A researcher at the Department of Justice on Tuesday released a 25-page report indicating a high probability of voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election. World-renown economist John Lott Ph.D., examined election results from Pennsylvania and Georgia, as well as potential election fraud in Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, and Wisconsin.
“This paper’s approach allows us to quantify how large a potential problem vote fraud and other abnormalities might be in the 2020 election,” Dr. Lott wrote.
White House advisor Peter Navarro heralded Lott’s study results on Twitter:
Hot off press, new Lott study estimates 11,350 absentee votes lost to @potus Trump in Georgia. Another 289,000 "excess (fraudulent) votes" across GA, AZ, MI, NV, PA, WI. As promised this a.m. on Bannon's War Room. Postpone GA Cesspool election!! https://t.co/geqEhnKqCR
— Peter Navarro (@RealPNavarro) December 29, 2020
Navarro released his own study of six contested states earlier this month, alleging “a coordinated strategy” to steal the election, “or unfairly tilt the playing field in favor of the Biden-Harris ticket.”
Lott’s study compared Fulton County Georgia’s precincts to similar precincts in neighboring counties that had no allegations of fraud. The purpose of the exercise, Lott wrote, was “to isolate the impact of Fulton county’s vote-counting process (including potential fraud).”
In 2016, there was little difference between Fulton County and its surrounding counties, according to Lott. But in 2020, with controls for demographic and in-person voting variables, he found that President Trump’s percentage of absentee votes was 7.81 percent lower in Fulton county than precincts in neighboring counties.
In measuring the difference in President Trump’s vote share of the absentee ballots for these adjacent precincts, we account for the difference in his vote share of the in-person voting and the difference in registered voters’ demographics. The best estimate shows an unusual 7.81% drop in Trump’s percentage of the absentee ballots for Fulton County alone of 11,350 votes, or over 80% of Biden’s vote lead in Georgia.
“In layman’s terms, in precincts with alleged fraud, Trump’s proportion of absentee votes was depressed—even when such precincts had similar in-person Trump vote shares to their surrounding countries. The fact that the shift happens only in absentee ballots, and when a country line is crossed, is suspicious,” Lott said.
Lott applied the same approach to Allegheny County in Pennsylvania for both absentee and provisional ballots and estimated that “the number of fraudulent votes from those two sources” was about 55,270 votes.
“The precinct level estimates for Georgia and Pennsylvania indicate that vote fraud may account for Biden’s win in both states,” said Lott.
He also examined the suspiciously high turnout rates in the two states.
“Increased fraud can take many forms: higher rates of filling out absentee ballots for people who hadn’t voted, dead people voting, ineligible people voting, or even payments to legally registered people for their votes,” Lott wrote.
He estimated that there were 70,000 to 79,000 “excess” votes in Georgia and Pennsylvania, enough vote fraud to account for Joe Biden’s win in both states.
Lott looked at voter turnout rates in Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, and Wisconsin, comparing counties in which voter fraud was alleged to other counties where it was not.
He concluded that if you add those states, the total number of fraudulent votes in the 2020 election increases to up to 289,000 excess votes.
The voter turnout rate data also indicates that there are significant excess votes in Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, and Wisconsin as well. While the problems shown here are large, there are two reasons to believe that they are underestimates: 1) the estimates using precinct level data assume that there is no fraud occurring with in person voting and 2) the voter turnout estimates do not account for ballots for the opposing candidate that are lost, destroyed, or replaced with ballots filled out for the other candidate.
Lott was appointed as senior adviser for research and statistics at the Justice Department’s Office of Justice Programs in October of 2020.