UPDATED 11/12, 11:30 p.m. ET: On Thursday, the Department of Homeland Security's Election Infrastructure Government Coordinating Council (GCC) Executive Committee released a statement saying that 2020 election was "the most secure in American history."
See original story below.
In spite of seemingly nonstop claims of improprieties and voter fraud from the current president of the United States, the New York Times found no evidence of fraud in any state in the union in their days-long investigation. The paper of record reached out to secretaries of state and other top election officials in every state and heard back unanimously that all elections had occurred without issues or evidence of fraud.
Republican and Democratic election officials alike told the Times they could find no evidence that anything untoward had happened on Election Day, when Americans voted in overwhelming numbers for Trump's challenger, Joe Biden.
“There’s a great human capacity for inventing things that aren’t true about elections,” Ohio's Republican Secretary of State Frank LaRose told the Times. “The conspiracy theories and rumors and all those things run rampant. For some reason, elections breed that type of mythology.”
Even laboratories of conservative ideology, places that would be more willing to back the president's claims, reported back that their elections were free of any fraud or tampering.
“Kansas did not experience any widespread, systematic issues with voter fraud, intimidation, irregularities or voting problems,” said a spokesperson for Kansas' secretary of state. “We are very pleased with how the election has gone up to this point.”
Minnesota's secretary of state was even more frank about the issue.
"I don’t know of a single case where someone argued that a vote counted when it shouldn’t have or didn’t count when it should," said Democrat Steve Simon. "There was no fraud.”
The only state where the Times did not receive a response from a statewide election official was Texas. However, representatives of Harris County — the largest in the state — reported no fraud.
In spite of this, the consensus among Republican voters and the U.S. president is that this election was fraudulent. In a recent survey from Politico 70% of registered Republicans agreed that fraud occurred. Of those, 78% believe that mail-in ballots eased voter fraud and 72% think that ballots were altered.
The Times' investigation found evidence of attempted election hindering, but from Republican politicians. Republican hopefuls and sitting state legislators have challenged the legitimacy of the election in several states and calls for secretaries of state to resign abound. At the same time, the Trump administration has filed a litany of lawsuits alleging unfair elections in states and counties where he lost.
