Thinking Critically About 2020 Stolen Election Claims

All swing (battleground) states used paper ballots. Flipping a vote on a machine in an air-gapped tally system doesn't change the indelible ink mark on the ballot. 49 states required 3,077 counties to perform post-election audits — including 509 audits in the 8 swing states won by Biden (Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin). None discovered any vote-flipping scheme.

Dominion Voting Systems sued Sydney Powell for defamation. Powell never produced any evidence. Her own legal team filed a court response on pages 27 & 28 stating that "no reasonable person would conclude that the statements were truly statements of fact."

The Idaho Secretary of State refuted Lindell's "Big Lie", noting that at least 7 Idaho counties have no electronic steps in their vote counting processes.

Professor J. Alex Halderman of the University of Michigan investigated Antrim County. His report concluded the problems were the result of human error — not a hack. Staff failed to update scanner programming after last-minute ballot changes were made.

A 2021 report from the cyber security firm ESET listed the 17 known cases of air-gapped systems being hacked in the previous 15 years. None were hacked wirelessly. None were any of our 3,144 county election systems.

Voters cast 29,165,276 votes in the 8 battleground states won by Biden — all on paper ballots:

• Arizona: 3,333,829 votes cast
• Georgia: 4,935,487 votes cast
• Michigan: 5,453,892 votes cast
• Minnesota: 3,201,142 votes cast
• Nevada: 1,373,376 votes cast
• New Hampshire: 790,597 votes cast
• Pennsylvania: 6,835,903 votes cast
• Wisconsin: 3,241,050 votes cast

Consider the physical impossibility of this claim:

• Without foreknowledge of the outcome, how many hundreds of thousands of phantom voters did hackers need to create to ensure a victory?
• How many co-conspirators were needed to mark and submit all those paper ballots?
• How did hackers recruit the army of co-conspirators they needed to receive and mark the ballots?
• How did the hackers conceal the addition of hundreds of thousands of voters to county voter rolls so that there wasn't one ROV or ROV staff member in the nation that reported it?
• How were those recruiting efforts kept secret from state and federal law enforcement or the press?
• How were those ballots mailed without a single ROV, staff member, or postal carrier reporting it?
• How did co-conspirators forge voter signatures on mail-in envelopes?
• How has not one co-conspirator come forward in years?

There have been no arrests and no credible evidence presented to support this claim. No cyber expert has demonstrated (replicated) the method used in such a massive attack.

The 10,315 number came from a report with a knowingly flawed assumption — the author noted that "because the Voter Registration file only contains the Birth Year for each registered voter, a more exact match cannot be made and there may indeed be false positives."

In section 3.1.6 (pages 36–40), an independent review by Justin Grimmer and Abhinav Ramaswamy concluded that "our estimate of approximately four coming from voters after they were deceased is in line with other estimates of dead voters." The Georgia SOS estimated two dead people voted, later raising that number to four.

A study of Washington State found up to 14 ballots received in the name of deceased individuals out of 4.5 million votes cast.

When Arizona Speaker Rusty Bowers pressed Giuliani for proof, Giuliani replied: "We've got lots of theories, we just don't have the evidence."

More than 155 million votes were cast in the 2020 election. The arrest of a single Chinese citizen voting in 2024 made national news. ICE charged 19 foreign nationals with voting in the entire 2016 election. A BPC analysis of The Heritage Foundation's Election Fraud Cases database found only 77 instances of non-citizens voting between 1999 and 2023.

A Brennan Center study analyzing 23.5 million votes across 42 jurisdictions in the 2016 general election found approximately 30 instances of non-citizens casting votes. There isn't any credible evidence of widespread voter fraud by non-citizens.

The President and the RNC raised over $200 million in the month after the election. They could easily have spent a small portion on recounts and reviewing election audits in any county with large late-night ballot drops.

In Georgia, there was an automatic recount because of the narrow margin of victory. Georgia performed both a hand recount and a machine recount. Biden still won. To quote Georgia Republican Governor Kemp: "The 2020 election was not stolen. No one with evidence of fraud has come forward — under oath — and proven anything in a court of law."

The full audio recording and transcript of the January 2, 2021 call is publicly available. Georgia's Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger responded: "We did a hand retally, a 100% retally of all the ballots and compared them to what the machines said and came up with virtually the same result. Then we did the recount, and we got virtually the same result … the data you have is wrong."

The Trump campaign raised over $200 million after the election and could easily have paid for a review of all Fulton County mail-in ballot envelopes. They did not. If over 50,000 Fulton County voters were turned away at the polls, every news outlet in the nation would have been reporting it.

Georgia Governor Brian Kemp (a Republican) issued a statement on August 15, 2023: "The 2020 election in Georgia 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."

Secretary Raffensperger responded: "Rudy Giuliani or his people, they sliced and diced that video and took it out of context … We did an audit of that and we proved conclusively that they were not scanned three times."

The two election workers named in the video sued Giuliani for defamation. Giuliani admitted in court that he lied. The women won the suit and were awarded a judgment of $148 million.

Georgia conducted both a hand and a machine recount in every county including Fulton County. There was no credible evidence to support this claim.

Montgomery has a long history of making dubious claims according to Wikipedia. A number of stories and posts have detailed his activities including Reuters' "The man behind Trump World's myth of rigged voting machines", Playboy Magazine's "The man who conned the Pentagon", and "Litigation History of Dennis L. Montgomery, 1993–present."

Lindell launched the "Prove Mike Wrong Challenge" after purchasing data and software from Dennis Montgomery for $1.5 million in 2021. He claimed the 37 terabytes of data contained packet captures ("PCAPs") that provided "irrefutable proof" that the 2020 election was stolen.

Lindell's own cyber expert said the key data is "illegitimate" and "cannot prove a cyber incursion by China." Bob Zeidman's book Election Hacks recounts how he entered the challenge, proved the information was wrong, and the ensuing litigation.

A jury awarded Eric Coomer $2.3 million for defamation. A Minnesota federal court ruled Lindell defamed Smartmatic. The defamation case filed by Dominion Voting Systems is ongoing.

Identical Turnout Rates? All swing states used paper ballots. Hackers couldn't have known how many phantom voters to add until they knew how many real voters voted — which wasn't known until after the polls closed. Page 3 of California's 2020 Statement of the Vote shows voter turnout ranged from 61.68% in Imperial County to 90.49% in Sonoma County. The website Election Insights has collected voter turnout data by age group for almost every county in 42 states. Sutter County's data shows turnout rates for 40-year-olds in California ranging from about 62% to about 90%.

Contradictions: Dr. Frank scoffs at the integrity of our air gapped tally systems, claims that hacks were done wirelessly and recommends scrapping our machine tally system. That implies a hack of our tally system. On the other hand, he claims phantom voters were added and produced identical voter turnout rates. That is a hack of the registration system. Was it our registration or tally system that he claims was hacked? He doesn't say.

If the hack was of the registration system, then scrapping the machine-based tally system and hand counting ballots makes no sense. That would only change how the illegal ballots he claims were created in the registration system were counted. On the other hand, if the hack was flipping votes from Trump to Biden in the tally system, then hackers had no reason to add phantom voters.

Air-Gapped System Not Secure? Claiming his phone has an "air gap" is blatantly disingenuous. Mobile phones are designed to communicate wirelessly. Machines approved for our air-gapped tally systems are prohibited from being connected to the internet or containing any hardware capable of wireless signals.

6th Order Polynomial Debunked: Justin Grimmer from Stanford's Hoover Institute has repeatedly debunked Dr. Frank's 6th order polynomial. In one analysis, Grimmer addresses Frank's claim that voter turnout was 88% in every precinct in California's Placer County.

Real World Victims: Tina Peters, the Clerk/Recorder/ROV for Mesa County, Colorado believed Dr. Frank. She is now serving a 9-year prison sentence for following a plan "hatched during an April 2021 meeting with (Dr.) Frank." The Shasta County Board of Supervisors cancelled their contract with Dominion after a Frank presentation — wasting over $1 million of taxpayer money fixing a problem that never existed.

His testimony is full of holes. He confirms that the fraud could be detected by hand counting the votes and comparing it to the machine totals — a procedure ALREADY REQUIRED as part of the post-election audit. 3,077 post-election county audits did not discover any vote-flipping scheme, including 509 audits in the swing states won by Biden.

The notion that BMDs used at polling places were hacked has been addressed by Bob Zeidman — a Republican computer expert who voted for Trump. He explains in his book Election Hacks why the chance of this happening is "zero."

As Zeidman explains, "Yes, physically hacking into voting machines is possible, as shown by J. Alex Halderman, Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Michigan. However, the attacks that he has demonstrated require physical access to each machine for a short period of time. The possibility that attackers were given physical access to a significant number of the millions of voting machines in the U.S. and that not one honest Democrat or Republican observed and reported it is… zero"

Mr. Curtis claims that a hack of polling place BMDs could have taken place if the BMDs were networked with the central system. This is fictional. Neither the scanners and tabulators that are part of an air gapped system nor the BMDs at the polling place are connected to the internet. If the BMDs were connected and were adding or flipping votes, then this would be easily detected in post election audits of paper ballots.

A 2021 report from the cyber security firm ESET listed the 17 known cases of air-gapped systems being hacked in the previous 15 years. None were hacked wirelessly. None were any of our 3,144 county election systems. Flipping a vote on a machine in an air-gapped tally system doesn't change the indelible ink mark on the ballot. 49 states required 3,077 counties to perform post-election audits (Alabama does not).

Georgia attempted to investigate TTV's claims but TTV refused to turn over the evidence. After being subpoenaed, TTV filed a court response saying they didn't have any evidence.

In Arizona, TTV repeatedly promised to provide evidence to the Attorney General's office, then claimed to be FBI informants and couldn't turn over the evidence. TTV indicated the AG's office could obtain the evidence directly from the FBI.

The FBI told the AG's office that representatives of TTV were not FBI informants, that the TTV representatives had never turned over evidence to them and instead had told the FBI that the evidence had been turned over to the AG's office and could be obtained from them. A AG's letter states: "Not only is this patently false, TTV acknowledged via correspondence and during a meeting with them that they had not given us the information but that they would."

The AG's letter concludes: "TTV has raised considerable sums of money alleging they had evidence of widespread voter fraud … Another law enforcement agency has also stated they have not provided them the information … Given TTV's status as a non-profit organization, it would appear that further review of its financials may be warranted."

Cell phone data alone does not prove anyone visited a drop box. A letter from the Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI) indicates TTV's data was only accurate to 100 feet. Ping data from the Ohio Attorney General was only good to 150 meters (492 feet). Amazon drivers, taxi drivers, garbage collectors, and police officers on patrol could all have driven by enough drop boxes and non-profits to be misidentified as mules.

The video evidence does not prove anyone was a mule. More than 2,000 mules, 4 million minutes of video, 10 trillion data points — and the movie doesn't show one person dropping ballots in multiple drop boxes. D'Souza issued an apology to Mark Andrews who was shown in the movie while the audio said "What you are seeing is a crime."

Former U.S. Attorney General William Barr testified: "The cell phone data is singularly unimpressive … The premise that if you go by five boxes or whatever it was, you know that that's a mule is just indefensible."

ACLED stated: "Our data do not support any of the claims or conclusions that were previously linked to ACLED." The murder of Secoriea Turner was not "ebbing on cold case status" as TTV claims — authorities arrested two suspects in August 2021, two months before TTV contacted law enforcement.

Salem Media Group stopped distribution of the movie and companion book after learning of misinformation.

At the request of the State of Michigan, Professor J. Alex Halderman investigated the issues in Antrim County including reviewing the ASOG report. His report concluded: "The incident in Antrim County arose due to the county's mishandling of last-minute ballot design changes …" The report went on to explain "Antrim changed three ballot designs to correct local contests after the initial designs had already been loaded onto the memory cards that configure the ballot scanners." and "… was not caused by a security breach." Halderman also disputed the claimed 68.05% error rate, stating "Mr. Ramsland is largely referring to other kinds of errors that he believes occurred on the basis of his mistaken interpretations of the forensic evidence."

Regarding claims that Dominion machines are connected to the internet: ballots are scanned and tabulated in an air-gapped system. Results are then copied onto a thumb drive and taken to an online computer where the file is transmitted to the Secretary of State's office. The video shown in the documentary merely shows how results get from that non-air-gapped computer to the Secretary of State's office.

Col. Waldron produced a PowerPoint presentation on January 3, 2021 claiming foreign computers were involved in transmitting election data. This USA Today fact check tracks the origins of this claim and concludes it is false. Col. Waldron's PowerPoint is available here.

Justin Grimmer and Abhinav Ramaswamy from Stanford's Hoover Institute evaluate fraud claims from the 2020 election.

USA Today published a "Fact check roundup: Debunking false narratives about the Jan. 6 Capitol riot" addressing a long list of stolen election claims.

Associated Press reported "Far too little vote fraud to tip election to Trump" and published "State details of AP's review of potential voter fraud cases" detailing their investigation of fraud claims in swing states.

FactCheck.org hosts "Viral Voting Misinformation" on its website, addressing many stolen election claims. You are invited to read their responses and judge the validity of their analysis.