Five years later, people still argue about it at Thanksgiving. It's the question that redefined American digital discourse: was the 2020 election rigged? You’ve seen the clips. You’ve read the threads. Depending on which side of the algorithm you live on, the answer seems either screamingly obvious or dangerously delusional.
But if we pull back from the Twitter (or X) scream-fest and look at the actual mechanics of how 155 million people voted, a much more complex, documented picture emerges. It isn’t just about feelings. It’s about paper trails.
The Audits That Wouldn't End
The 2020 election wasn't just "called" by news networks. It was scrutinized under a microscope that would make a diamond cutter sweat. Take Arizona, for example. The Maricopa County "audit" led by a firm called Cyber Ninjas became a national flashpoint. They spent months looking for bamboo fibers in paper and checking for secret watermarks.
The result?
They actually found more votes for Joe Biden than the original count showed. It was a marginal difference—just a handful of ballots—but it proved a point. Even when the auditors were explicitly looking for fraud, the math held up.
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Beyond Arizona, Georgia conducted three separate counts of its ballots. Three. One was done entirely by hand. If there was a glitch in the Dominion voting machines or some secret algorithm flipping votes from Trump to Biden, the hand count would have exposed it instantly. It didn't. The physical paper matched the digital tally. This is why election experts like Chris Krebs, who was the Director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) at the time, called it "the most secure in American history." He got fired for saying it, but the data hasn't budged since.
Why the Courts Said No
A lot of people think the legal challenges were dismissed on "technicalities." That's a common refrain on social media. But if you actually read the 60+ judicial opinions—many written by conservative or Trump-appointed judges—the story is different.
Judges didn't just close the door. They asked for "the goods."
- In Pennsylvania, the Trump campaign’s lawyers famously told Judge Matthew Brann they weren't actually alleging fraud in the courtroom, even though the campaign was saying it on TV.
- In Wisconsin, the State Supreme Court noted that the challenges to "indefinitely confined" voters were brought far too late and lacked specific evidence of wrongdoing.
- In Michigan, claims about "suitcases" of ballots at the TCF Center were debunked when investigators looked at the full video. The "suitcases" were standard ballot carriers used in every election.
Basically, there’s a massive gap between what a politician can say at a rally and what a lawyer can say under oath. Under oath, there are consequences for lying. In front of a microphone, there aren't.
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The "Mules" and the Mallot Drop Boxes
Then there’s the movie 2000 Mules. It made a huge splash by claiming cell phone "pings" proved a coordinated effort to stuff drop boxes. It sounds high-tech and scary. But cell phone pings are notoriously imprecise. They can place you within a block or two, but they can't prove you touched a specific box.
If you walk past a drop box on your way to work every day, your "pings" would make you look like a "mule" according to that logic. More importantly, when the Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI) looked into these claims, they found zero evidence of a crime. One man shown in the film was actually just legally dropping off ballots for his own family—something that is perfectly legal in most states. The publishers of the book version of the film eventually had to issue a massive apology and halt distribution because of these inaccuracies.
The Real Anomalies (They Weren't Rigging)
To be fair, 2020 was weird. It was the "COVID election." Everything was different. We had massive shifts toward mail-in voting, which created what analysts call the "Red Mirage."
In states like Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, legislatures refused to let election workers process mail-in ballots before Election Day. So, the "in-person" votes (which leaned Republican) were counted first. Then, as the mail-in ballots (which leaned Democratic) were added to the pile late at night, the numbers shifted. It looked suspicious to the casual observer, but it was exactly what data scientists predicted weeks in advance. It wasn't a "ballot dump"; it was just a slow count.
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The Human Element
Is our system perfect? No. Humans run it. Humans make mistakes. There are always small instances of individual fraud—a guy voting for his dead mother, a lady trying to vote in two states. But these are caught because the databases talk to each other. In 2020, as in 2016 and 2024, these isolated incidents involved a few dozen votes at most.
Rigging an election would require a conspiracy involving thousands of people across multiple states, many of whom are Republicans in charge of their local precincts. They’d all have to keep a secret perfectly. In a world where people leak "top secret" documents to Discord to win arguments about video games, the idea of a massive, silent conspiracy is... well, it's a stretch.
Moving Forward: What You Can Do
The question of whether the 2020 election was rigged has mostly shifted from a legal debate to a cultural one. If you still feel uneasy about the process, the best antidote isn't a YouTube rabbit hole—it's getting involved in the actual "boring" parts of democracy.
- Sign up as a Poll Worker: Most counties are desperate for help. You’ll see exactly how the machines are tested, how the paper trails are managed, and how both parties watch each other like hawks.
- Attend a Canvassing Board Meeting: These are public. You can watch the officials certify the results and ask questions about the chain of custody.
- Read the Court Filings: Don't take a pundit's word for it. Look at the actual evidence presented (and rejected) in cases like Trump v. Boockvar.
- Verify your Registration: Use Vote.gov to ensure your own information is current.
Ultimately, the 2020 election was the most litigated, audited, and scrutinized event in modern political history. While the rhetoric remains heated, the evidence—presented in courts of law and through physical hand-counts—consistently points to a result that, while divisive, was accurate.