It’s 2020, Forever

Election denialism unsettles both the past and the future

The peaceful, orderly transfer of power is something most of us always took for granted in the US. But since 2020, election denialism has kept fights about who really won the election going long after all the conspiracy theories have been investigated and disproven. Now that President Trump is back in office, with all the power of the Justice Department as his disposal, his refusal to accept defeat looks like it’s turned into a mission to undermine trust in all elections, not just the one he lost. Check out this piece from The Preamble contributor Casey Burgat on what happens when elections never really end.

—Sharon

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Five years later, President Donald Trump simply can’t let the 2020 election go. Not even close.

At rallies, in interviews, and on social media, the president continues to insist that the election he lost was rigged, corrupt, and stolen. In 2021 he declared it “the most fraudulent election in the history of our country,” a claim he has repeated frequently since returning to office. He has even gone as far as telling NBC News, “I won three times. Unfortunately for this country, I didn’t assume office the second time.”

For years those statements functioned mostly as political messaging. They energized supporters, fueled fundraising, and helped cement the belief among as many as 70% of Republicans that President Biden’s win was illegitimate.

But now the constant claims of election fraud and corruption are intersecting with something much more powerful: the power of the president.

Trump is once again back in the White House, and the Justice Department answers to him again. He has stocked the department with loyalists — including Attorney General Pam Bondi — who not only helped him spread the Big Lie but are more than willing to use the DOJ and the FBI to investigate the election that ended his first presidency.

And in recent weeks, the feds have ratcheted up their probe.

In January, FBI agents seized ballots and election materials connected to the 2020 vote from a facility in Fulton County, GA, part of a federal investigation tied to claims about how election records were handled after the election. Weeks later, federal prosecutors widened their inquiry to Arizona, seizing election records connected to the Republican-led audit of ballots in Maricopa County.

Five years after the ballots were counted, recounted, certified, audited, litigated, appealed, and relitigated, the president is still claiming widespread fraud. But now his shouts of election rigging can’t be dismissed as just rhetoric. His administration is using the machinery of government to search for evidence to support claims that have already been repeatedly debunked.

All of which raises a deeper question about how democratic systems handle defeat.

What happens when a president refuses to move on from an election he lost?

And, even worse, what happens when he then uses the investigative power of government to keep revisiting it?

The election that was already investigated… exhaustively

To understand why these new investigations are more than unusual, it helps to remember just how thoroughly the 2020 election was examined at the time.

Trump and his allies challenged the results in over 60 lawsuits across the country. Judges — appointed by presidents from both parties — rejected their claims, often citing the absence of credible evidence supporting allegations of widespread fraud. In Trump’s lawsuit challenging the election results in the swing state of Pennsylvania, for example, a panel of three conservative judges wrote, “Free, fair elections are the lifeblood of our democracy. Charges of unfairness are serious. But calling an election unfair does not make it so. Charges require specific allegations and then proof. We have neither here.”

Outside of the courtroom, the scrutiny was just as intense and just as conclusive.

In Georgia, officials conducted a full hand recount — one by one by one — of nearly five million ballots, then ran them through the scanners a second time. The recounts confirmed Joe Biden’s close victory.

In Wisconsin, Biden won by less than a percentage point, close enough that the Trump campaign was able to request a recount. Their request targeted Milwaukee and Dane counties — the state’s largest, most Democratic areas — reexamining more than 800,000 ballots. After recounts there, there was a shift of a few hundred votes. In Biden’s favor.

Even the controversial Arizona audit ordered by Republican lawmakers — an effort widely criticized by election experts — confirmed Biden’s victory in Maricopa County.

Recount of 2020 election ballots in from Maricopa County, Arizona

Different states. Different methods. Different actors. Same result. Biden won.

At the federal level, officials overseeing election security reached a similar unequivocal conclusion. Trump’s own Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency described the 2020 election as “the most secure in American history.” And speaking directly to the president’s claims of widespread fraud, DHS stated, “There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.”

For most political systems, that level of scrutiny would close the book, and possibly even engender confidence in the security of our elections.

Instead, we got January 6. And we still haven’t moved on.

In fact, the constant claims that the 2020 election was stolen became one of the central organizing ideas of Trump’s political resurgence, repeated in speeches, echoed by allies, and embraced by large segments of the Republican electorate.

Now, in 2026, that narrative is intersecting with federal investigative power.

The Justice Department enters the story

For years, Trump’s claims about the 2020 election lived mostly in speeches, lawsuits, and political messaging. Now they are showing up in subpoenas, search warrants, and federal investigations.

Start in Georgia.

In January, FBI agents arrived at a facility in Fulton County and seized ballots and election materials tied to the 2020 vote — physical records from an election that had already been counted, recounted, and certified more than five years earlier. This wasn’t a document request or a voluntary handover. It was a federal seizure of ballots — one of the most sensitive components of any election system — executed years after the fact.

Georgia officials pushed back immediately, going to court to demand the return of the materials. Their argument was straightforward: those ballots aren’t just evidence. They are the official record of the election, required by state law to remain in local custody.

Then came Arizona.

A federal grand jury issued a subpoena demanding records connected to the Arizona Senate’s review of ballots in Maricopa County, the same review that had already confirmed Biden’s victory.

The request wasn’t narrow. Prosecutors sought ballot images, voting machine data, and materials tied to the audit itself — reaching back into a process that had already been completed, debated, and settled years ago.

At the same time, the Justice Department is pursuing a separate case involving executives at the voting technology company Smartmatic, charging individuals with bribery and money laundering tied to overseas contracts.

Smartmatic has argued that the case is unfolding in a broader political environment shaped by years of claims — often promoted by Trump and his allies — that voting technology companies were central to election fraud.

Smartmatic election technology

It would be one thing if career investigators at the Justice Department or FBI were independently following new evidence wherever it led, insulated from politics and guided by standard law enforcement practice. That’s how the system is supposed to work. But that’s not what this looks like. These efforts are being pushed from inside the White House by figures like Kurt Olsen, who Trump named the White House’s director of election security and integrity. Olsen was a leading campaign figure who helped promote election fraud theories after 2020 and has continued to advocate investigations into those same claims, including the ballot seizures in Georgia.

To be sure, the Justice Department has the authority to investigate potential violations of federal law. Voter fraud is such a violation, which is why the DOJ has a voting integrity division. To investigate and combat irregularities, the DOJ can issue subpoenas, seize records, and pursue criminal cases when warranted. Those tools exist for a reason. Election crimes do occur, and the federal government regularly investigates cases involving voter intimidation, ballot tampering, and illegal campaign activity.

Occasionally those investigations uncover serious wrongdoing. In 2018, for example, investigators uncovered absentee ballot fraud in North Carolina’s ninth congressional district, ultimately forcing the state to hold a new election.

But there’s an important distinction between investigating specific violations of federal law and overseeing the broader administration of elections.

The Constitution assigns the responsibility for running elections—designing ballots, managing voting systems, counting votes, and maintaining election records—to the states. Federal involvement is typically narrow and reactive: enforcing voting rights protections or prosecuting clear instances of criminal misconduct.

What’s happening now begins to blur that line.

When federal investigators move beyond discrete allegations and start revisiting the mechanics of how a state conducted an election years after it was completed—seizing ballots, demanding audit records, reexamining vote totals—they are stepping closer to supervising the election itself. And that’s a role the constitutional system was designed to keep largely out of federal hands.

And that marks a significant escalation — not just of Trump’s continued fixation on 2020, but of the role the federal government is now playing in revisiting it.

Why investigations matter politically

Even investigations that ultimately find nothing can still shape politics and undermine confidence in election security.

For one thing, the existence of a federal probe gives an institutional signal that a question remains unresolved. The fact that investigators are examining ballots or issuing subpoenas can reinforce the perception that something suspicious occurred. It gives those skeptical of the 2020 results something tangible to point to and say, “I knew there was something fishy going on. Why else would the FBI be investigating?”

Investigations also extend the political timeline of an election. Instead of ending when results are certified, the contest continues through court filings, subpoenas, and grand jury proceedings. Concessions are stalled, if they come at all.

And those investigations can influence the environment surrounding future elections. Local officials in Arizona have already raised concerns about what federal demands for election records might mean for election administration and voter confidence heading into upcoming contests.

Local officials in Arizona, for example, have raised concerns that federal demands for ballots, voter data, and election records could disrupt the administration of future elections—pulling resources away from preparing for upcoming contests, complicating chain-of-custody procedures for ballots, and raising legal questions about who ultimately controls election materials. There are also concerns about voter privacy, particularly if sensitive registration data or ballot images are swept into federal investigations.

But perhaps the most consequential effect is what these investigations make possible.

Sustained claims of fraud — backed by ongoing federal probes — can create a pretext for new national legislation aimed at “fixing” a problem that repeated audits, recounts, and court rulings have failed to find. Proposals like the SAVE America Act, which critics argue would impose restrictive voting requirements in the name of election security, draw much of their political justification from the idea that the system is broken.

The logic is straightforward: if the election is still under investigation, then reform must be necessary.

That same dynamic is now extending even further. Some allies close to Trump have urged him to consider declaring a national emergency over election integrity and assert greater federal control over election administration. These ideas include directing federal agencies to oversee voter registration systems, deploy federal personnel to monitor polling places, and take custody of certain election infrastructure and data. Others have pushed for executive actions that would standardize voting procedures nationwide or condition federal funding on states adopting stricter voter identification and registration requirements. Any one of these measures would be an extraordinary step in a system where the Constitution assigns that responsibility primarily to the states.

Taken together, the risk isn’t just that investigations revisit the past.

It’s that they reshape the future — justifying new federal involvement in elections based on claims that have already been tested and repeatedly rejected.

When elections don’t end

American elections are designed with a clear endpoint in mind. Votes are cast, counted, and, when necessary, recounted. Courts step in to resolve disputes. And eventually — sometimes quickly, sometimes after weeks of uncertainty — the losing side accepts the outcome.

That final step has always mattered more than we tend to admit.

Even in the closest elections, the system has relied on it. In 1960, Richard Nixon had credible grounds to challenge results in Illinois and Texas after his narrow loss to John F. Kennedy. He chose not to pursue a prolonged fight, warning that doing so could put the country through a constitutional crisis. The system held not because the election was uncontested, but because the losing side decided to end the contest.

Former Vice President Al Gore

The same pattern played out in 2000, when the outcome hinged on a few hundred votes in Florida. For 36 days, the country watched recounts, court rulings, and legal challenges unfold. The uncertainty stretched well into December, until the Supreme Court’s decision in Bush v. Gore effectively ended the recount and handed Bush the White House.

Al Gore disagreed with the ruling. Many Democrats did. But standing before the country the next night, Gore conceded the election, saying that while he strongly disagreed with the Court’s decision, he accepted it for the sake of national unity.

That moment didn’t resolve every grievance. It did something more important. It ended the election.

The system depends on that kind of acceptance. It does not require consensus about fairness. It does require a shared recognition that, at some point, the contest is over.

The 2020 election broke from that pattern.

Trump never accepted the outcome. Instead, the claim that the election was stolen became a defining feature of his political identity and a rallying point for his supporters. That refusal didn’t just prolong a dispute — it fueled a movement that culminated on January 6, when a mob stormed the Capitol in an effort to stop the certification of the results.

For much of American history, the peaceful transfer of power was treated as a given; something stable enough to be taken for granted. January 6 reminded us that it isn’t.

What has followed since has been less visible, but no less significant. The ballots were counted in November 2020. The results were certified weeks later. The recounts, audits, and lawsuits played out in the months that followed, each one reaffirming the same outcome.

And yet, politically, the election never ended.

Five years later, the same claims are now being pursued through the investigative power of the federal government. The search continues not because the system failed to examine the election, but because one side never accepted that the examination was complete.

That shift matters.

When elections don’t have a clear endpoint, they stop functioning as decisions and start functioning as ongoing disputes. And when the machinery of government is used to keep those disputes alive, the question is no longer just about what happened in 2020.

It’s about whether the system still has a way to move on.