“If I lose, the contest has been rigged.” Most of us leave this narcissistic fantasy behind in grade school, but it fueled Trump’s claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him, and now, amplified once again by Donald and his MAGA crowd, this senseless and nonsensical fantasy is fueling his efforts to delegitimize the 2024 election in advance and to create social and political discord.
False fraud claims like the ones that Donald and his Always Trump minions cooked up strike at the heart of our democracy: if the voting process is corrupt, they assert, the results of that process must also be corrupt. Whether they were concocting accounts of voter misbehavior or citing imaginary irregularities in the vote count, the MAGA herd felt free in 2020 to damage the lives of good citizens and to threaten the guardrails that protect our democracy.
The most notorious, the most malicious—and likely the most expensive—episode of false fraud claims occurred when Trump and Rudy Giuiliani, “America’s [Former] Mayor,” falsely accused Fulton County, Georgia poll workers Ruby Freeman and her daughter Shaye Moss of tampering with ballots in order to give candidate Biden an advantage. Amplified by the MAGAphone, this conspiracy theory exposed the poll workers to threats of extreme violence. As Freeman later testified before the January 6 Congressional hearing, the episode “turned her life upside down.” She had to flee her home and keep her identity hidden. She had become an election worker, she explained, to honor her forebears who had been excluded from voting. Eventually, the two won a defamation lawsuit against Guiliani for $148 million—an amount he is trying very hard not to pay. In 2022, Moss won a John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award for “doing the hard and unseen work to run our Democracy.”
Closer to home, lawsuits against various Boards of Elections, including the Bucks County Board of Elections, Secretary of State Boockvar, The Pennsylvania Supreme Court, and The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania began on October 28, 2020, five days before the General Election on Tuesday, November 3rd. The lawsuits included many complaints about mail-in votes, vote counting, and the certification of votes, but not one of these lawsuits against alleged fraud prevailed. In probably the most far-reaching lawsuit, on November 9th, the Trump campaign challenged election results in a number of key Democratic counties. The lawsuit was eventually denied by a Trump-appointed US Circuit Court of Appeals Judge who wrote, “Free, fair elections are the lifeblood of our democracy. 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.”
Despite all of their righteous anger, Trumpers have found proof of little, if any, actual voter fraud. That’s because we have very little voter fraud in the United States: the systems that are designed to prevent fraud work very well and Americans’ respect for the norms of democracy protect us from voting chaos. The Brennan Center’s report, The Truth about Voter Fraud, puts the incidence rates of voter fraud between 0.0003 percent and 0.0025 percent.
Demonstrating his total inability to learn, Trump is again howling about voter fraud—this time fraud he imagines is committed by immigrants. Trump is now demanding a law denying noncitizens the right to vote in federal elections. The joke is on him: There is already such a law. And noncitizens do not vote. Nor do dead people.
(Parts of this article were informed by The Steal: The Attempt to Overturn the 2020 Election and the People Who Stopped it by Mark Bowden and Matthew Teague.)