Are US elections fraud-filled? One Georgia dispute is a window.

In Georgia’s Republican primary, there’s been no shortage of candidates echoing former President Donald Trump’s disproved electoral fraud claims and vowing to restore “election integrity.” Few, however, have what Jake Evans, a Trump-endorsed lawyer making his first run for Congress, is selling: direct experience litigating a 2020 election challenge. 

“I contested an election in Long County, Georgia – and that revealed a lot of the widespread fraud we saw in 2020,” Mr. Evans said in a televised debate this month with his GOP primary opponents. 

Mr. Evans, who is running in today’s primary for former House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s old seat in the Atlanta suburbs, represented a Republican probate court judge who sued after losing his primary election by nine votes, claiming fraud. 

But contrary to the young attorney’s campaign claims, the case, which went all the way to Georgia’s Supreme Court, did not uncover any evidence of voter fraud. Rather, it turned up a handful of minor errors in how ballots were filled out or verified – the types of mistakes that crop up in every election, but that can nonetheless be used to toss out votes and potentially invalidate results in a close race.

Despite all the conspiracy theories surrounding the 2020 presidential election, multiple studies have underscored that fraud – especially on the scale required to sway a statewide or national outcome – is vanishingly rare in modern U.S. elections. President Trump’s top election and cybersecurity officials called the 2020 election the “most secure in U.S. history,” and his own attorney general concluded there was no evidence of widespread fraud. A review by The Associated Press last December of suspected 2020 voter fraud in Georgia and five other battleground states found fewer than 475 cases, of which virtually all involved individuals acting alone to cast extra ballots. Most of these ballots were spotted by clerks and not counted in vote tallies.  

Yet back in the summer of 2020, before Mr. Trump and his allies ignited a national firestorm to “Stop the Steal,” a smaller conflagration consumed Long County, in southern Georgia. As the protracted dispute over its probate court race showed, clerical errors or database mismatches can provide fertile ground for post-election challenges in a close race – which can then easily snowball into vague allegations of fraud that undermine public trust in elections.

“We don’t have a problem with voter fraud in this country,” says Luke Moses, the lawyer who represented the winning candidate in the case. “What we have is a group of partisan individuals who don’t care what a voter’s intent is.”  

In June 2020, Long County certified that Teresa Odum had won the Republican primary for probate judge by nine votes, beating incumbent Judge Bobby Smith. A recount turned up additional absentee ballots, but the margin of victory – and the result – remained the same. In a place where Republicans outnumber Democrats 4 to 1, that meant certain victory for Ms. Odum in November. 

In response, Mr. Smith sued the county and Ms. Odum, claiming election fraud.

Robert Parker, the chair of the Board of Commissioners in Long County, says local opinion was divided on the merits of the case. “Fifty percent thought the allegations were true. Fifty percent thought they weren’t,” says Mr. Parker, who works out of a windowless, wood-paneled office in Ludowici, the sleepy county seat. 

Mr. Evans, the Atlanta-based attorney who represented Mr. Smith, had a record of challenging election results. He was also a former chair of Georgia’s Ethics Commission and a young Republican activist whose father, Randy Evans, was a Trump donor who served as his ambassador to Luxembourg.

Over three days of court hearings in September, Mr. Evans formally challenged 30 votes out of 2,741 cast. Of the 30, six were found to be doubles: Voters had mailed ballots, then voted again on Election Day due to apparent confusion over which primary races in Georgia had already been held. One of the six said he voted twice intentionally. In addition, another voter had registered in the wrong county. 

“We conceded that seven shouldn’t have voted,” says Mr. Moses, Ms. Odum’s attorney. “They needed to find two more.” 

Mr. Evans challenged the other ballots over irregularities in ID checks and signature matches, but the court rejected all of the remaining challenges. With the exception of the intentional double voter, “there was no evidence that any of the voters or election officials knowingly acted with possible fraudulent or malicious intent,” a superior court judge wrote. 

Irregularities occur in virtually all U.S. elections, because local election officials must interpret complex, shifting rules that can penalize voters if not followed precisely. In Georgia, voter registration applications must exactly match information held by state agencies; critics say this frequently leads to problems because of data entry errors or tiny differences in how names are written, such as missing hyphens. 

Deciding whether legitimate ballots should be rejected over minor errors is a discretionary power that should be exercised with great caution, says Mr. Moses. He worries that minor irregularities will increasingly be used to toss out votes in other close-run elections. “If you don’t dot every ‘i’ correctly and cross every ‘t’ properly, your vote won’t count,” he says, which could further undermine faith in the electoral process. 

Since 2020, a wave of election bills passed by Georgia and other Republican-run states have added new restrictions in the name of securing the vote. Republicans argue that emergency rules adopted in 2020 to facilitate voting under pandemic conditions, particularly no-excuse mail-in voting, were overly lax. 

On Dec. 1, 2020, as Mr. Trump was ramping up the fight to overturn his electoral defeat in Georgia and other swing states, the court issued its verdict in Long County: Mr. Smith had failed to show evidence required to invalidate the election. Last year, Georgia’s Supreme Court upheld the decision by a 7-0 vote. 

Mr. Smith declined to discuss his lawsuit. Mr. Evans didn’t respond to requests for comment.

To Mr. Parker, who is also chief of police in Long County, the outcome felt like vindication after all the mudslinging. At a time when public trust in the electoral process has been seriously undermined, he hopes rulings like this can help restore a sense of legitimacy. 

“I knew what was the truth and what was not, and I wanted everyone to know,” he says. “Your election is your reputation. When you ruin it, you never get it back.”