Why Do I Think There Was Fraud in the 2020 Election?

[See also my posts on actual detected fraud and absentee voting fraud and the oppressor/oppressed reason Democrats would cheat]

Election night 2020 saw Donald Trump ahead in Pennsylvania by 700,000 votes, in Georgia by 120,000, in Michigan, by 295,000, and in Wisconsin by 116,000.¹ A week later, Biden was declared the winner in all four states, by 82,000, 12,000, 154,000, and 21,000 votes respectively. Never before had the vote count appeared so slowly and reversed so drastically. Figure 1 below shows for Georgia how most of the votes were counted early, but then Biden slowly gained till he had enough for victory.

Despite nobody much liking Biden as a candidate, he received a record number of votes nationwide. There were 19 bellwether counties that voted for the winner in every presidential election from 1980 through 2016, but in 2020, 18 of the 19 voted for Trump.² In all but one election since 1964, the candidate who won the Presidency saw his party gain seats in the House of Representatives. Not so in 2020: the Democrats lost House seats.³ Biden came up with just the votes he needed at just the right time. Republicans wondered how.

Figure 1: Biden’s Slow Win in Georgia (Curiel, Stewart & Williams)

Before going on, though, let’s consider a hypothetical.

On Election Night, Donald Loser had a comfortable lead over Joe Victor in the county that would determine the election. Counting all the absentee ballots took more time than anybody expected, however, so the election officials decided to postpone finishing till the next day. They went home at 11 p.m. and showed up again at 9 a.m. the next morning. Unfortunately, the doors of the building had no locks. Anybody could walk in and out. In the morning, after the election workers had drunk their morning coffee they continued the count, and in the end Victor won the state, though by a small margin.

Did Victor really win the election in this hypothetical? If you were a spectator in this hypothetical, would you believe that fraud gave him the victory? What would you do?

I start with the hypothetical because it’s important to think about what “believe that fraud gave him the victory” means. Do you need to see the fraud with your own eyes? Hear it from reliable witnesses? Infer it from the circumstances? If you are wondering why Republicans believe the election was stolen, it may be that what they mean by “believe” is different from what you mean. In the hypothetical, there is no proof that fraud occurred, and no proof that it did not occur either. Thus, “belief” is not going to be the same as “certainty”. What it is, is worth thinking about.

What should be done after the election, in the unlocked building hypothetical? The obvious response would be to have the FBI investigate to see whether anybody fiddled with the ballots. The situation is suspicious enough not to need eyewitness stories to prompt them to start, even though it’s quite possible no crime was even committed. Local and state police and representatives of both political parties should join the investigation and be kept fully informed. Maybe nobody did come in during the night, but for the election to be considered legitimate, there ought to be an audit— a sampling of ballots— to see if the signatures matched, whether twenty voters lived at one address, and so forth. This should not be a full-scale criminal investigation. We want to find out if a crime was committed; who did it is secondary. Criminal investigations take years, because their chief aim is to find out who forged votes, not to find out whether votes were forged. Also, criminal investigations are done in secret, so as to better catch the culprit and be able to convict him at trial, but in an election audit transparency and speed are of the highest importance.

If extensive fraud is found, what should be done? We could declare Loser the winner. More likely, though, we should hold a new election in the state with fraud. A new election was held in a North Carolina congressional race initially won by the Republican candidate in 2018 with a margin of 905 votes, for example, after evidence came out of a large-scale scheme to cheat on his behalf using absentee ballots.

The alternative to investigation is just to ignore the fact that the doors had no locks, and declare Victor the winner After all, there is no solid evidence of vote fraud. Nobody said, “I committed vote fraud”. Nobody said, “I hid in the bathroom overnight and saw people walk in with suitcases full of ballots.” If Loser went to court, his argument would have to be, “The voting results changed in a suspicious way, and vote fraud would have been easy because the doors were unlocked, and I shouldn’t have lost.” He wouldn’t have a single concrete example of vote fraud.⁴ Even if he did have a few solid examples, he would still have to show that it was likely enough votes were forged that he would have won. And courts move slowly: by the time the case was decided, appealed, and re-appealed, it would be time for the next election.⁵

Another issue is certification. Suppose the Justice Department refused to investigate the unlocked doors, saying they didn’t have enough evidence to even begin an investigation, what would you do if you were a state official deciding whether to certify the results? Just on the basis of the peculiar vote reversals and the ease of cheating, I would conclude that more likely than not, Loser “really” won.⁶ But I think I would vote to certify anyway, at the same time making loud complaints and continuing to call for an investigation afterwards. After all, what can you do?⁷

In the real world, the problem wasn’t unlocked doors. Rather, it was a massive massively increase in the number of absentee ballots, which massively reduces the risk of fraud. 68 million absentee votes were cast in 2020, 39 million more than in 2016. The Covid epidemic led to states relaxing their absentee voter laws just months before the election.⁸ Equally important, the Democratic Party put considerable effort into registering voters and getting them to vote absentee. But absentee voting is much more vulnerable to cheating than in-person voting.⁹ In-person voting occurs under the eyes of election observers from both parties. The cheater is limited by time in how many false ballots he can cast in person; voting absentee, he has time to submit hundreds of votes. In-person voting has electioneering bans; nobody is there to protect the absentee voter from pressure. Absentee ballots can be completely filled in and ready to sign by a bought voter; for in-person voting the voter has to mark his ballot. An uneducated voter can be given an absentee ballot to sign after being told the form is for something else such as free school breakfasts; an in-person voter knows he is voting. Election officials can mismail an absentee ballot requested by someone of the opposite party; an in-person voter cannot be denied entry to the polling place. The list goes on and on. Even in the Covid year of 2020 only 14 of 43 European nations allowed absentee voting for any reason at all except for living abroad.¹⁰ Adding 39 million absentee votes was bound to increase fraud.

Figure 2: Absentee voting in Europe (Lott 2020)

I acknowledge that it’s also reasonable to believe Biden won the election. I can imagine changing my mind if I learned more. We know that the election results changed because of the absentee ballots in just the right states. But maybe the Democratic Party was just better at taking advantage of the absentee voting rules using such things as legal “harvesting” of votes by party members who go around and collect absentee ballots to deliver to the election officials. The Democratic Party is also good at looking at data and figuring out in which counties and demographics to focus their efforts. One’s belief in whether Biden really won is rather like one’s belief in God: the evidence is insufficient for proof or disproof, so one must use one’s intuition to reach an answer, and honest men will disagree.

The Democratic media has vociferously denied the possibility of election fraud in the 2020 election and have denigrated anyone who brought up doubts as “election deniers”.¹¹ The few Republican news outlets don’t call Biden supporters “fraud deniers”. There’s a difference in tone. What I want you to accept, faithful reader, is that both views are plausible. I am made suspicious by the very intensity of the hostility of the media and the Establishment to the idea that the election should have been audited. "The lady doth protest too much, methinks." Why did You-Tube feel for three years after the election that it had to ban any claims of fraud?¹² Why did a Colorado judge sentence Tina Peters, the Mesa County Clerk, to 9 years in prison for letting unauthorized people into her computer system to look for election fraud and preserving computer files the state would have erased? In contrast, when Hillary Clinton said Donald Trump was an illegitimate President, Fox News showed no reluctance to report her claims. Republicans just laughed and moved on. We did have a massive investigation, and it found nothing. Indeed, it was the opposite of an audit — its aim was to try to convict someone of election crimes rather than to see if Russian posts on the Internet swung the election to Trump.¹³

In 2020, however, it’s quite plausible that Biden stole the election, and if Democrats wanted to restore confidence in elections they should have allowed an audit. Instead, they loudly proclaimed that the voting patterns were nothing to worry about and absentee voting was absolutely safe, both of which are obviously false. Trump wanted to investigate in his two months as a lame duck, but he couldn’t manage to get the Justice Department to do it, just as he wasn’t able to prevent the excesses of the Russian collusion investigation. Trump didn’t know how to manage a bureaucracy (and probably still doesn’t).¹⁴

In summary, the pattern of votes over time and location was highly suspicious. Vote fraud had just become much easier in America by a vast increase in absentee balloting. Vote fraud is an explanation for the suspicious pattern. The government should have investigated the swing state elections, but it did not. In the absence of concrete evidence, Congress could do little but certify. You should not think that the lack of evidence caused by the lack of investigation means Biden really won— only that Democrats knew they could cheat because of lack of auditing and a media ready to label precautions against cheating a threat to democracy.¹⁵

Footnotes

1. There’s also Arizona, where Biden won by 10,547, and Nevada, where he won by 33,596, close outcomes, but where there was no reversal from election night to the final count. On election night, Biden was ahead by 7,647 in Nevada and 136,000 votes in Arizona.

2. Wikipedia has the list of bellwether counties at “List of election bellwether counties in the United States.” Note that 14 of 33 bellwether counties voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016 even though Trump was the winner. In “Where Did All The Bellwether Counties Go?” FiveThirtyEight.com (2021), Ryan Matsumoto attributes the changes in 2016 and 2020 to the shift towards Republicans of less-educated white voters. A good overview of the oddities is “How the 2020 Election Could Have Been Stolen,” Claes G. Ryn (2021).

3. For 1980 to 2020, see “History Stands Against the Idea of Incumbent President Losing but His Party Gaining House Seats,” Randy DeSoto, The Western Journal, November 13, 2020. Wikipedia’s Party Divisions has the party split of the House since 1789. 1992 is the exception year when the winning presidential candidate’s party lost seats; in that year Bill Clinton won with a minority of votes because of third party candidate Ross Perot. I looked back a bit further. than 1980 Kennedy's party lost seats in 1960 (but did he become President only because of fraud in Texas and Illinois?). Eisenhower’s party neither gained nor lost in 1956. Franklin Roosevelt’s Democrats lost seats in 1940 and 1944, but that’s because Republicans won only 88 out of 435 seats in the 1936 election.

4. You may wish to add to the hypothetical that everybody, Republican and Democrat alike, agreed to leave the ballots in an unlocked building. You might say, “There was vote fraud, but it was Trump’s fault for not taking basic precautions. If you leave the keys in your car overnight and your car gets stolen, should I feel sorry for you?” But here more of us than the car owner lose out.

5. Courts rarely overturn election results. I mentioned the North Carolina congressional election, one occasion on which they did. But consider Greene County, Alabama, in the local elections of 1994. A third of the votes were by absentee ballot, in contrast to the more typical four percent in the 1998 election. The Alabama Attorney-General investigated, and found, among many other things, that 60 absentee ballots were requested by and mailed to one post office box address, and 5 people came with suitcases to deliver more than 1,000 ballots. By 1998, eleven defendants had been charged and convicted. Note that this was too late to hold a new election.

Greene County is massively black and Democratic, but “civil rights groups” such as the NAACP attacked the investigation as racist and claimed it was an effort to suppress absentee voting. The episode is a shameful revelation of what groups such as the NAACP had become even by the 1990’s. See Hans von Spakovsky, “Absentee Ballot Fraud: A Stolen Election in Greene County, Alabama” (2008).

6. Having to grit our teeth and accept dubious election results is not new in American history. Nixon may have really won the 1960 election over Kennedy because there was fraud in Texas and Illinois. He chose not to press for investigation. Democrats Grover Cleveland and Woodrow Wilson won their elections and re-elections with the support of “the Solid South”, which was solidly Democratic because blacks, who voted Republican, were effectively disenfranchised.

7. Democracy in America is not in as bad shape as in Russia, but Russia shows what happens when there’s no way to force the government to investigate. Putin wins his elections. He has been popular in the past, and maybe is now, so maybe the vote count is honest. We don’t have the evidence— because who is going to investigate? Or, to be more specific, there isn’t any evidence of Putin ordering the murder of Alexei Navalny, or even that it was murder; we just conclude Putin is guilty because Navalny’s death in prison was so sudden and so convenient. I can’t really say that Putin cheated in the balloting, and I couldn’t convict him of murder beyond a reasonable doubt either.

8. Michigan and Wisconsin mailed absentee ballots to all registered voters. “The Evolution of Absentee/Mail Voting Laws, 2020-22,” National Conference of State Legislatures (updated 2023). Georgia and Pennsylvania set up drop boxes at which absentee ballots could be dropped off instead of being mailed. “Ballot Drop Boxes in the 2020 Elections,” Stanford-MIT Healthy Elections Project (2021). (Question: if there’s early voting, what need is there to vote absentee when you’re able to get to a drop box?)

9. See Hans von Spakovsky, “Four Stolen Elections: The Vulnerabilities of Absentee and Mail-In Ballots,” (July 16, 2020) for a full discussion of why absentee voting is prone to fraud. Anybody who wonders how easy it is to cheat using absentee ballots can find the answer there, in four case studies as well as the general theory.

10. The map at the start of this Substack is from John Lott, “Why Do Most Countries Ban Mail-in Ballots?: They Have Seen Massive Vote Fraud problems,” (October 15, 2020). “Special Voting Arrangements in Europe: Postal, Early and Mobile Voting” by Anika Heinmaa and Nana Kalandadze (IDEA.net, Nov. 2020) has a similar map and information, which is useful to know when opinions are heated and you fear one source might be biased (though Lott gives plenty of sources).

11. An example of denigration is the Wikipedia article, “Election denial movement in the United States”. As of October 4, 2024, it is blatantly biased, pretending that only Republicans ever question election results and that elections are never fraudulent. The talk section has a lot of people wondering why no Democratic objections to elections are mentioned. The response is that Democrats do not object to election results unless the elections really were rigged, so that doesn’t count. An earlier version of the article even included the sentence, “The election denial movement adheres to a widespread Republican belief that any American election not resulting in a desired Republican candidate's victory has been rigged or stolen through fraud." Readers no doubt know that Wikipedia, while good for math definitions and electoral vote counts in the 1892 election, is unreliable on anything with political implications (it’s pretty bad on economics, even).

12. One reason You-Tube might have censored election fraud posts from 2020 to 2023 is pressure from President Biden, the winner. We know that the Biden Administration urged the internet platforms to censor adverse posts of various kinds; the Supreme Court declared that kind of government pressure legal so long as it could not be shown that the platform had responded in specific ways to specific urgings (see Murthy v. Missouri).

13. The Washington Post quoted Hillary Clinton as saying in 2019, “He knows he’s an illegitimate president. I believe he understands that the many varying tactics they used, from voter suppression and voter purging to hacking to the false stories — he knows that — there were just a bunch of different reasons why the election turned out like it did.” Former President Jimmy Carter similarly said, “I think a full investigation would show that Trump didn’t actually win the election in 2016. He lost the election, and he was put into office because the Russians interfered on his behalf.”

14. You might hope the Voting Section of the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department would do election audits. That section is staffed by Democrats, however. See John Fund and Hans von Spakovsky, Stolen Elections (2012), who talk about the Section’s ideological recruiting practices and extreme reluctance to investigate vote fraud by black politicians, even in Democratic primaries.

Trump ran a big business, but his talent seems to have been in the art of the deal rather than in managing people, and he never had to manage people he couldn’t fire. The fears of Democratic voters that he will become a dictator are for this reason misguided. Trump couldn’t even dictate to a secretary, if she was a member of the civil service. On the other hand, he did pretty well with foreign policy, e.g., Ukraine and the Middle East. Foreign policy is all about threats and dealmaking.

15. It’s not normal to end on a footnote, but I will, since readers may wonder at the evidence I have not discussed. If I did, we would get bogged down into details that are disputed and that I think are not the key to why some people believe the election was stolen and some believe it was not. If you do want to go into the confusing array of reports of misregistering voters in Michigan, unwatched counting in Georgia, voting machines with easily hacked keys, and so forth, places to look are Joe Fried’s book, Debunked, his blogpost on, for example, Michigan election fraud, Peter Brimelow’s long 2023 article, Rigged, by Mollie Hemingway, and Our Broken Elections: How the Left Changed the Way You Vote, by John Fund and Hans von Spakovsky. The books are reviewed in “Are Fair Elections Possible? The 2020 elections raised serious questions about foul play in the American voting process,” by Andrew E. Busch.