A political scientist examines the evidence and concludes that widespread fraud took place.

As a citizen who is also a political scientist, I have tried to do due diligence to assess what happened in the recent election. Who won what and at what level and what does it mean? And what about the charges of vote fraud? People keep asking me what I think, and I decided to write down the conclusions I have reached to date and on what grounds. Because charges of vote fraud have called the outcome of the presidential election into question, I have paid particular attention to them.

This memorandum is not written to persuade. It merely records my findings and reflections. Few people are really open to persuasion in any case—not just on political subjects but on any subject about which they care and on which they have adopted certain views. Diehard partisans for a certain outlook will refuse to have their beliefs questioned, and so will many others. They will be no less dismissive of a document challenging their opinions if it is full of footnotes and appendixes. Such a document will, indeed, make them resist it even more. As for the relatively few people who are truly open-minded, they will not find another person’s observations dispositive. They will, as they should, want to consider the evidence on a contested matter for themselves.

I hope that I am not deceiving myself when I say that I have not reached my conclusions regarding the 2020 election because of partisanship. I am a close student of politics, but have never belonged to a political party. If I have a bias, I suppose it is that of one who is largely alienated from both of the American parties and who believes that both of the presidential candidates in 2020 have major flaws.

It should be obvious that the issue of the legitimacy of the election is too touchy and inflamed for my view of what happened to settle it for anyone. There are numerous legal challenges to the vote in a number of states. Those charging fraud have had just a few weeks to prepare their cases, and much of the supporting material is hard to understand for those who are not political scientists, computer geeks, or statisticians. Whatever the veracity of the allegations, there is a large and growing amount of material to consider—this despite the media mantra that the charges are “baseless” or “unsupported.”

It is widely recognized that especially in their coverage of matters related to Donald Trump, the mainstream media long ago abandoned any pretense of impartiality. It is nevertheless remarkable that the media have not investigated even the more plausible-looking of the allegations of vote fraud. It did not take me long to realize that the charges were far more serious and credible than the American public had been told. In fact, this memorandum reviews the election with special reference to the allegations of fraud. I had barely begun looking into them when I noticed that, very shortly after the election, European experts on American elections, some of whom also had advanced expertise in statistics, had published articles or given interviews in which they claimed to have seen clear evidence that the election was “rigged”! In Sweden of all places, an expert on American elections published a series of articles showing that Biden’s win in the swing states simply could not be explained without assuming major fraud. Since Donald Trump is even more disdained by the media in Europe than he is here, I was surprised to hear a few European commentators refer to the presidential election as if its fraudulence should be obvious to all. I became even more curious about puzzling aspects of the election, but was still skeptical. You can find support for virtually any point of view on the Internet.

This summary of my views of the election will for the most part be confined to political-sciency observations. Although electronic ballot stuffing may be the most important of the fraud allegations, I will, because of a lack of proficiency in statistics and computer science, not go into depth on the vote anomalies that experts in these fields regard as by themselves sufficient proof of fraud.

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