President Donald Trump claimed that the 2020 US presidential election was stolen; millions of Americans apparently believed him. We assess the most prominent statistical claims offered by Trump and his allies as evidence of election fraud, including claims about Dominion voting machines switching votes from Trump to Biden, suspiciously high turnout in Democratic strongholds, and the supposedly inexplicable failure of Biden to win “bellwether counties.” We use a combination of statistical reasoning and original data analysis to assess these claims. We hope our analysis contributes to public discussion about the integrity of the 2020 election and broader challenges of election security and election administration.
Election results data have been deposited in Code Ocean at <https://codeocean.com/capsule/0007435/tree/v2>.