More than five years after President Trump lost the 2020 election, he and his administration are still pursuing baseless conspiracy theories in an attempt to prove otherwise.
Though scores of lawsuits aiming to overturn the results were dismissed by judges in 2020 and 2021, Mr. Trump’s relentless false arguments that he won the election have led many of his supporters to believe him. And now that he is back in the White House, some of those falsehoods have become official stances of the U.S. government.
On Wednesday, F.B.I. agents in Georgia searched an election center in Fulton County, Ga., which includes Atlanta, for ballots and other voting records from the 2020 contest. The move appeared to be a significant escalation of Mr. Trump’s effort to rewrite the history of the 2020 election and his defeat to Joseph R. Biden Jr.
Here’s the reality of what happened.
Biden won Georgia, Arizona and other swing states.
Brad Raffensperger, a Republican who serves as Georgia’s top election official, said multiple times that Mr. Trump lost the state to Mr. Biden in 2020.
Other top Georgia Republicans have confirmed this, too.
Gov. Brian Kemp, who defended the integrity of his state’s voting system from Mr. Trump, said in 2023 that the 2020 election was not stolen.
“For nearly three years now, anyone with evidence of fraud has failed to come forward — under oath — and prove anything in a court of law,” Mr. Kemp wrote on social media. “Our elections in Georgia are secure, accessible, and fair and will continue to be as long as I am governor.”
In Arizona, where Mr. Trump and his allies also fought to overturn Mr. Biden’s victory, some prominent Republicans also shot down claims of a stolen election. They included Rusty Bowers, a staunchly conservative Republican who was then the speaker of the Arizona House and who rejected the push from Mr. Trump and his allies.
“I do not want to be a winner by cheating,” he wrote in his personal journal at the time, according to testimony he gave Congress in 2022. “I will not play with laws I swore allegiance to.”
Trump’s attorney general deflated his false claims.
William P. Barr, who was Mr. Trump’s attorney general and resigned in December 2020 after acknowledging that the Justice Department had found no widespread voter fraud, testified in 2022 that he had told the White House at the time that its election theories were baseless.
“They obviously were influencing a lot of people, members of the public, that there was systemic corruption in the system and that their votes didn’t count and that these machines controlled by somebody else were actually determining it, which was complete nonsense,” Mr. Barr said. “I told them that it was crazy stuff and they were wasting their time and that it was doing grave, grave disservice to the country.”
Trump’s vice president also defended the election.
During the days leading up to Jan. 6, 2021, and on the morning Trump supporters stormed the Capitol, Mr. Trump publicly and privately pressured Vice President Mike Pence not to certify the election results.
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Mr. Pence refused, a decision that effectively forced him into Republican exile. But in the years since, he has defended his actions and said Mr. Trump lost the 2020 election.
“Despite what the former president and his allies have said for now more than two and a half years and continue to insist,” Mr. Pence said in a 2023 speech, “the Georgia election was not stolen and I had no right to overturn the election on Jan. 6.”
Recounts and audits reaffirmed the results.
Several states, including Georgia, conducted recounts because of Mr. Biden’s close margin of victory, and in some cases they performed audits. All confirmed the results and found no impropriety, nor any significant change in the final vote totals.
Separately, soon after the 2020 election, The New York Times called top election officials in every state, and none had found any evidence of voter fraud that affected the outcome.
Over and over, Trump lost in court.
Mr. Trump and his allies filed more than 60 lawsuits challenging the results of the 2020 election across roughly seven states, claiming fraud, malfeasance and errors. Some even offered financial incentives for information about fraud.
They lost nearly every case.
Their allegations were rejected again and again as lacking proof or credibility, often by Republican-appointed judges.
“Free, fair elections are the lifeblood of our democracy,” wrote Judge Stephanos Bibas, a federal judge in Pennsylvania who was appointed by Mr. Trump in 2017. “Charges of unfairness are serious. But calling an election unfair does not make it so. Charges require specific allegations and then proof. We have neither here.”
The main claims of fraud were debunked.
Mr. Trump and his allies have offered an array of false or baseless claims about the 2020 election. He has argued that Georgia election officials introduced suitcases full of Biden-only ballots into the system; that thousands of dead people voted; and that election machines from Dominion Voting Systems switched millions of votes to be awarded to Mr. Biden instead of him.
None of these things were true, and all have been debunked by Republican officials.
Byung J. Pak, the Trump-appointed U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Georgia at the time of the 2020 election, told congressional investigators that Mr. Trump’s infamous suitcase theory — perpetuated by his lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani — was false.
“We found that the suitcase full of ballots, the alleged black suitcase that was being seen pulled from under the table, was actually an official lockbox where ballots were kept safe,” Mr. Pak testified in 2022 to the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack.
Mr. Giuliani himself eventually conceded in legal filings that he had made false statements about two Georgia election workers he and Mr. Trump had for years accused of concealing ballots.
And no evidence has ever proved that voting machines in Georgia or anywhere else changed votes in the 2020 election. Fox News, Newsmax and Mr. Giuliani each settled defamation lawsuits brought by Dominion.
Trump and many of his allies faced prosecution, with varying outcomes.
Nearly 1,600 people were charged with federal crimes related to the Jan. 6 riot. Other Trump allies were charged in state courts with being fake electors who sought to cast electoral votes for Mr. Trump in states he lost.
Mr. Trump, who was himself indicted on federal felony charges related to his attempt to overturn the 2020 election, issued a sweeping grant of clemency for the convicted Jan. 6 attackers on his first day as president last year. He has since pardoned others for crimes related to the riot. Mr. Giuliani and others who advanced Mr. Trump’s false claims in court and in the news media have also received presidential pardons.
The federal charges against Mr. Trump were dropped after he won the 2024 election.
And most of the state cases that local prosecutors brought against fake electors have been dismissed or dropped, or remain bogged down in the courts.
Reid J. Epstein is a Times reporter covering campaigns and elections from Washington.
The post How Trump’s 2020 Election Claims Have Been Debunked Again and Again appeared first on New York Times.
