Alleged irregularities in the 2020 United States presidential election

2020 U.S. presidential election
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2020

During the 2020 United States presidential election, on election night, and after Joe Biden was declared the winner, Republican nominee President Donald Trump and prominent Republicans made numerous unsubstantiated claims casting doubt on the legitimacy of the election. A number of unsubstantiated claims have been debunked by organizations.

Background

The election saw a record number of ballots cast early and by mail, due to many states relaxing restrictions on mail-in voting in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Due to the large number of mail-in ballots, some swing states saw delays in vote counting and reporting; this led to major news outlets not projecting a winner until four days later, on November 7. Both before, during, and after this count, Trump made unfounded allegations of irregularities, which were echoed by GOP leaders and some of his supporters on social media. Facebook and Twitter took action to block such claims, by blocking the group #StoptheSteal and labeling disputed posts. Biden's campaign dismissed these allegations and insisted that all votes should be counted, including all mail-in ballots.

Throughout November 4-8, the Trump campaign filed lawsuits in several states over what it called, without evidence, vote harvesting, illegal votes, machine errors, vote dumps and late-counted votes; some of these lawsuits are currently pending. On November 6, the U.S. Justice Department told prosecutors that armed federal agents can be sent to ballot counting locations to investigate voter fraud.

Events and allegations by state

Michigan

On November 4, poll watchers in Detroit, Michigan alleged they were kicked out of the hall. In contrast, Democrat officials said Republicans were “trying to slow down and obstruct the counting.” Per the Reuter report: "Greg King of the Trump campaign said the problem arose when people left for lunch and did not sign out, so when they returned it created the appearance of too many people in the room. A Democratic poll observer, Liz Linkewitz, said she and other Democrats had been barred as well and it was not a partisan issue."

On November 5, a state judge in Michigan dismissed the Trump campaign's lawsuit requesting a pause in vote-counting to allow access to observers, as the judge noted that vote-counting had already finished in Michigan. That judge also noted the official complaint did not state "why", "when, where, or by whom" an election observer was allegedly blocked from observing ballot-counting in Michigan.

In Antrim County, human error led to a miscount of an unofficial tally of votes for the presidential candidates. The error was caused by a worker using different kinds of ballots when setting up ballot scanners and result-reporting systems, therefore mismatched results were produced. The errors were spotted and rectified, thus the unofficial tally was changed from a Biden victory in the county to a Trump victory.

Pennsylvania

Election observers at the Philadelphia Convention Center claimed they were denied the option to oversee the counting of ballots and forced to stay over 25 feet from ballots being counted; Trump's campaign manager said they filed suit against Pennsylvania Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar and "each of the 67 Pennsylvania County Boards of Elections", and sued to stop "hiding the ballot counting and processing from our Republican poll observers."

On 5 November, an appellate judge ruled in favor of the Trump campaign's demand to observe Pennsylvania officials ballot counting. Corey Lewandowski posted a video he said showed him arguing with Michelle Hangley over what he believed was a failure to enforce the order. A separate case filed by the Trump campaign in the federal court was dismissed, in part because, per a Bloomberg Law write-up of the case, "the lawyer for the campaign admitted that 'they had several representatives in the room'".

The same day, Politico reported that Democratic officials in Pennsylvania were privately sharing potential margins of victory for Biden with his campaign staff, as counting continued, and told them that the presidential nominee will likely win the state by anywhere from 100,000 to 200,000 votes after all the counting is completed.

Project Veritas released a video where a Pennsylvania postal worker in Erie claimed that on November 5, the Erie postmaster told a postal supervisor "that they messed up yesterday", because "they had postmarked one of the ballots the fourth instead of the third, because they were supposed to put them for the third". On November 10, Democrats on the United States House Committee on Oversight and Reform stated that the postal worker "completely recanted" the claims. The Washington Post, citing three anonymous sources, reported on November 11 that the postal worker, Richard Hopkins, had acknowledged to investigators that the allegations were not true. Hopkins publicly denied that he had recanted his allegations. Also on November 11, Project Veritas released a two-hour audio recording purportedly of the conversation between Hopkins and the investigators. The Washington Post described it as "not clear" if Project Veritas had edited the audio recording before release. In the recording, Hopkins is heard saying that Project Veritas wrote his affidavit for him. Additionally, Hopkins recounted that when he was interacting with Project Veritas, he was in "so much shock [he] wasn't paying that much attention to what they were telling me". Hopkins says in the audio that he heard parts of a conversation, with the specific phrases he heard being "ballots on the 4th", "all for the 3rd", and "one postmarked on the 4th". Hopkins acknowledged in the audio that he had not heard the word "backdate".

Georgia

David Shafer, chairman of the Georgia GOP, complained that Georgia's Fulton County instructed observers to leave and “continued to count ballots in secret” despite claiming that they were “closing up” for the night. County officials disputed these claims.

On November 4-5, several Georgia counties experienced a glitch also reported encountering technical failures. Voting machines crashed in several Georgia counties, including Spalding and Morgan, in what election officials described as a “glitch. The counties also used voting machines made by Dominion Voting Systems and electronic poll books by KnowInk, and an elections supervisor at Spalding County Board of Election Marcia Ridley said the companies “uploaded something last night, which is not normal, and it caused a glitch."

Nevada

Richard Grenell alleged that “3,060 people here in Nevada that voted ... illegally, they are not residents of Nevada.” Republican lawyers released a list of over 3,000 people who allegedly did not live in Clark County, Nevada, when they voted. However, these were not proven to be illegal votes, because Nevada (a) allows for people who moved states 30 days before the election to vote in Nevada's election, and (b) allows people studying in colleges in another state to vote in Nevada's election. Additionally, the list featured military members who were overseas and voted by mail.

Wisconsin

On November 6, Trump campaign manager Bill Stepien said: "There have been reports of irregularities in several Wisconsin counties which raise serious doubts about the validity of the results." No evidence of such "irregularities" has been provided by the Trump campaign.

Arizona

On November 8, Trump's campaign filed a lawsuit in state court in Maricopa County, alleging that the state's most populous county incorrectly rejected votes cast on Election Day by some voters. They said poll workers told some voters "to press a button after a machine had detected an overvote [which] disregarded voters' choices in those races". A representative for Maricopa County stated that only "180 potential overvotes" are at stake in the case.

Refuted claims

One claim of a "vote dump" was caused by a data input error on the website Decision Desk HQ, which briefly showed an unusually large uptick in votes for Joe Biden. It prompted suspicions and later it was revealed that the error came down to a typo by a county's reporting that was quickly corrected, when an extra 0 was added on the end when Biden's votes 15,371 were keyed, thus displaying 153,710.

In Maricopa County, Arizona, an allegation that hundreds of Republican voters were given Sharpie pens to fill out their ballots, thus causing their ballots to be invalidated, was later proven to be incorrect. The matter was investigated by The Arizona Attorney General's Office, and officials confirmed that Sharpies were used in voting, but said that they would not invalidate a ballot.

In Wisconsin, the claim that more people voted than were registered to vote in the state had spread on Twitter, and was later refuted as the figure was found to be outdated, from 2018. In addition, Wisconsin allows for new voters to register on Election Day and immediately vote, which would render the actual number of registered voters higher than the number recorded on November 1, 2020.

Dennis Montgomery, a software designer with a history of making dubious claims, asserted that a government supercomputer program was used to switch votes from Trump to Biden on voting machines. Sidney Powell, an attorney representing Trump and Michael Flynn, promoted the theory on Lou Dobbs's Fox Business program two days after the election, and again two days later on Maria Bartiromo's program, claming to have "evidence that that is exactly what happened." Christopher Krebs, a former Microsoft executive and the director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, characterized the claim as "nonsense" and a "hoax." The Agency characterized the 2020 election as "the most secure in American history," with "no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes or was in any way compromised."

Reactions

On November 5, Trump asserted during a press that “if you count the legal votes, I easily win. If you count the illegal votes, they can try to steal the election from us. If you count the votes that came in late, we’re looking at them very strongly". On November 8, Melania Trump shared on Twitter post reading "The American people deserve fair elections. Every legal - not illegal - vote should be counted. We must protect our democracy with complete transparency".

The Biden campaign, members of the Democratic party, major media outlets including CNN, NBC, ABC, among others, dismissed allegations of widespread fraud/ fake votes as "baseless", and major networks "cut away from Trump's baseless fraud claims" on live TV.

On November 9, many Republican lawmakers declined to call the Democratic winner the president-elect. Patrick Basham, director of the Democracy Institute in Washington, citing tallies in these contested swing states and tallies in comparable Midwestern states, said "Trump's party held the Senate, gained numerous House seats, and didn't lose a state legislature ... It therefore defies logic Biden secured more votes than Barack Obama", continuing, "there is a mountain of evidence, direct and circumstantial, of widespread ballot fraud ... Biden underperformed Hillary Clinton in every major metro area around the country, save for Milwaukee, Detroit, Atlanta and Philadelphia." The Judicial Watch has released a comparison study of Census Bureau population statistics and state voter registration data, revealing a notable disparity. Its study found that 352 U.S. counties in 29 states managed to have 1.8 million more registered voters than eligible voting-age citizens. “In other words, the registration rates of those counties exceeded 100% of eligible voters.

Huffington Post reported that voter fraud is "extremely rare"; according to the Brennan Center for Justice, "extensive research reveals that fraud is very rare, voter impersonation is virtually nonexistent, and many instances of alleged fraud are, in fact, mistakes by voters or administrators. The same is true for mail ballots, which are secure and essential to holding a safe election amid the coronavirus pandemic." On November 10, USA Today commented "Though President Donald Trump and his campaign have repeatedly claimed there has been fraud, there is no evidence of widespread voter fraud [...] though there have been minor issues that are typical in elections, including voting machines breaking and ballots that were miscast and lost".

See also

• Postal voting in the 2020 United States elections
• 2016 United States presidential election recounts
• Elections in the United States

References

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