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Muse Spark 1.2Nov 3, 2026meta/muse-spark-1.2-20260805

Is voter fraud a problem in the US?

I'll look into whether voter fraud is a widespread issue in the US and what recent studies show.

No — according to extensive research by nonpartisan, academic, and government reviewers, voter fraud exists but is extremely rare in the United States and has not been shown to occur at a scale that changes statewide or federal election outcomes.

What the data shows

Scholars and nonpartisan researchers who have compiled proven cases across decades conclude that instances of voter fraud are extremely uncommon relative to the hundreds of millions of ballots cast.

Key findings:

•Fraud rates are microscopic. The Brennan Center for Justice longitudinal research found incident rates between approximately 0.0003% and 0.0025% in studied contests — meaning roughly 1 to 25 fraudulent votes per million cast. Another Brennan-cited review of 84 million votes in 22 states yielded 14 instances referred for prosecution—an implied fraud rate on the order of 0.00000017% in that sample. Other reviews cite a finding of just 31 credible cases of in-person voter impersonation out of roughly a billion ballots in a long-term study.
•Heritage Foundation database — the most-cited database of proven fraud — is very small. The Heritage Foundation's Election Fraud Database, maintained by the conservative think tank, lists roughly 1,561 proven instances that led to convictions across many years, with other summaries citing approximately 1,465 proven cases over roughly 44 years or, as of its last update in December 2025, 1,620 proven instances. That is on the order of 30-40 proven cases per year on average.

Brookings' review of Heritage data found, for example, that in Arizona across 36 elections and 42.6 million ballots there were 36 documented cases—about 0.0000845% of ballots—and that no federal outcome was changed. A similar calculation for Pennsylvania found 39 cases across more than 100 million ballots yielding about 0.000039%.

•2020 election audits. An Associated Press investigation examined every potential case of voter fraud in the six battleground states disputed by former President Donald Trump and found fewer than 475 — a number that would have made no difference in the 2020 presidential election. Reporters who asked local election officials in the six states most contested identified just under 475 potential instances of fraud out of 25.5 million ballots cast for president in those states. The Democrat won those six states by a combined 311,257 votes out of 25.5 million ballots.

Trump's own attorney general affirmed in December 2020 that federal investigators did not uncover fraud "on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election".

•Mail-ballot and impersonation fraud. Studies that parsed mail-ballot cases in 2020 calculated fraud tied to mail voting at roughly 0.000051% of mail ballots cast. A Massachusetts Institute of Technology study of mail ballots over two decades called mail-in fraud "exceedingly rare" and reported rates on the order of 0.00006 percent of votes nationally.

The Brennan Center concluded that most reported incidents of voter fraud are actually traceable to other sources, such as clerical errors or bad data matching practices, and states that fraud by individual voters is both irrational and extremely rare.

Brennan analysts reviewing the Heritage database found it contains very few examples of the forms of fraud most cited in policy debates — only about ten cases of in-person voter-impersonation fraud and roughly 41 cases of noncitizen voting. The Brennan Center analysis found that over roughly five decades, only 41 cases of non-citizen voting could be confirmed.

Does fraud never happen?

Yes, proven cases do exist. Examples include double voting, absentee ballot fraud, registration fraud, and schemes like the 2019 North Carolina 9th District ballot-trafficking operation, but databases show only a tiny handful of prosecuteable cases in federal elections and none that shifted outcomes in key contests examined.

Heritage and other groups argue this shows systemic vulnerabilities remain, even if incidents are rare, and that election integrity measures are justified to prevent potential abuse. Critics of those arguments point out that Heritage markets its database as "a sampling of proven instances" not an exhaustive count, and that even that sampling remains tiny compared with total ballots cast — billions over the period covered.

Bottom line

Researchers across the ideological spectrum — from the Brennan Center on the left to the Heritage Foundation and Cato Institute on the right — agree on the numbers: documented voter fraud is:

> vanishingly rare, and does not happen on a scale even close to that necessary to "rig" an election

Voter fraud is not considered a systemic problem that regularly determines election outcomes, though isolated, prosecutable cases do occur at very low rates.

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