What to say when someone tells you the election was stolen.
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This week I’m giving you talking points to use the next time someone tries to tell you we have an election fraud problem.
Thirty-one.
That is the number a law professor named Justin Levitt landed on after years of hunting for the thing you keep hearing about at family dinners. Levitt teaches at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, and he went looking for voter impersonation and fraud, the specific crimes where a person walks into a polling place and pretends to be somebody else, because that is the crime nearly every voter ID law in this country claims to stop. He tracked every credible allegation he was able to find from 2000 through 2014, across general elections, primaries, special elections, and city races. In general and primary elections alone, more than a billion ballots were cast in that window. He found 31 incidents.
Thirty-one out of a billion.
That works out to roughly one incident for every 32 million ballots. You have better odds of being struck by lightning.
The number nobody wants to talk about
Levitt is one researcher with one methodology. The Associated Press came at the same question from a completely different direction after 2020, and the result should have ended this argument permanently. Reporters spent months contacting more than 300 local election offices in the six states Donald Trump and his allies claimed the most fraud in. These were Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. They asked for every potential case of fraud, every disputed ballot, every referral sent to a prosecutor. They found fewer than 475 across all six states combined.
Joe Biden carried those states by 311,257 votes out of 25.5 million cast, so the disputed ballots amounted to fifteen hundredths of one percent of his margin. Most of them were never counted at all, because poll workers pulled them for inspection before those ballots ever reached a tally, which is the system doing precisely the work it was designed to do, and virtually every one of those cases involved a single person acting alone with no coordination behind them.
The cases ran in both political directions, and one of the most publicized involved a Nevada man who went on television claiming somebody had voted in his dead wife’s name and later pleaded guilty to doing it himself.
Trump’s own attorney general said it out loud in December of 2020. Bill Barr told the country there was no evidence of fraud at a scale that would change the outcome. He resigned weeks later.
Even Utah went looking, and here is what they found. It’s a deep red state. It has no Democratic machine anybody is able to blame. It has a Republican governor with a Republican legislature and a Republican chief election officer.
On April 17, 2025, Lieutenant Governor Deidre Henderson opened a full citizenship review of the state’s voter rolls, and her office spent more than a year running 2,069,640 voter records, active and inactive, against Utah Driver License Division data, the federal SAVE immigration database, and a hand review of registration forms by her own staff. The final report came out on May 27, 2026.
Her office confirmed 27 noncitizens on the rolls and flagged another 25 as probable, which means 99.72 percent of Utah’s registered voters were verified as American citizens. Thirteen of the 27 had cast a ballot in some election. Nine of the probable group had voted at some point since 2016, and those nine still have 30 days to produce documents before any clerk removes them.
Twenty-two people, over roughly a decade, in a state that counts millions of votes.
Why repetition beats evidence
Here is the piece that has nothing to do with law and everything to do with the machinery inside your head. Psychologists have a name for it. The illusory truth effect.
Hasher, Goldstein, and Toppino documented it in 1977, and Lisa Fazio and colleagues sharpened it in 2015. Repeat a statement often enough and people start rating it as true, and this holds even for people who knew the correct answer before the repetition began, because familiarity registers in the mind as accuracy and that feeling of ease gets mistaken for a considered judgment.
Levitt noticed something else during his research that explains more than any statistic will. People living in states with strict ID laws do not feel better about their elections than people living in states with loose ones. The single strongest predictor of whether an American believes an election was fair is whether their candidate won. That is the whole engine. Losing feels like theft to a brain that has spent years being told theft is what the other side does.
Put it in a courtroom
I have tried a lot of cases. More than most lawyers. What I’ve learned is that a claim survives a courtroom by producing sworn witnesses and documents that hold up under cross examination. With respect to the election fraud claims, they all went into courtrooms across this country and died there, in front of judges appointed by Republicans, in front of judges appointed by Democrats, in front of judges Trump himself put on the bench. Most of those cases never even reached a jury, because they collapsed on the pleadings and the complete lack of evidence long before anyone was sworn in.
Then the voting machine companies sued, and the receipts came due. Fox News was sued for defamation by Dominion and paid $787.5 million dollars in April of 2023, with the settlement landing moments before opening statements and with Rupert Murdoch expected on the stand. Newsmax paid Dominion $67 million dollars in 2025 also for defamation and had already handed Smartmatic $40 million. Delaware Superior Court Judge Eric Davis ruled the claims about Dominion were false before either case ever reached a jury. Smartmatic’s $2.7 billion dollar case against Fox is still pending. Ask for the receipt and watch what happens.
Unfortunately, the fraud story is a permission slip for everything you see Republicans crying about each day on the news. It’s a waste of time, a waste of money, and it reduces the public’s confidence in validity of our elections. Even on Wednesday, MyPillow founder Mike Lindell is refusing to concede losing the Minnesota Republican gubernatorial primary. State House Speaker, Lisa Demuth, won with 43.6% of the 93% of the votes counted and Lindell, who was of course, backed by Trump, came a distant second with 32.3%% of the votes.
What you do with this
I’m sorry to say that you are going to hear the stolen election line over and over between now and November. After the democrats take back a majority in Congress, you’re going to hear it again from Trump and podcast hosts, from a cousin at your barbecue, from a candidate lining up an excuse before a single vote is counted, and from an ad you never asked to watch.
Interesting how election fraud didn’t seem to be an issue in 2024 when Republicans won the House, Senate and Oval Office but you can bet your lucky stars that it’s going to be a huge problem in November. Remind me again who the snowflakes really are?
Moving forward, remember that you do not need to shout. All you need is a number and a question. The number is thirty-one out of a billion. The question is the one I put to any witness who makes a big claim with nothing behind it, and it is four words long. Show me the case. Show me the county, the docket number, the ruling, and the name of the judge who signed it. That request has been sitting on the counter since 2020, and on the specific claim that fraud changed a federal outcome, not one person has come back with the paperwork.
Check your own registration this month, because four states added a documents requirement in the last two years and more are lined up behind them. Then take thirty-one out of a billion, put it in front of the next person who tells you your vote was stolen, and watch how quickly the conversation runs out of road.
And while they’re still trying to figure out the truth, grab your friends and vote.
Mitch Jackson, Esq.
Free readers get the verdict. Paid subscribers get the cross-examination — the filings, the language, and what it actually means. If this newsletter has ever kept you from being misled, that’s what your upgrade funds.
I wish the lies could be stopped or hindered, and fact-checked. AI may soon be capable of doing this as politicians are speaking!
It’s about bigotry, Mitch. How can we talk to someone who refuses to accept truth that contradicts their preferred world view, cemented by 24/7/365 propaganda? Down and almost out for the count.