Was there voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election?
Yes.
But the number of cases is trivial by any measure — and nowhere near the widespread cheating Donald Trump has been claiming, since even before Election Day, reports the Washington Post.
“After an intense hunt by President Trump’s allies to surface voting irregularities in this year’s election, law enforcement agencies in six key swing states targeted by the president have found just a modest number of complaints that have merited investigation, according to cases tracked by state officials,” the Post says.
In Pennsylvania, which is high on Trump’s list of states with what he claims were large numbers of illegal votes, just three voters have been charged with voting illegally, or trying to, all of them Republicans. Joe Biden won the state by more than 80,500 votes.
“The situation is similar in Nevada, another state where Trump and his backers claimed that the election results were distorted by a virtual kitchen sink of fraudulent behavior, including ballot-box stuffing, illegal out-of-state voting and double voting,” the Post says, officials in Clark County — which includes Las Vegas — found only three questionable votes.
In Michigan, two people have been charged with voter fraud: a woman accused of forging her daughter’s name on an application to receive a ballot, and a man charged with forging his daughter’s signature on a ballot.
It’s more or less the same in Wisconsin, Georgia and Arizona, which had larger numbers of complaints, mostly from Trump supporters, but investigators found little evidence of actual fraud.
“The tiny number of incidents further undercut Trump’s barrage of false allegationsthat there was widespread manipulation of the vote,” says the Post, noting that such claims “continue to be echoed by many Republican officials,” including some who concede that Biden won.
Trump’s White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, wrote in a Twitter post on Monday that there is “mounting evidence of voter fraud.”
“In fact, such allegations have been rejected by dozens of judges across the country, a number of whom noted in their decisions that Trump and his allies failed to put forward evidence to support such claims,” the Post says.
