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WillowOne's Positions

The 2020 US Election Steal and January 6

My Positions

  1. Joe Biden won the 2020 United States presidential election, by 306 electoral votes to 232 and by about seven million votes. The result was certified in every state, recounted and audited where it was contested, upheld in more than sixty courts, and confirmed by the Trump administration's own Department of Justice and its own cybersecurity agency.
  2. The claim that the election was stolen is the largest and most consequential conspiracy theory in the English-speaking world, and it differs from the rest of this folder in one respect: it was tested. Its proponents had the chance to make the claim in court, under oath, with penalties for lying, and when they got there they declined to make it.
  3. The attack on the Capitol on 6 January 2021 was an attempt, incited by the sitting president and prepared by people around him, to stop the certification of the result, first by pressure and then by force. The "peaceful protest", "tourists" and "false flag" accounts are false, and the people who were there said so themselves, on camera, at the time.
  4. None of this is a party position. Had the fraud been real I would want it found, and so would the Republican officials in Georgia, Arizona and Michigan who looked for it, found nothing, and were threatened for saying so. This result was examined harder than any in history, by people who badly wanted a different answer, and it held.

Rejected Positions

Fraud on a scale that changed the result

  • Claim: The election was stolen by mass fraud: voting machines that switched votes, dead and ineligible voters, suitcases of fake ballots counted after observers were sent home, "mules" stuffing drop boxes, and mail-in ballots "dumped" for Biden in the small hours.
  • Basis: The claims of Donald Trump and his lawyers Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell; affidavits from campaign observers; the film 2000 Mules by Dinesh D'Souza; a report on Antrim County, Michigan; a security-camera clip from Atlanta; the fact that Trump led on election night in several states and lost after the mail ballots were counted.
  • Reason for rejection: Taken in order. The campaign and its allies brought over sixty lawsuits and lost or withdrew every one that reached a decision, including before judges Trump had appointed, and the Supreme Court declined to hear Texas's attempt to throw out four other states' results. In court the lawyers repeatedly told the judges that they were not alleging fraud, because alleging it requires evidence and lying about it carries sanctions; Giuliani said as much in Pennsylvania, and Powell's own defence to Dominion's defamation suit was that "no reasonable person would conclude that the statements were truly statements of fact". The Attorney General, William Barr, announced on 1 December 2020 that the Justice Department had found no fraud on a scale that could have changed the outcome, and the federal cybersecurity agency called it "the most secure in American history". Georgia counted its ballots three times, including once entirely by hand, under a Republican Secretary of State, and the totals matched. Michigan's Republican-led Senate Oversight Committee spent eight months investigating and reported that there was no evidence of widespread fraud, that the Antrim County "vote flip" was a human error in reporting that was corrected within hours, and recommended that the Attorney General investigate those raising money on the claims. Arizona's Senate hired a firm with no election experience, the Cyber Ninjas, to recount Maricopa County; after six months it found Biden had won by slightly more. The Atlanta "suitcases" were the standard ballot containers used all night, the observers had left of their own accord, and state and federal investigators reviewed the full tape; the two election workers accused by Giuliani of fraud won a 148-million-dollar defamation judgment against him in 2023. 2000 Mules was withdrawn by its own publisher in 2024 with an apology to a man it had falsely shown as a "mule", and the group that supplied its data admitted in Georgia proceedings that it had none. The "4 a.m. dumps" were predicted in detail before the election: Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin forbade processing mail ballots before election day, mail ballots were overwhelmingly Democratic because Trump had told his voters not to use them, so the mail count came last and moved the totals towards Biden. The fraud that was actually prosecuted amounted to a few dozen individuals nationally, several of them Trump voters who voted twice. The machines-flipped-votes story, which is where the Venezuelan algorithms, Italian satellites and German servers lived, was tested in discovery when Dominion sued Fox News; the internal messages showed the network's hosts and executives privately calling it insane while broadcasting it, and Fox settled for 787.5 million dollars rather than go to trial. Mike Lindell, who promised five million dollars to anyone who could disprove his data, lost the five million in arbitration to a software engineer who did.

The Vice President could have rejected the electors, and the "alternate" electors were legitimate

  • Claim: Under the Constitution Mike Pence had the power on 6 January to reject the electoral votes of contested states or send them back to the legislatures, and the slates of Trump electors who met in seven states were a lawful contingency modelled on Hawaii in 1960.
  • Basis: Memoranda by the lawyer John Eastman; the ambiguity of the Electoral Count Act of 1887; the Hawaii precedent.
  • Reason for rejection: The Vice President's role in counting the votes is ministerial, as every Vice President before and since has understood it, as the most conservative judges Pence consulted told him, and as Eastman himself conceded in private when asked whether the theory would survive the Supreme Court. Had it been otherwise, the Vice President of the losing party could choose the President at every election. The Hawaii electors of 1960 met while a recount was pending that later reversed the result; the 2020 slates met after every recount and lawsuit had failed, signed certificates declaring themselves the "duly elected" electors of states they had lost, and in several cases were told by the campaign to keep the plan quiet. Prosecutors in Michigan, Georgia, Nevada, Arizona and Wisconsin charged participants with forgery and fraud, Eastman was disbarred, and Congress amended the Electoral Count Act in 2022 to say in terms what everyone had assumed it meant. A plan that only works if the law is not what everyone thinks it is, and that has to be kept secret from the people whose names it uses, is not a contingency.

January 6 was a peaceful protest, a guided tour, an antifa false flag, or an FBI operation

  • Claim: The crowd at the Capitol was largely peaceful and let in by police; the violence was done by left-wing infiltrators; and the whole thing was provoked by federal agents, in particular a man named Ray Epps who urged people to enter and was never charged.
  • Basis: Selectively edited footage of calm moments; the slowness to charge Epps; a documentary series on Fox; the general plausibility of agents provocateurs.
  • Reason for rejection: About 140 police officers were injured, the building was breached by force at several points on film, the chamber was evacuated minutes ahead of the crowd, and the people inside livestreamed themselves, named themselves, and explained on camera that they were there to stop the steal for Trump. More than 1,500 of them were charged, over a thousand were convicted or pleaded guilty, and the leaders of the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers were convicted by juries of seditious conspiracy, with evidence of weapons stockpiled across the river. No antifa member was identified among the defendants, and the defendants' own lawyers did not claim otherwise. The Justice Department's Inspector General, in December 2024, found that the FBI had 26 confidential informants in Washington that day, that none had been authorised to enter the Capitol or to encourage anyone else to, that none was an undercover agent, and that the Bureau's failure was to have had too little intelligence, not too much. Epps was charged, pleaded guilty, was sentenced to probation, and sued Fox for defamation. In January 2025 the returning President pardoned nearly all of the convicted and commuted the rest, which is a fact about the pardon power and not about the facts: a pardon is accepted, not awarded, and it does not reverse a jury's finding. The federal indictment of Trump himself for the attempt to overturn the result was dismissed after his re-election under the Department's policy against prosecuting a sitting President, not on its merits; the special counsel's closing report concluded the evidence would have sustained a conviction. I note that as a record, not a verdict.

Notes

  1. The retreat. Pressed on the fraud, the claim retreats to a different one: the election was "rigged" by social-media moderation, by changes to voting rules during the pandemic, by the suppression of a laptop story, or by private grants to election offices. Those are arguments about whether the campaign was fair, which is a legitimate argument that every losing side has, and some of them have substance. They are not the claim that was made. "Stolen" means votes were counted that were not cast, or not counted that were; "rigged" means the other side had advantages. Sliding from the first to the second when the first fails is the Motte-and-bailey fallacy, and it is the main way the belief survives.
  2. Why it holds. The theory does what the rest of the folder does: every loss in court proves the courts are in on it, every Republican who looked and found nothing is a traitor, and every piece of missing evidence is being suppressed (Popper's Razor). It requires the silence, or the complicity, of tens of thousands of election workers of both parties in fifty states, which is the Moon Landing problem with a larger cast. It prefers a vast conspiracy to a dull explanation, when the dull explanation, that a president with a 40 per cent approval rating lost, was available (Hanlon's Razor, Occam's Razor - Principle of Parsimony). What it adds is a leader who makes belief a condition of membership, so that the cost of doubting it is social and professional rather than intellectual, and a media ecosystem that has now paid the better part of a billion dollars for telling its audience what it wanted to hear and has not stopped.
  3. What it did. Two election workers in Georgia were driven from their homes. A Secretary of State and his family received death threats for counting correctly. Officials who certified honest results lost their seats in primaries to people who promised not to. The country that invented the peaceful transfer of power had its first non-peaceful one, five people died in or around it, and the man who incited it was returned to office four years later having never conceded. Whatever else it is, it is the strongest evidence in this vault that a false belief held by enough people has consequences, and that "it's just talk" is not an answer to it.
  4. Speech. I would not criminalise any of it. Lying about an election is speech, and the remedy for speech is speech, evidence and, where it defames real people, the civil courts, which in this case worked better than almost anything else did (Free Speech). The remedy is not to forbid the claim but to make it answer: in court, where it folded, and in public, where it should be met every time with the question that killed it in front of every judge who asked it. Where is the evidence?

Sources

  • Danforth, J., Ginsberg, B., Griffith, T. B., Hoppe, D., Luttig, J. M., McConnell, M. W., Olson, T. B. and Smith, G. R., Lost, Not Stolen: The Conservative Case that Trump Lost and Biden Won the 2020 Presidential Election (July 2022) — https://lostnotstolen.org/
  • Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, Joint Statement from Elections Infrastructure Government Coordinating Council, 12 November 2020
  • Michigan Senate Oversight Committee, Report on the November 2020 Election in Michigan (June 2021)
  • Arizona Senate, Maricopa County Forensic Election Audit, Volume III (September 2021)
  • Texas v. Pennsylvania, 592 U.S. ___ (2020), order of 11 December 2020
  • US Dominion, Inc. v. Fox News Network, Delaware Superior Court, settlement of 18 April 2023; and the summary judgment opinion of 31 March 2023 holding the statements false
  • Freeman v. Giuliani, US District Court for the District of Columbia, jury verdict of 15 December 2023
  • Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol, Final Report (December 2022)
  • Office of the Inspector General, US Department of Justice, A Review of the Federal Bureau of Investigation's Handling of Its Confidential Human Sources and Intelligence Collection Efforts in the Lead Up to the January 6, 2021 Electoral Certification (December 2024)
  • Special Counsel's Office, Final Report on the Special Counsel's Investigations and Prosecutions, Volume One (January 2025)

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