Funny thing: No one cheated in the 2020 election. The Associated Press (not fake news, one of the most respected news agencies worldwide other than Reuters) conducted a state-by-state review in the six battleground states most disputed after the election and found fewer than 475 potential cases of voter fraud across more than 25 million ballots—a number that could not have changed the election result. Independent statistical (https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/2330443X.2023.2289529#abstract) and legal (https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2103619118) reviews echoed that conclusion: courts, audits, and systematic statistical analyses found no evidence of fraud at a scale that would alter results, and researchers described the most prominent fraud claims as “not even remotely convincing.” Multiple academic studies and post‑election audits put fraud rates at vanishingly small fractions of total votes; long‑running studies and meta‑analyses characterize mail‑in and other election fraud as “exceedingly rare” with fraud percentages measured in the thousandths or ten‑thousandths of a percent. Meanwhile in the 2016 Presidential election, the Department of Homeland Security reported that Russian government hackers targeted the election infrastructure of 21 U.S. states and successfully penetrated a small number of them, prompting bipartisan concern and a Senate finding that federal and state authorities were ill‑prepared to respond to this threat. Multiple U.S. government investigations and independent reporting conclude that a foreign power—principally the Russian government—conducted a coordinated interference campaign in the 2016 U.S. presidential election that used hacking, document releases, and an extensive social‑media influence operation designed to harm Hillary Clinton and boost Donald Trump.
