Hey, Oklahoma students. Here’s your real ‘election fraud’ primer.

Opinion Philip Bump Hey, Oklahoma students. Here’s your real ‘election fraud’ primer. The state’s curriculum now teaches kids to be skeptical about the results of the 2020 election. May 2, 2025 at 4:37 p.m. EDTToday at 4:37 p.m. EDT 6 min 149 A woman wears 'Trump Won' stickers at the Arizona State Capitol in Phoenix in September 2021. (Caitlin O'Hara/For The Washington Post) Greetings, Oklahoma high school class of 2026 and beyond! You have arrived here because your state moved to enact a curriculum this year that includes instruction centered on elevating doubts about the results of the 2020 election. Make sense of the latest news and debates with our daily newsletter Because there is no actual doubt about those results (save for those raised by allies of President Donald Trump), I wanted to provide a one-stop shop for understanding what actually happened — and why no such skepticism is warranted. Skip to end of carousel Sign up for the How to Read This Chart newsletter Subscribe to How to Read This Chart, a weekly dive into the data behind the news. Each Saturday, Opinions columnist Philip Bump makes and breaks down charts explaining the latest in economics, pop culture, politics and more. End of carousel The new curriculum establishes “United States History Content Standards” that ask students to “analyze contemporary turning points of 21st century American society.” That includes an analysis of “the significant events during the first Donald J. Trump administration,” including his ouster following the 2020 election. Or, as described in the curriculum’s “just asking questions” language: “Identify discrepancies in 2020 elections results by looking at graphs and other information, including the sudden halting of ballot-counting in select cities in key battleground states, the security risks of mail-in balloting, sudden batch dumps, an unforeseen record number of voters, and the unprecedented contradiction of 'bellwether county’ trends.” We’ll quickly run through each of the identified elements of the “discrepancies,” just so you can ensure that your schoolwork on the subject is complete. But we should start with the most obvious rejoinder to suggestions that the election was stolen: No evidence has emerged of even small-scale efforts to steal votes. Follow Trump’s second term Follow It’s been five years, as of this writing, and despite a desperate hunt for any indication that votes were stolen, the best Trump and his allies can do is talk about supposed “discrepancies.” This isn’t because the discrepancies are important. It’s because the discrepancies are all they’ve got. “The sudden halting of ballot-counting in select cities in key battleground states.” First, many claims about pauses in vote counting were either false or easily explained. Where vote-counting did stop, the explanation was obvious: It was late and people were tired. But what difference does it make if vote counting stopped? How is this a “discrepancy”? It doesn’t show that any votes were added or falsified; it doesn’t even hint at that. It’s just … something that happened. And because it did, it has been cast as suspicious, as surely as someone hunting Bigfoot might see a broken branch on a trail and think they were on to something. 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It is also true that studies have found that fraud is slightly more common with mail ballots than in-person voting (where, despite Trump’s past claims, almost no fraud actually occurs). The focus on mail-in balloting as a factor in alleged 2020 fraud is not because there was rampant fraud. It’s because, with the covid-19 pandemic in full force, states expanded their use of mail-in ballots. Trump seized on the purported insecurity of those ballots to undermine confidence in the outcome. Obviously, that effort was successful. Reporters for the Associated Press determined there was almost no fraud in the 2020 election, including in places where ballot dropboxes were used. To this date, there is no evidence that mail-in ballots were a vector for significant cheating. (And don’t even get me started on Dinesh D’Souza’s ridiculous movie suggesting otherwise.) “Sudden batch dumps.” What’s being referred to here is that, in some cities and states, batches of ballots were added to the vote count at once. In some places, those ballots shifted the running count to favor Trump over Joe Biden. The reason those batches were added to the vote totals wasn’t because of a conspiracy, though. It’s because … big groups of valid ballots were added to the vote totals. When the curriculum says that students will be “looking at graphs,” it probably means charts of these jumps that became popular among Trump supporters. Vote totals in, say, Wisconsin showed Trump maintaining a lead until — whammo! — a big surge for Biden and suddenly the Democrat had an advantage that he maintained. What happened in Wisconsin is that the largest city, Milwaukee, reported all of its results at once. They went overwhelmingly for Biden, so he gained the lead. But there was nothing suspicious about that. In fact, Trump did better there in 2020 than he had in 2016. “An unforeseen record number of voters.” Trump has often claimed it was simply impossible for Biden to have gotten so many votes. But it wasn’t. Turnout rates were higher in 2020 than they had been in decades. But this isn’t a mystery. The election was polarizing, and mail-in balloting made it easier for more (legitimate) voters to cast ballots. (Turnout was also high in 2024, but Trump does not think that election was suspect, obviously.) What’s more, the country added more than 23 million adults from 2010 to 2020, helping explain why Biden got more votes in his election than Barack Obama received in 2008. “The unprecedented contradiction of ‘bellwether county’ trends.” This is my favorite of the “discrepancies” because it’s so silly. “Bellwether” counties are ones that had consistently voted for the winner of presidential elections. In other words: they don’t predict, they reflect. Once Trump lost in 2020, those counties were simply no longer bellwethers and other counties, perhaps with shorter track records of matching the vote, replaced them. It’s also important to note that the bellwethers were already contradicted in 2016 — if you look at the popular vote margin that year (which favored Hillary Clinton) rather than the electoral vote total (which favored Trump). You might have noticed that none of the links or arguments in this article are particularly recent. All of this has been understood and articulated for several years. So the Oklahoma legislature and state schools Superintendent Ryan Walters (who enlisted right-wing pundits to help overhaul the curriculum) should have known that the “discrepancies” they want you to treat seriously had already been treated seriously and dismissed. They made them part of the curriculum anyway. In a way, then, the inclusion of these subjects in Oklahoma instruction serves precisely the intended purpose, if only by accident. It is very much representative of one of the “contemporary turning points of 21st century American society”: the fealty Republicans offer to Donald Trump and his surreal vision of the world. Using the above information to challenge the curriculum almost certainly won’t get you an A. But, unlike the curriculum itself, it does actually provide useful instruction.