“As a Republican, it bothers me when Trump says that we win without voter fraud,” said Trey Grayson, former Kentucky secretary of state. “On the one hand, it is literally true. There is not a lot of voter fraud in this country, and Republicans win elections all the time. I won twice; Trump won the presidency once. But Trump’s continued insistence that voter fraud is why Republicans lose elections has been very harmful for the party.”
“Lost, Not Stolen,” from 2022, is a 72-page report from eight prominent conservative legal and political figures that knocks down many of the more frequently heard claims that the 2020 election was stolen or illegitimate. Among its all-star author lineup: Michael McConnell and two other former federal judges, former Solicitor General Ted Olson (who is no relation), and Republican election lawyer Ben Ginsberg.
Their “unequivocal” conclusion is that Trump lost; they find no credible evidence that fraud changed the outcome even in a single precinct, let alone in any state. I wrote about their report here.
In 2024 Justin Grimmer and Abhinav Ramaswamy of the Democracy and Polarization Lab at Stanford University published an 85-page dissection of the Trump fraud claims. Grimmer is also associated with the Hoover Institution.
“All of the claims we evaluate fail to provide evidence of fraud or illegal voting. Trump’s claims … are riddled with errors, hampered by misunderstandings about how to analyze official voter records, and filled with confusion about basic statistical techniques and concepts.” Like the authors of “Lost, Not Stolen,” Grimmer and Ramaswamy examine cases from all six of the close/?contested states in 2020, namely Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. |
