As you are no doubt aware, former President Donald J. Trump and legions of his supporters have spent the past year insisting that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from its rightful winner, namely Donald J. Trump the elder.
The Associated Press, which has the advantage of employing journalists in every state plus a large national reporting staff with a reputation for no-nonsense, nothing-but-the-facts reporting, has reviewed “every potential case of voter fraud in the six battleground states disputed by Trump to assess the validity of Trump’s allegation that he wuz robbed a year ago by voter fraud orchestrated by Democrats.
Monday, AP published the results, which I didn’t notice until Tuesday and which may not have received the attention they deserve. So I summarize them below and at the bottom will provide a link to the full AP writeup of their findings.
The AP found no significant bias in favor of either Biden or Trump in the processing or counting of ballots in any of the six states Trump and his allies have been claiming were stolen. The headline the AP put on the story on its own website read:
Far too little vote fraud to tip election to Trump, AP finds
The AP’s summary paragraph of the findings read:
An Associated Press review of every potential case of voter fraud in the six battleground states disputed by former President Donald Trump has found fewer than 475 — a number that would have made no difference in the 2020 presidential election.
No difference. Not all of the very few bad ballots they found even worked against Trump. But even if they had, not a single state (and therefore not a single electoral vote) would have been flipped.
Biden defeated Trump by more than four million popular votes nationally, a healthy 4.4 percentage points in the national popular vote (which would make it the second-biggest margin among the last six presidential elections).
All of those problem ballots AP found, put together, amounted to 0.15 percent of all the ballots.
That’s not 15 percent. It’s 15 hundredths of one percent across the six Trump-disputed states Biden carried. So, to restate the obvious, the AP findings eviscerate the Trump stop-the-steal fraud claim. Trump should feel free to relay his congratulations to Biden on a clean, solid victory. But don’t hold your breath.
The AP review also showed no collusion intended to rig the voting. Virtually every case the AP suspects of possible fraud was based on an individual acting alone to vote more than once.
I don’t know if Trump or his minions will try to discredit the AP or accuse it of bias. But as a 48-year veteran of journalism, I would testify that the AP, even unto the point of being boring, is about as unbiased as any journalistic source I know. That’s just me, a member of the fake news crowd.
The findings build on a mountain of other evidence that the election wasn’t rigged, there was no “steal” to “stop,” and the results were verified by election officials in all those states, including many that are run by Republican elected officials.
I would like to live long enough to witness Donald Trump acknowledging that he lost the 2020 election fair and square, because then I would live forever.
Oh, I almost forgot. Here’s a link to the AP’s own version of the story on which this post relies.
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