Who really won the 2020 US presidential election?

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As Donald Trump returns to the White House this month, the US and the world are as divided in their opinions of him as ever. There remains a similar disagreement over the results of the 2020 election. Many Trump supporters adamantly believe he should be completing his second term right now rather than starting it. Yet those who dislike him say this point of view is ridiculous and that it has been 'debunked' many times.

With opinions sharply divided and bias and distrust on both 'sides', getting to the truth is difficult. However it is possible to at least understand why both points of view are held so strongly by each 'side'.

Continuing suspicions

The resounding win by Trump in 2024 inflamed speculation about the last election rather than dampen it down, especially regarding alleged 'missing votes' when comparing the Democratic support between the two elections.

Just following the election, the reported 2024 count for Harris was considerably lower than Biden's in 2020, prompting a surge in speculation. For example, the conservative Christian commentator Dinesh D'Souza wrote this post on X which received 163,000 'likes': "Kamala got 60 million votes in 2024. Does anyone really believe Biden got 80 million in 2020? Where did those 20 million Democratic voters go? The truth is, they never existed. I think we can put the lie about Biden's 80 million votes to rest once and for all."

However, according to the latest numbers from the Associated Press, in 2024 Harris received just under 75 million votes, while Trump received 77.3m. The reason the initial vote was much lower was that they had not all been counted.

This time round, Trump's victory led to similar accusations of missing votes – but this time from Democrat supporters. Those who believe there were missing votes also allege that the cause of the discrepancy is widespread fraud. But what is the evidence of this?

Voter fraud?

A team around Trump alleged signs of fraud well before the 2020 election, including claims of rigged voting machines and an unusually large number of mail-in ballots voting for Biden.

This wasn't just a fringe belief. A 2021 survey by academics Gordon Pennycook and DG Rand found that "a majority of Trump voters in our sample – particularly those who were more politically knowledgeable and more closely following election news" believed that fraud was widespread and that Trump won the election.

After the vote, Trump and his allies filed many lawsuits in states where Biden won and also with the Supreme Court to challenge the result. The authorities were unanimous in rejecting these suits – though some Trump supporters believe that this was due to procedural issues rather than the merits of the case, due to supposed bias in the judiciary.

However, some claims about widespread voter fraud have failed to be successfully defended in court from defamation lawsuits, the plaintiffs including Rudy Giuliani and Fox News. The former, once a celebrated New York mayor who helped the city through some of its toughest periods, was ordered to compensate two election workers $148m for claiming they were involved in a rigged election. Conservative TV channel Fox News settled with a maker of the voting machines for $787m. With sums this large at stake, if there were good evidence of the fraud they allege, would they not have produced it?

But yet again, if the judicial system is not trusted, even this will not convince everyone. One of the reasons the belief is so widely held is that on social media there have been umpteen photos and videos that purport to show officials tampering with the vote in some way. Politifact says it investigated numerous of these claims and found all of them wanting. Numerous government and state organisations have also declared the 2020 election fair and valid.

The trouble is, many Trump supporters no longer trust the media or government officials, because they have witnessed unprecedented levels of bias against Trump. There is plenty of evidence of widespread dislike of Trump among those in authority – but they might argue that it is justified. So, there is a vicious cycle, because distrust on each side provokes behaviour that then further fuels distrust, and on and on it goes.

Bias in media

In 2021 a CNN employee, Charlie Chester, who thought he was on a date, was recorded describing his employer's work as 'propaganda' for President Biden's campaign. "Look what we did, we got Trump out. I am 100 per cent going to say it, and I 100 per cent believe that if it wasn't for CNN, I don't know that Trump would have got voted out," he says in the video. "I came to CNN because I wanted to be a part of that."

Although this video received a lot of attention and exclamations of "I told you so!" from Trump supporters, Chester did not work in editorial, the part of the news company that creates the content. So, while that may have been his perception of what was happening, it is not evidence that the media company was deliberately trying to skew the election, nor that Biden's campaign was involved, as is sometimes portrayed.

Yet if many people in the media do have these kinds of firmly held anti-Trump beliefs, there are grounds to be concerned about possible bias in how they treat the news, which will in turn fuel claims by Trump supporters that they are not to be trusted.

The difficulty in assessing what really happened is illustrated in the bizarre saga of Hunter Biden's laptop. Depending on who you believe, news of it was suppressed by the Trump-hating media just before the election, or it was an overblown disinformation campaign. Some social media companies did suppress the story just before the election – would they have done the same with questionable evidence of corruption by Trump? Again, the levels of distrust on both sides lead to difficulties in drawing conclusions.

Mea culpa

Perhaps what we can be more sure of is when one of the 'sides' explicitly admits to biased behaviour of their own group. Not too long after the election results, a fascinating investigation into a supposed "vast, cross-partisan campaign to protect the election" was described in Time Magazine. The goal of this alleged "conspiracy", according to writer Molly Ball, was the noble goal of safeguarding democracy, and it was apparently sparked by suggestions well ahead of the vote that Trump would challenge the results if he lost.

This "conspiracy" involved preventing Trump's court challenges, increasing voting by mail, and pressuring social media companies to tackle "disinformation".

"There was a conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes, one that both curtailed the protests and coordinated the resistance from CEOs," the article says.

"Both surprises were the result of an informal alliance between left-wing activists and business titans ... Both sides would come to see it as a sort of implicit bargain – inspired by the summer's massive, sometimes destructive racial-justice protests – in which the forces of labour came together with the forces of capital to keep the peace and oppose Trump's assault on democracy."

The problem is, one man's protection of democracy is another man's illegitimate restriction of legitimate routes to question possibly dodgy results. The article describes "a well-funded cabal of powerful people, ranging across industries and ideologies, working together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information."

It describes a concerted effort to increase voting by mail, and to challenge concerns from voters about this method. This succeeded. Only a quarter of voters did it the traditional way of casting their ballot in person.

But yet again we find ourselves in a place where to those who dislike or are fearful of Trump, these actions can be perceived as legitimate and legal means to prevent an election from being wrongly usurped, while for those who support him, these actions look very different.

So who do we trust? And on what information are we basing these loyalties? Perhaps most important of all in our troubled times, is seeking to reach out and understand the point of view of people who think very differently to us, rather than perceiving them as merely bad actors who we must do all that is necessary to fight against. Only then do we have hope of getting to the truth, and lessening the division that is so damaging our societies and fuelling such questionable behaviour on both sides.

Heather Tomlinson is a freelance Christian writer. Find more of her work at https://heathertomlinson.substack.com or via X (Twitter) @heathertomli.