No evidence for systematic voter fraud: A guide to statistical claims about the 2020 election

Significance President Donald Trump claimed that the 2020 US presidential election was stolen; millions of Americans apparently believed him. We assess the most prominent statistical claims offered by Trump and his allies as evidence of election fraud, including claims about Dominion voting machines switching votes from Trump to Biden, suspiciously high turnout in Democratic strongholds, and the supposedly inexplicable failure of Biden to win “bellwether counties.” We use a combination of statistical reasoning and original data analysis to assess these claims. We hope our analysis contributes to public discussion about the integrity of the 2020 election and broader challenges of election security and election administration. After the 2020 US presidential election Donald Trump refused to concede, alleging widespread and unparalleled voter fraud. Trump’s supporters deployed several statistical arguments in an attempt to cast doubt on the result. Reviewing the most prominent of these statistical claims, we conclude that none of them is even remotely convincing. The common logic behind these claims is that, if the election were fairly conducted, some feature of the observed 2020 election result would be unlikely or impossible. In each case, we find that the purportedly anomalous fact is either not a fact or not anomalous.