“Stop the Steal” was a campaign asserting that the 2020 presidential election had been stolen. Its rallies in Washington in November and December 2020 preceded the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol.
The phrase is older than the campaign
The House Select Committee’s final report records that the phrase was coined in early 2016 by Roger Stone, first to allege that Donald Trump’s rivals were attempting to take the Republican nomination from him, and afterwards to allege that Hillary Clinton would take the presidency. When Trump won in 2016 it was set aside, and the Committee finds it did not become a significant movement until after the 2020 election.
An earlier version of this page said only that the phrase “was used sporadically before gaining widespread adoption after Election Day”. The documented history is more specific than that, and it is given here.
Organization
The Committee reports that as early as November 5, 2020 Stone told associates he intended to reconstitute the campaign through litigation, and that Ali Alexander organized a new “Stop the Steal” campaign, incorporating it as an entity in Alabama on November 10, 2020 with a bank account and websites. Two Washington rallies — November 14 and December 12, 2020 — are identified in the report as critically important precursors to January 6.
The election-security finding
The claim the campaign was organized around was contradicted at the time by the outgoing administration’s own agency. As the Select Committee report records, the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency issued a joint statement of election security officials on November 12, 2020 describing the election as “the most secure in American history”, and stating: “There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.”
Status
Recorded as transformed rather than active. The specific campaign to overturn the 2020 result
ended with the certification of the electoral count; claims and organizing that began under its
name continued in other forms. The earlier active status asserted a continuity this page cannot
document.
What this page does not claim
The former description of this page stated that the movement led to the January 6 attack. Causation of that kind is exactly what was contested in the Committee’s work and in subsequent litigation. This page records the documented sequence — the rallies, the organizers, the date — and attributes the Committee’s conclusions to the Committee.
Sources
- 01.
U.S. House of Representatives, 117th Congress. Final Report of the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol. (2022). House Report 117-663, ordered printed December 22, 2022. Source for the phrase's origin with Roger Stone in early 2016, for Ali Alexander's incorporation of "Stop the Steal" as an Alabama entity on November 10, 2020, for the November 14 and December 12, 2020 Washington rallies, and for the CISA joint statement quoted below. This is a report by a congressional committee whose membership and conclusions were themselves contested; it is cited as the most complete documentary record of the events, and its findings are attributed to it here rather than asserted.