While many acknowledge that election fraud may occur, it is widely accepted that such incidents are anomalies and occur in numbers too low to impact the results. A central question about the 2020 election's outcome was whether the amount of fraud committed was outcome determinative. In Heartland's new report, researchers conclude that without mail-in ballot fraud, “Donald Trump would have won the election.” Heartland, a public policy thinktank, characterizes these findings as "stunning," advocating for a series of policy reforms aimed at bolstering the security of future elections. The conclusion is drawn based on a collaborative Heartland Institute/Rasmussen Reports survey released in December 2023. The survey documented voters who self-admit to mail-in voter fraud and revealed that a fifth of mail-in ballots in the 2020 election were illegally cast. According to the survey data:In a recent study that will likely ignite a flurry of debate among political analysts and scholars, the Heartland Institute presents findings that cast a new light on the 2020 presidential election — a topic that remains one of the most divisive in American political discourse.
“After analyzing the raw survey data, we were also able to conclude that 28.2 percent of respondents who voted by mail admitted to committing at least one kind of voter fraud. This means that more than one-in-four ballots cast by mail in 2020 were likely cast fraudulently, and thus should not have been counted,” Heartland says. “Because Joe Biden received significantly more mail-in votes than Donald Trump, we conclude that the 2020 election outcome would have been different in the key swing states that Donald Trump lost by razor thin margins in 2020 — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin — under the 28.2 percent scenario,” the report details. The institute's analysis further explores the differential rates of admitted fraud between Trump and Biden voters, suggesting that even with a conservative estimate of fraud, Trump would have emerged victorious in key battleground states. This scenario, they argue, would have granted Trump a decisive win in the Electoral College, shifting the final tally to 311 electoral votes for Trump against 227 for Biden. “We also include a scenario in which Trump and Biden voters committed fraud at different rates, stemming from the differences in self-admitted mail-in voter fraud among Trump and Biden voters from the Heartland/Rasmussen survey. However, due to its small sample size, the margin of error for these estimates is too high to produce statistically reliable results,” Heartland's research team says. “Our analysis indicates that at the 28.2 percent fraud rate, Biden voters admitted to committing at least one form of fraud at a rate of 23.2 percent, and Trump voters self-admitted fraud rate was 35.7 percent. Even under this scenario, Trump would have defeated Biden in Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, and won the Electoral College 278-260,” the report explains. Heartland's report delves into 29 different hypothetical scenarios, concluding that under nearly all conditions examined — except for three — Trump would have won, regardless of the actual fraud level. Even factoring in the possibility that the level of fraud detected in the survey substantially overstates the actual level of fraud that occurred, “Trump would likely have won the 2020 election anyway,” researchers say. “We have no reason to believe that our survey overstated voter fraud by more than 25 percentage points, and thus, we must conclude that the best available evidence suggests that mail-in ballot fraud significantly impacted the 2020 presidential election, in favor of Joe Biden,” the report notes. “In other words, had the 2020 election been conducted like every national election has been over the past two centuries, wherein the vast majority of voters cast ballots in-person rather than by mail, Donald Trump would have almost certainly been re-elected,” researchers conclude. This analysis raises critical questions about the use of mail-in ballots, a voting method that saw unprecedented levels of utilization in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Heartland’s report also challenges the narrative of the election's integrity and calls for a reevaluation of voting practices that have been altered or expanded in recent years.
