Group of prominent conservatives release report refuting Trump claims of election fraud

A group of eight prominent conservatives has reviewed all 64 of the court cases by former President Donald Trump and his allies in their effort to overturn the result of the 2020 presidential election and found all of them to be without merit.

The group, which was comprised of former Republican senators Gordon Smith and John Danforth, several former federal judges, and other high-ranking Republican officials, released a 72-page report stating that the 2020 election was “administered by trained professionals who reaffirmed their established track record for fairness” and urged their fellow conservatives to move on.

“We urge our fellow conservatives to cease obsessing over the results of the 2020 election, and to focus instead on presenting candidates and ideas that offer a positive vision for overcoming our current difficulties and bringing greater peace, prosperity, and liberty to our nation,” the report’s authors write in the introduction.

The group reviewed cases filed in each of the states where Mr Trump was narrowly defeated and sought to overturn the result in the courts — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

In each case, in which the Trump campaign alleged a wide variety of unfounded irregularities ranging from voter fraud to election official manipulation, the group of eight was not swayed.

Under the conditions, the authors noted, it was an impressive performance of election administration.

“The performance of the system in 2020 was all the more remarkable because of the extraordinary circumstances caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, which precipitated changes on an unprecedented scope and timeline,” the authors wrote. “Some of those changes may have created possibilities for fraud, but there is no evidence that those risks materialized in reality; nor did they result in dampening voter participation—quite the opposite.”

In its investigation, the authors noted that not only was there no case of fraud large enough to change the result of an entire state, there was no instance of fraud large enough to change the result of even a single precinct.

The courts themselves agreed about the baselessness of the Trump campaign’s lawsuits. Of the 64 suits the campaign filed, 34 were dismissed. Of the 30 cases that went before a judge, Mr Trump and his allies won just won — a minor suit in Pennsylvania that did not affect the result of the election there.

In addition to its review of the court cases filed on behalf of the Trump campaign, the authors also reviewed the election audits ordered by Republican elected officials in a number of the states that Mr Trump narrowly lost and found that they too “failed to support the allegations from Trump and his supporters.”

“We conclude that Donald Trump and his supporters had their day in court and failed to produce substantive evidence to make their case,” the report reads.