Case Study 2 — The 2020 Election Challenges and What the Evidence Shows

The premise

This case study examines what happened to the legal claims that the 2020 presidential election was stolen. The chapter has stated, plainly, that the election was not stolen. This case study walks through the evidentiary record that supports that finding. The premise is that a citizen who reads the textbook should be able to look at the primary sources — court rulings, recount results, statements by Republican election officials — and assess for themselves whether the chapter's claim is justified.

The vote and the certification

President Joe Biden defeated President Donald Trump by 7,059,526 votes nationally and 306–232 in the Electoral College. Biden won Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Nevada — all states Trump had won in 2016. The margins varied: Biden won Arizona by roughly 10,500 votes, Georgia by roughly 11,800, Wisconsin by roughly 21,000, and Pennsylvania by roughly 81,000. Each state conducted its own certification process. Each state's results were certified, in most cases by a mix of Republican and Democratic officials.

The U.S. Congress counted electoral votes on January 6–7, 2021, after the joint session was interrupted by the breach of the Capitol. The count was completed and Biden was declared the winner. He was inaugurated on January 20, 2021.

The court cases — 60+ losses

The Trump campaign and allied litigants filed approximately 60 court cases challenging various aspects of the 2020 election results. The Election Law Blog, MIT Election Lab, and other sources maintain comprehensive catalogs. The cases sought, variously: orders barring certification of state results; orders requiring rejection of mail ballots received after Election Day; orders excluding particular categories of votes from the count; orders compelling state legislatures to designate alternative electors; and other forms of relief that would have changed the outcome.

The campaign and its allies lost essentially all of these cases. A few examples:

  • Pennsylvania. Donald J. Trump for President v. Boockvar (E.D. Pa. 2020), reviewed by Judge Matthew Brann (a Republican appointee), was dismissed at the pleading stage. Judge Brann's opinion noted: "This Court has been presented with strained legal arguments without merit and speculative accusations, unpled in the operative complaint and unsupported by evidence." The Third Circuit, with Judge Stephanos Bibas (a Trump appointee) writing, affirmed: "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."

  • Wisconsin. Trump v. Wisconsin Elections Commission (7th Cir. 2020) was dismissed by Judge Brett Ludwig (a Trump appointee) at the district level and affirmed by the Seventh Circuit. The court held the campaign's claims, even taken at face value, would not have produced grounds to overturn the result.

  • Georgia. Wood v. Raffensperger (11th Cir. 2020) was dismissed for lack of standing. The 11th Circuit panel included two Trump appointees.

  • Texas v. Pennsylvania. Texas's Attorney General attempted to invoke Supreme Court original jurisdiction to invalidate the results in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, and Wisconsin. The Supreme Court denied leave to file the bill of complaint, holding Texas lacked standing to challenge how other states ran their elections.

The pattern was consistent. Where evidence was offered, courts examined it and found it insufficient. Where evidence was not offered, courts noted the absence. Many cases were dismissed on procedural grounds (standing, laches, jurisdiction); several reached the merits and were dismissed on the merits. Judges appointed by presidents of both parties — including Trump appointees — examined the claims and rejected them.

Recounts and audits

Multiple states conducted recounts, often more than one.

Georgia. Georgia conducted a full statewide hand recount in November 2020, then a separate machine recount, then an audit of signature matching in Cobb County. Each confirmed Biden's victory. Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, certified Georgia's results. On January 2, 2021, President Trump telephoned Raffensperger and asked him to "find 11,780 votes" — one more than Biden's margin. Raffensperger declined and the call was recorded; the recording was later released and became central evidence in subsequent state and federal investigations into post-election conduct.

Arizona. The Arizona Senate authorized a partisan-funded review by Cyber Ninjas, a firm with no prior election-administration experience, to conduct an unofficial audit of Maricopa County's 2020 ballots. The Cyber Ninjas review, after months of contested process and methodological criticism, ultimately reported that Biden had won by a slightly larger margin than the official count had recorded. The county's official recount and audit had already confirmed Biden's victory by the original margin.

Michigan. Wayne County's results were audited; the audit confirmed the official count. The Republican-led Michigan Senate Oversight Committee, in a June 2021 report, found "no evidence of widespread or systematic fraud" and recommended the Attorney General investigate those who had perpetrated election-fraud claims for financial gain.

Wisconsin. A Republican-led legislative review under former state Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman, after over a year of investigation, did not find evidence that would change the outcome. The Wisconsin Supreme Court rejected the most aggressive interpretations of state election law that had been advanced in post-election litigation.

The Republican election officials who refused to overturn

The institutional system held in 2020 because state-level election officials, many of them Republicans, did their jobs. A non-exhaustive list:

  • Brad Raffensperger (R-GA, Secretary of State). Certified Georgia's results. Refused Trump's January 2 request. Was subsequently censured by the Georgia Republican Party but re-elected in 2022.
  • Doug Ducey (R-AZ, Governor). Signed Arizona's certification of Biden's victory; declined a phone call from President Trump that arrived during the certification ceremony.
  • Mike Shirkey (R-MI, Senate Majority Leader). Met with Trump at the White House in November 2020 and declined to commit to summoning the Michigan legislature to substitute Trump electors. Issued a public statement that Michigan's results were valid.
  • Aaron Van Langevelde (R-MI, Board of State Canvassers). Cast the deciding vote to certify Michigan's results despite political pressure to abstain or vote against certification. Was subsequently not reappointed to the Board.
  • Bill Gates (R-AZ, Maricopa County Supervisor). Certified Maricopa results despite physical threats. Continued in office through 2024 and oversaw the 2024 administration.
  • Stephen Richer (R-AZ, Maricopa County Recorder). Publicly refuted election-fraud claims about 2020. Faced a primary challenge in 2024 and lost to a candidate who questioned 2020 results, but the 2024 election in Maricopa was still administered without major operational failure.

The pattern across these officials was consistent: they had supported Republican candidates, including Trump, but they had also taken oaths to administer elections according to law. When the law and the certification process required them to certify Biden's victory, they did. The system that depended on them held.

The persistence of denial

That the courts ruled, the recounts confirmed, and Republican officials certified — these are facts. What is also a fact, and a different kind of fact, is that approximately one-third of Americans, and roughly two-thirds of self-identified Republicans, continue to believe the 2020 election was illegitimate or stolen. This finding is robust across surveys: Pew Research, the American National Election Studies, AP-NORC, and most major polling organizations consistently report it from 2021 through 2025.

The persistence of the belief is not a matter of evidence; the evidence has been examined, by courts, by recounts, and by Republican officials, and it has not supported the claim. The persistence is a fact about media ecosystems, partisan identity, and the durability of beliefs once they are anchored to political identity. Subsequent chapters (especially Chapter 37) examine the political consequences. For the purposes of this case study, the point is narrower: the 2020 election was not stolen, and the durable contrary belief is real.

The 2024 election

The 2024 election, by contrast, did not produce an analogous denial movement. Donald Trump won the 2024 presidential election, defeating Vice President Kamala Harris in the popular vote and the Electoral College. The Trump campaign and its allies did not file 60+ court cases. State-level Republican officials administered the election without operational failure. The peaceful transfer of power occurred on January 20, 2025.

This is consequential for what the chapter has argued. The institutional system that processed the 2020 election produced a result Trump's allies refused to accept. The same institutional system, in 2024, produced a result Trump won. The system that Republicans criticized as biased in 2020 produced a Republican victory in 2024. The system that Democrats had defended in 2020 was the system that produced their loss in 2024. In both cases, the institutional system worked as designed: state-level officials administered elections according to state law, results were certified, electors were counted, and the candidate with the Electoral College majority took office.

That two consecutive presidential elections were administered competently across deep partisan division — even as one was followed by a denial movement and one was not — is itself a finding about American democracy as of 2026. The system worked. The political-cultural consequences of the 2020 denial movement persist. Both of those things are true. The chapter has tried to describe both honestly.

A point about how to read this case study

The chapter has been explicit about its own limitations. We have stated that the 2020 election was not stolen because the courts examined the claims and found them insufficient, because the recounts confirmed the result, because Republican election officials in close states certified, and because the institutional system worked. These are four lines of evidence, and a citizen who chooses to dispute the chapter's conclusion has to engage with all four. It is not enough to cite a single contested precinct or a single anomaly in a single county; the relevant question is whether the aggregate evidence supports the aggregate claim that an election with a 7-million-vote popular margin and a 306–232 Electoral College margin was won by the candidate with fewer votes.

This case study has not engaged in detail with the specific factual claims that 2020-denial advocates have raised. There are several reasons. First, those claims have been engaged in detail by courts, by recounts, by audits, and by Republican officials, and the engagements are matters of public record. A reader who wishes to assess the specific claims should read those engagements, not summaries of them. Second, the claims are not consistent across advocates: the dominion-machine theory, the suitcase-of-ballots theory, the dead-voter theory, and the foreign-interference theory have at various times all been advanced and have at various times been contradicted by other 2020-denial advocates. The case study would have to be a chapter unto itself to address each. Third, and most importantly, the chapter's job is to describe American government as a political-science textbook would, not to relitigate the 2020 election. The political-science finding is that the election was decided by voters, the result was certified through the constitutional process, and the institutional system that has produced presidential elections since 1789 produced one in 2020 too. Subsequent chapters take up the political-cultural consequences. The empirical core, however, is settled.