Election securityElection security It’s Official: The Election Was Secure
Election officials and election security experts have long been clear: voter fraud is extraordinarily rare and the U.S. system has strong checks in place to protect the integrity of our voting process. “These are the facts,” says the Brennan Center for Justice. “But the facts have not stopped bad actors from trotting out baseless claims of ‘systemic voter fraud’ to suppress votes and undermine trust in our democracy for political gain.” Government officials, judges, and elected leaders, overwhelmingly Republican —and, in the executive branch and the judiciary, mostly Trump appointees — have publicly acknowledged confidence in the November election.
Election officials and election security experts have long been clear: voter fraud is extraordinarily rare and our system has strong checks in place to protect the integrity of our voting process. These are the facts. But the facts have not stopped bad actors from trotting out baseless claims of “systemic voter fraud” to suppress votes and undermine trust in our democracy for political gain.
By all measures, says the Brennan Center for Justice, the 2020 general election was one of the most secure elections in our history. Voters turned out in record numbers to cast their ballots by mail and in person, and the votes were counted in a timely manner. This success, however, did not dissuade President Trump and his enablers from loudly claiming fraud when the race did not go his way. In a brazen attempt to overturn the results, he unleashed an onslaught of outlandish claims about widespread fraud in the election, shamelessly targeting the votes of Black and Latino citizens in several cities. The severity of the allegations by the president and his allies, however false, has elicited a resounding rebuke of the myth of widespread voter fraud from officials at every level of government. And today, the Supreme Court all but ended the legal fight to overturn the election when it rejected Texas’s lawsuit to throw out the presidential election results in four battleground states that President Trump lost.
Democratic officials and civil rights leaders have been outspoken about the strength of our election systems and their trust in our election officials. And despite the alarming number of Republicans enabling Trump’s attempts to subvert democracy, there is a growing bipartisan coalition of leaders united behind the facts. What follows is a collection of definitive statements rejecting the myth of widespread voter fraud from federal agencies; the courts, including Trump-appointed judges; and Republican election officials and elected officials.
Federal Agencies
The nation’s top intelligence and law enforcement agencies have confirmed that there is no evidence of significant voter fraud in American elections and that the 2020 election was secure.
Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)
· “We have not seen, historically, any kind of coordinated national voter fraud effort in a major election, whether it’s by mail or otherwise.” – Christopher Wray, FBI Director, September 24, 2020, hearing before the U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs. (Director Wray was appointed by President Trump in 2017.)
