“The Big Lie”: Multiple Studies Refute Claims of Voter Fraud and Voting by Non-Citizens
The current administration’s effort to limit access to voting (as reflected in the proposed SAVE bill) is based upon the claim by Donald Trump and his supporters that he lost the 2020 election because of fraud, ballot manipulation and voting by large numbers of undocumented immigrants. There have been well over a dozen analyses by nonpartisan experts and organizations across the political spectrum, all verifying the accuracy of the voting in the 2020 presidential election.
AI and search engines failed to identify a single statistical analysis by proponents of voter fraud or voting by undocumented immigrants.
Here are just a few of these studies. Click the links to go to the sources.
President Trump’s own Cyber Defense Agency (CDA) examined the 2020 election process and concluded: “There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.” President Trump promptly fired CDA Director Christopher Krebs as well as other individuals in the agency who had investigated the election procedure.
President Trump’s Attorney General, William Barr, investigated the claims of voter fraud and concluded there was no evidence of significant fraud.
The non-partisan Campaign Legal Center described the flimsy nature of various unsuccessful court filings by the Trump campaign and his supporters.
A group of distinguished Republican ex-Senators, retired judges and high-level members of the first Trump administration released a 62-page report documenting the overwhelming evidence that Donald Trump fairly lost the 2020 election.
A team of Associated Press reporters, drawing upon the expertise of various experts, concluded that the claims of election fraud were false.
The New York Times and the Washington Post ran separate lengthy analyses that reached the same conclusion, with the Post documenting the (often absurd) claims of major election deniers.
In both editorials and news coverage, the Wall Street Journal rejected claims of election fraud.
In an extensive 2024 article, National Public Radio’s Ashley Lopez compiled extensive evidence—much of it from Republican election officials—concluding that studies over multiple elections had shown that—in the words of Ohio’s Republican Secretary of State—“voter fraud continues to be exceedingly rare.”
In the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, the gold standard of multidisciplinary science journals, a team of mathematicians and voting rights experts published an article, the title of which summarized their findings. “Audits of the 2020 American election show an accurate vote count.”
Another team of experts reached the same conclusion in the Journal of Statistics and Public Policy, “Statistical Fallacies in Claims about ‘Massive and Widespread Fraud’ in the 2020 Presidential Election.”
Researchers for the highly respected Brooking Institution also reached the same conclusion.
The ultra-conservative Heritage Foundation (author of “Project 2025”) went to great lengths to prove voter fraud, particularly among noncitizens, only to come up with an embarrassingly small number of actual cases.
Several research studies by the conservative Cato Institute documented the reality: non-citizens are not voting in any significant numbers.
Finally: scholars for the conservative Hoover Institution published one of the most extensive refutations of claims about a “stolen election” (“An Evaluation of Fraud Claims from the 2020 Trump Election Contests.”) The authors found no credible evidence of voter fraud. Most surprising, they said, was“ just how weak the evidence of illegal or fraudulent voting really is.” The claims, they found, were “based on error riddled analyses from individuals who misunderstand basic facts about elections, basic statistical concepts, and failed to justify the statistical tests that are used.”