Is voter fraud a problem in the US?

Short answer: No, not in terms of scale — documented voter fraud is extremely rare in the U.S., though it's not literally zero, and perceptions of fraud are much higher than actual instances.

What the research shows

Fraud occurs, but at vanishingly small rates. To come up with thousands of instances of voter fraud around the country, Heritage staff had to go back decades in time where there have been hundreds of millions of votes cast and a very small number of cases of election fraud have been found, none of which affected election outcomes. For example, in Arizona, Heritage had to go back 25 years, over which there were 36 elections held and 42,626,379 ballots cast, in order to come up with 36 cases of fraud. The percentage of fraudulent votes was a minuscule .0000845%, and in Pennsylvania, Heritage data goes back 30 years and covers 32 elections with over 100 million votes cast and found only 39 cases of voter fraud.

Multiple independent reviews reach the same conclusion. "Research has been consistent over time that voter fraud is infinitesimally rare," one expert tells NPR. Academic literature backs this up: research conducted during the past two decades has concluded that there is no evidence of significant election fraud in contemporary American national elections.

Historical case-by-case studies find similarly tiny numbers. A comprehensive review found 31 credible instances of impersonation fraud from 2000 to 2014, out of more than 1 billion ballots cast, and a Brennan Center report concluded incident rates between 0.0003 percent and 0.0025 percent, noting it is more likely that an American "will be struck by lightning than that he will impersonate another voter at the polls."

2020 election specifically was heavily scrutinized. After that election, the Associated Press contacted local election officials in six swing states. In their analysis, they found 475 potential voter fraud cases — which amounts to an extraordinarily small percentage of the more than 25 million ballots that were cast in those six states. Legal challenges fared no better: Trump and his allies filed 62 lawsuits in various courts in an effort to challenge the election, many resting on claims of voter fraud. Of the 62 lawsuits, only one succeeded before the Pennsylvania Supreme Court overturned the initial ruling.

Mail-in voting has somewhat higher (but still tiny) rates. While quite rare, experts say fraud occurs more often with mailed-in votes than with in-person voting. Brookings researchers examined cases of fraud reported during elections in 2016, 2018, 2020, and 2022 and estimated there were about four cases of fraud for every 10 million mail ballots cast, on average.

Non-citizen voting is also essentially negligible. A 2014 academic paper concluded that "the likely percent of non-citizen voters in recent US elections is 0."

The gap between perception and reality

This is where things get interesting — public belief in fraud is far higher than documented cases. A 2024 nationwide NPR/PBS News/Marist poll found 58% of Americans were concerned about voter fraud in the 2024 United States presidential election, including 88% of Donald Trump supporters and 29% of Kamala Harris supporters. Similarly, a series of Monmouth polls conducted between 2020 and 2023 found that 29%–32% of Americans believed the 2020 United States presidential election was fraudulent.

Experts attribute this gap partly to confusion between actual fraud and administrative/data issues. As one Brennan Center attorney put it: conservative-leaning groups often lump all cases where the voter thought they were eligible along with cases where someone intended to commit fraud. "These numbers don't distinguish between...an allegation that may be incorrect or a situation where someone has voted in good faith incorrectly." Issues like outdated voter rolls (dead people still registered, duplicate registrations) are frequently conflated with actual fraudulent voting, even though the study investigated "outdated voter rolls, not fraudulent votes."

Bottom line

Election security experts broadly agree: the amount of voter fraud in the United States is not zero, but it is very close to zero. And the multiple safeguards, transparencies, and verification systems in place ensure that voter fraud will remain both small in scale and rare. It exists as isolated, individual-level incidents rather than a systemic threat to election outcomes — but concern about it among the public remains much higher than what the evidence supports.