Trump Big Lie Isn’t about 2020

In a speech Thursday night, President Trump claimed there have been serious breaches of election security and repeated his assertions that the 2020 election was compromised. As in the past, these remarks are utterly indefensible. And they are likely part of an illegal effort to federalize control over the upcoming midterm elections, so as to tilt the results in his party’s favor. Hopefully, America’s courts and federal system will continue to stymie him.

Trump claimed in his speech that some 278,000 non-citizens illegally registered to vote . There is no real evidence to support this, and even he didn’t claim proof there was any significant actual illegal non-citizen voting. Decades of efforts to find such evidence — including by the right-wing Heritage Foundation — have turned up no more than a few dozen cases, over a span of several decades. A search of the Heritage’s election fraud database turns up only 99 supposed cases of non-citizen voting from 1982 to 2025.

Trump also claimed foreign powers intervened to prevent his election in 2020, and that China “obtained” some 220,000 voter files. In January 2021, the US intelligence community — then led by Trump’s own first-term political appointees — concluded foreign interference did not tilt the election against him and that China did not even try to do so. The voter-file access claim makes no sense. As my Cato Institute colleague Walter Olson — an election law specialist — points out, “this means nothing” because it is possible to buy or rent voter information from states that make them public information.

These claims are intended to bolster Trump’s long-standing assertions that the 2020 election was somehow “stolen” from him. Overwhelming evidence shows the contrary. In 2020–21, Trump and his political allies filed 64 court cases challenging the results in six key swing states. As detailed in “Lost, Not Stolen,” a review of these cases conducted by prominent Republican lawyers, election law specialists, and former federal judges, none of these decisions found significant evidence of voter fraud.

While some cases were dismissed on procedural grounds, 30 were decided on the merits, and in 14 others the plaintiffs voluntarily withdrew their suits (likely because they lacked evidence to substantiate their claims). Trump only prevailed in one case — a Pennsylvania decision involving procedural flaws that did not involve near enough votes to overturn Joe Biden’s over 80,000 vote margin of victory in that state. Later investigations conducted in various swing states — including those undertaken by Republicans in Arizona and Michigan — likewise found no meaningful evidence of significant fraud.

If some combination of Democrats and foreign powers had managed to “steal” the 2020 election while Trump was in the White House, and avoid detection in the process, one wonders why they didn’t do it again in 2024, when a Democratic president was in power and in control of the Justice Department and the intelligence community. The fact that no such thing happened then is yet further evidence that it didn’t happen in 2020.

The real purpose of Trump’s ongoing lies about the 2020 election and election security may be to bolster his efforts to “nationalize” control of the 2026 midterm elections, so that he can skew results in his party’s favor, at a time when most pollsters and election analysts expect Republicans to lose control of at least one house of Congress, and possibly both.

Fortunately, Article 1, Section 4 of the Constitution gives states primary responsibility for election administration, subject to override by congressional legislation. No current federal law gives Trump the authority he seeks. Numerous federal courts — including in cases presided over by Republican-appointed judges — have rejected his attempts to change voter ID rules by executive order and take control of state voter rolls. Courts should similarly rule against any potential efforts to use federal law enforcement agencies or — worse still — troops, to seize control of polling sites and ballots, just as the Supreme Court in December rightly rejected Trump’s illegal efforts to use the National Guard in Illinois and other blue states. State governments should also do everything possible to resist such power grabs through the political process and mobilize public opinion against any attempts..

America’s decentralized system of election administration has downsides, as well as virtues. But, as leading election law scholar Richard L. Hasen notes, it provides valuable protection against “a president hell-bent, like Trump, on election subversion.” Hasen, previously an advocate of election law centralization, adds that this has led him to reconsider. Americans would do well to heed Hasen’s point and also reject Trump’s bogus claims of fraud, intended to pave the way for his own very real efforts to undermine our elections.