Voting machine inaccuracies, Ballot tracking discrepancies, failure to give observers sufficient access to the counting of ballots, and Democrats bribing voters — these constituted the claims President Donald Trump and his supporters put forth as proof of voter fraud in the 2020 United States presidential election in Nevada.
Shortly afterwards, judges in Nevada dismissed these claims, following which an unofficial political conservative group restated the findings of those lawsuits through a report which came out this month. The latter summarizes the investigations undertaken into each claim of election fraud which Trump and his allies submitted, and came to the conclusion that no one had “stolen” the 2022 election.
“Lost, Not Stolen: The Conservative Case that Trump Lost and Biden Won the 2020 Presidential Election”, encompasses reports regarding each battleground state where Trump alleged the committing of fraud, such as Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Nevada, Michigan, Georgia, and Arizona.
According to the report which was made by a group comprising former senators and judges, who said they were “deeply troubled” when they saw the efforts to discredit or overturn the 2020 election results. The authors include Judges J. Michael Luttig, Thomas B. Griffith, Theodore B. Olson, and Michael W. McConnell; former Senators Gordon H. Smith and John Danforth; and lawyer Benjamin Ginsberg.
“Efforts to thwart the People’s choice are deeply undemocratic and unpatriotic,” the report states. “Claims that an election was stolen, or that the outcome resulted from fraud, are deadly serious and should be made only on the basis of real and powerful evidence.”
According to the report the political landscape — which was a lot different back in 2020 — explains Biden’s victory. The reelection campaign that Trump ran was timed during a pandemic, which saw a “severe downturn in the global economy,” per the report.
Also important to note was the sizable electorate which voted for just the Republican ballots that landed down the ballot, and not for Trump.
Trump and supporters failed to present sufficient evidence that could bring about a different election result, the report says; however, according to the authors, the processes carried out during the election were imperfect.
“States should continue to do what they can do to eliminate opportunities for election fraud and to punish it when it occurs,” the report states. “But there is absolutely no evidence of fraud in the 2020 Presidential Election on the magnitude necessary to shift the result in any state, let alone the nation as a whole.”
The report concluded that there had been no fraud which altered the election outcome in any single precinct. It says, “Our review of each of these Trump charges affirms that the 2020 election was administered by trained professionals who reaffirmed their established track record for fairness.”
Changes made due to the pandemic may have permitted fraud, the report conceded, while still holding that there isn’t proof that these possibilities ever “materialized in reality”. The changes also drove up voter participation.
According to the report, election procedures have endured in every election that occurred since as far back as 2000, and have remained “sound and reliable” in each instance.
The report says that Trump’s legal representatives arrived in court proceedings without proof of the wrongdoing they claimed had taken place, before returning “to their rallies and media campaigns to repeat the same unsupported claims.”
“Even now, 20 months after the election, a period in which Trump’s supporters have been energetically scouring every nook and cranny for proof that the election was stolen, they come up empty,” says the report. “Claims are made, trumpeted in sympathetic media, and accepted as truthful by many patriotic Americans. But on objective examination they have fallen short, every time.”
The 10 Cases Filed in Nevada
The report says that in Nevada, Trump and cohorts brought 10 cases in total with 28 counts, and these challenged the 2020 election results. However the petitioners were unable to prove fraud, or even irregularities that were capable of overturning the results of the election, inside an investigation or court.
Biden’s win in Nevada was by over 30,000 votes, where he got 50.1% while Trump got 47.7%. This shared similarities with the 2016 election, which was when Hilary Clinton won the same state by around 27,000 votes.
“Biden’s win in Nevada, like Clinton’s, is attributable to a reliable base of Democrats in Southern Nevada,” the report states. “He performed far better with Latina women than Latino men and outperformed Trump with independents.”
The report also cited the investigation that Republican Secretary of State Cegavske’s office carried out into the claims by Trump, regarding election misconduct. This investigation covered over 125 hours’ worth of time, and failed to uncover proof of widespread voter fraud.
In March of last year, The republican Party in Nevada brought out an extra 3,000 complaints to the office of Cegavske; in April, the latter gave a response which found that the basis of most of these complaints was that the party did not understand the creation and keeping of voter registration records. None of these were seen to involve widespread fraud.
Also in the conservatives’ report was info regarding the review the Associated Press did on Trump’s claims pertaining to Nevada. Again, no evidence was seen of widespread fraud.
Per the report, the potential fraud cases that local election officials identified — fewer in number than 100 — represented under 0.3 of the margin of victory for Biden.
The report says that one Nevada court ruled that the plaintiffs did not present enough evidence to bolster their claims, which held that officials did a count of the ballots cast by nonresidents, as well as incorrectly authenticating ballots in enough numbers to even affect the outcome.
“We emphasize that the court’s finding was that Trump and his supporters failed even to offer sufficient evidence,” says the report. “In other words, when given a chance to prove their claims in court, they came up short.”
