Group Of Prominent Conservatives Smacks Down Trump's Election Fraud Nonsense
This extremely detailed report, just released, was put together by eight prominent conservatives, including three former federal judges. It carefully examines “every claim of fraud and miscount put forward by former President Trump and his advocates, and now put the results of those investigations before the American people, and especially before fellow conservatives who may be uncertain about what and whom to believe.” “LOST, NOT STOLEN: The Conservative Case that Trump Lost and Biden Won the 2020 Presidential Election” | Election Law Blog
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
Lost, Not Stolen (lostnotstolen.org)
The Honorable Thomas B. Griffith
The Honorable J. Michael Luttig
The Honorable Michael W. McConnell
The Honorable Theodore B. Olson
Executive Summary
As part of his post-election attempts to retain the presidency, Donald Trump and his supporters filed 64 cases containing 187 counts in the six key battleground states, in addition to utilizing some of the recount and contest procedures available to them under state law. The former president maintains to this day that the 2020 election was stolen and the results fraudulent. This Report takes a hard look at the very serious charges made by Trump and his supporters. The consequences of a president and a major party candidate making such charges are monumental. If true, our electoral system is in desperate need of repair. If not true, that must be said because such false charges corrode our democracy and leave a significant share of the population doubting the legitimacy of our system, seriously weakening the country.
Every member of this informal group has worked in Republican politics, been appointed to office by Republicans, or is otherwise associated with the Party. None have shifted loyalties to the Democratic Party, and none bear any ill will toward Trump and especially not toward his sincere supporters. Many of us have worked over the years in polling places as part of
Republican Election Day Operations looking for the same sort of fraud and irregularities DonaldTrump claimed in 2020. Such vigilance is entirely appropriate and must not be stigmatized as “voter suppression.” Fraud, irregularities, and procedural deficiencies formed the basis for challenging the results in five of the six highly contested Electoral College battleground states of Arizona (page 7),Georgia (page 27), Michigan (page 36), Nevada (page 47), and Wisconsin (page 64). In Pennsylvania (page 53), Trump verbally attacked the elections as fraudulent, but his lawyers never filed such charges in court.
For this Report, we examined every count of every case brought in these six battleground states. We include both a narrative for each state and an accompanying Addendum listing each case and its disposition. We conclude that Donald Trump and his supporters had their day in court and failed to produce substantive evidence to make their case. Of the 64 cases brought by Trump and his supporters, twenty were dismissed before a hearing on the merits, fourteen were voluntarily dismissed by Trump and his supporters before a hearing on the merits, and 30 cases included a hearing on the merits. Only in one Pennsylvania case involving far too few votes to overturn the results did Trump and his supporters prevail.
Repetition of these false charges causes real harm to the basic foundations of the country, with 30 percent of the population lacking faith in the results of our elections. In our system of government, these cases provided the forums in which Trump and his supporters could and should have proven their claims. This Report shows that those efforts failed because of a lack of evidence and not because of erroneous rulings or unfair judges. Judges, legislators, and other election officers, often including members of his own party, gave Trump ample time and every opportunity to present evidence to make his case.
Post-election audits or reviews in each state also failed to show any irregularities or fraud that would overturn the electoral results. In many cases, after making extravagant claims of wrongdoing, Trump’s legal representatives showed up in court or state proceedings empty-handed, and then returned to their rallies and media campaigns to repeat the same unsupported claims. Even now, twenty months after the election, a period in which Trump’s supporters have been energetically scouring every nook and cranny for proof that the election was stolen, they come up empty. Claims are made, trumpeted in sympathetic media, and accepted as truthful by many patriotic Americans. But on objective examination they have fallen short, every time. Moreover, even if there were such evidence (which we did not find), there is an obligation on the part of a campaign challenging the veracity of official results to bring its challenges on a timely basis, through the established legal channels, based on ordinary rules of evidence and logic.
In our system of government, these proceedings provide the forums in which Mr. Trump and his supporters could and should have proven their claims. They had every opportunity to use those channels. Once they had lost, Trump and his supporters had an obligation to recognize that the election debate was over. Questions of election legality must be resolved dispassionately in courts of law, not through rallies and demonstrations—and most emphatically, not by applying political pressure and threats to induce Congress to ignore its constitutional duty and the electoral outcome for which the people voted, and which the legal processes of the affected states had examined and confirmed. The same system used to bring all his cases, recounts, and contests also sets deadlines for when the process becomes final, a winner is declared, and the losing candidate concedes.
Trump failed to abide by that norm in contrast to prior losers of presidential elections such as Richard Nixon and Al Gore. After reviewing the evidence presented in each court case and the post-election reviews with this lens, certain patterns emerge. Most obvious is that the former president’s rhetoric—before, during and after the election—was not supported by the legal cases he tried to make or any evidence he introduced. Cases and reviews in the six battleground states included similar charges and similar dismissals by federal and state courts. This chart describes the nature of Trump’s charges and the pages of each state’s narrative that describe the outcome: Fraud or ballots improperly counted: Arizona, page 10; Georgia, page 29; Michigan, page 42; Nevada, page 48; Pennsylvania, page 58; Wisconsin, page 67. Voting machines producing rigged results: Arizona, page 10; Georgia, page 31; Michigan, page 41; Nevada, page 49.
Absentee ballot or mail-in ballot irregularities: Arizona, page 11; Michigan, page 42; Pennsylvania, page 56; Wisconsin, page 65. Ineligible voters: Arizona, page 12; Georgia, page 29; Michigan, page 43. Observers access blocked/failure to monitor polling places: Arizona, page 12; Georgia, page 32; Michigan, page 40; Nevada, page 48; Pennsylvania, page 55. Post-election reviews and audits: In addition to the numerous legal cases, the six states conducted post-election reviews at the insistence of or because of the Trump allegations.
This Report discusses those efforts, which also failed to support the allegations from Trump and his supporters: Arizona: Cyber Ninjas review, pages 7–10, 16. Georgia: The Secretary of State manually recounted all five million ballots cast (page 27) and conducted a post-election audit. Michigan: Separate post-election investigations by a Michigan State Senate committee chaired by Republican Ed McBloom, pages 36–40, and Michigan’s Office of the Auditor General, pages 36, 37. Nevada: Republican Secretary of State investigations of voting complaints, page 47. Pennsylvania: A statewide risk-limiting audit in February 2021, page 54. Republican state senators pursued a forensic audit that has yielded no evidence to date, page 54. Wisconsin: The Wisconsin Legislative Audit Bureau, a non-partisan, independent body, found no evidence of widespread fraud to alter the election results, page 64. The conservative Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty likewise found no evidence of widespread voter fraud and no evidence of significant problems with voting machines, page 64. Wisconsin House Republicans hired a former state Supreme Court justice to examine the election; an interim report cited no evidence of fraudulent votes sufficient to overturn the results, page 65.
After the dismissal of all 64 court cases and state reviews, Trump and his supporters have continued in the sixteen months since Joe Biden’s Inauguration with claims of a fraudulent election. Each has been refuted. Two of the most publicized examples illustrate this. In the first, economist John Lott Jr. produced a paper in Public Choice claiming that “simple tests of voter fraud” showed excess votes for Biden in Pennsylvania and Georgia and 255,000 excess votes in six key states due to artificially large turnout across several counties. That was quickly refuted by political scientists Andrew Eggers and Justin Grimmer.1 A second example is a recent film from Dinesh D’Souza, “2000 Mules,”2 which attempts to demonstrate rampant voter fraud in the 2020 Presidential Election through digital-device location-tracking data. Yet the film, heartily endorsed by Trump at its Mar-a-Lago premiere, has subsequently been thoroughly debunked in analyses.3 What the film claims to portray is simply not supported by the evidence invoked by the film. As this Report notes, in five of the six battleground states, analyses have shown that Trump lost not because of fraud but because a small but significant subset of Republican voters supported the GOP’s candidates down-ballot but did not vote for Trump. In many instances,
Republican candidates other than Trump won despite being subject to the same alleged fraudulent systems that Trump supporters declaim. See pages 7, 27, 36, 53, and 64. We are most concerned that even after failing in more than 60 court cases to produce evidence of fraud or irregularities that would change the 2020 election results, the repetition of the false charges of a stolen election continues. To have 30 percent of the country lack faith in election results based on unsubstantiated claims of a “stolen” election is not sustainable in a democracy, and it discredits the political party making those charges.
We hope that setting out the full record in this Report will help restore faith in the reliability of our elections.
Andrew Eggers & Justin Grimmer, Comment on “Simple Tests for the Extent of Vote Fraud With Absentee and Provisional Ballots in the 2020 US Presidential Election” (Apr. 2, 2022), https://www.dropbox.com/s/ouxd7zinzv8l9o6/Fraud2.pdf?dl=0. 2 2000 MULES, https://2000mules.com/ (last visited July 6, 2022). 3 Danny Hakim & Alexandra Berzon, A Big Lie in a New Package, N.Y. TIMES (May 29, 2022),
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/29/us/politics/2000-mules-trump-conspiracy-theory.html; Khaya Himmelman, Fact Checking Dinesh D’Souza’s “2,000 Mules,” THE DISPATCH (May 21, 2022), https://factcheck.thedispatch.com/p/fact-checking-dinesh-dsouzas-2000?s=r; Tom Dreisbach, A Pro-Trump Film Suggests Its Data Are So Accurate, It Solved a Murder. That’s False, NPR (May 17, 2022), https://www.npr.org/2022/05/17/1098787088/a-pro-trump-film-suggests-its-data-are-so-accurate-it-solved-a-murderthats-fals; Ali Swenson, Fact Focus: Gaping Holes in the Claim of 2K Ballot “Mules,” ASSOCIATED PRESS (May 3, 2022), https://apnews.com/article/2022-midterm-elections-covid-technology-health-arizonae1b49d2311bf900f44fa5c6dac406762; Philip Bump, “2000 Mules” Offers the Least Convincing Election-Fraud Theory Yet, WASH. POST (May 11, 2022), https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/05/11/2000-mules-offersleast-convincing-election-fraud-theory-yet/.
Tags
Who is online
301 visitors
The election is over Trump lost, time to look to the next election. Strengthen the voting laws, ban drop boxes, voter ID, absentee ballots need to be limited and reviewed, voter roles should be cleaned up for starters. Trump should not run again.
If Americans can safely bank and do their taxes online, we should be able to safely and securely cast our votes online. Why is the gop trying to make voting harder when we have the technology to make voting easier and more secure? So, why not?
Is it because the gop would lose? Indubitably...
They had a meeting in Helsinki with Putin to discuss that very process, but it was written in invisible ink - more alleged news to come.
Because I am sure the IRS computers are must safer and more secure than they were in 2015.
Nah, it could never happen now.
The whole point of a closed ballet system that is not connected to the internet is to prevent hacking and data breaches that would throw into question election results. But let's put everything online and see what happens.
Did you catch the part where they couldn't find any evidence of voting laws being too lax, drop boxes too abused, voter fraudulent and misused, or present absentee ballot unlimited and unreviewed? Voter roles are not dirty, Trump and his defenders in the GOP are, and this is the findings of a highly respected prominent conservative group.
The people that deny the truth I am beginning to think are just complete morons.
What bothers me are those who are not stupid yet continue to make excuses / deflect for Trump. Worse still are those who say they would actually vote for this abysmal character to yet hold the most powerful office on the planet. How utterly irresponsible can a voter be?
Spot on.
Thats gotta sting, lol.
This is a 72 page report that examines, in detail , every single one of Trump's 60-some court challenges to the election.