $148 million for defaming them. [3]