Keeping Alive the Simple Truth of the 2020 Presidential Election

How to know the truth about what happened.

The election is over, and Joe Biden is going to be the next President of the United States on January 20th. Yet, a large number of Republicans apparently still believe that the 2020 Presidential Election was rigged. On top of that, Republican elected leaders and the right-wing media ecosystem (Fox News, NewsMax) continue to perpetuate this false narrative despite the Trump-inspired Capitol Riot showing how dangerous it is to mislead people in this way.

The net effect is that although the election is over, the mass delusion is not going away soon, and it damages confidence in the electoral system. So in this edition, I’m starting a compendium of the best rationale for why the election was fair because I think supporters of Positive Politics are going to need to reference these statements a lot.

A Simple, Decisive Argument

The good news is that you really only need to know one simple, incontrovertible fact that discredits every argument, and that is the following from Time:

Trump and his allies’ public allegations stand in stark contrast to what his lawyers are actually claiming— bound by professional ethics rules—in election-related cases in court. In three separate lawsuits in Pennsylvania and cases in Arizona and Nevada, Trump’s lawyers have jettisoned sweeping claims of fraud, instead focusing on relatively small-bore complaints.

That’s right, in almost 60 lawsuits, the Trump campaign’s “elite strike team” of lawyers never presented any evidence of, or actually alleged, fraud. They never showed any evidence of malicious voting machines. They never contended that any individual orchestrated a large-scale operation to manufacture votes. Instead, they complained about arcane procedural rules and the constitutionality of certain aspects of mail-in voting. They perpetuated rumors and hearsay. Even then, they pretty much lost spectacularly on all cases. Thus, you know for certain there is no real evidence. If that evidence existed, they would have brought it.

So, from that alone, you know that the whole massive election fraud allegation was a big lie. And no, I’m not calling anyone a Nazi, but I am saying they stole a page from Hitler’s playbook. (See this link if you don’t know what I’m talking about.)

More Detailed Arguments

If you are interested in a more thorough debunking of common claims, you can review the comments and references below.

• All the states had fraud detection and vote certification processes. Many of these states had Republican administrations. None of them found any significant voter fraud issues.

• Attorney General William Barr, a Trump appointee, released a statement saying the United States Department of Justice had found no evidence of fraud.

• The Director of Cybersecurity during the election, Chris Krebs, conducted intensive operations to prevent election interference and declared it was the safest ever held.

• Several state supreme courts and the United States Supreme Court found the cases so lacking in standing or evidence that they refused to hear them or dismissed them outright.

• The Republicans who were elected in the same process were not complaining their own victories were fraudulent.

• Finally, read here and here for a repudiation of many common false claims about the election process.

A Simple, Unassailable Conclusion

There can only be one reasonable conclusion about the election. It is rock solid, and it is this:

Joe Biden won the 2020 election fair and square, and there is zero credible evidence to the contrary.

We’re going to have to keep explaining this to people a lot over the next few years. Creating change is difficult when it requires an understanding of complex issues and subtle distinctions, so I think repeating a simple, easily verified argument is best if we are going to move forward in a positive direction. Unfortunately, there are a lot of non-rational reasons why people believe in conspiracy theories, but at least focusing on clear reasoning is a start to change.

So bookmark this page because I’ll keep updating it as a handy place to find the best information for debunking the crazy election fraud myth.