Is voter fraud a problem in the US?

Short answer: No — not in any way that affects election outcomes. Documented voter fraud is extremely rare.

Decades of research, audits, court cases, and government investigations — conducted by researchers and officials across the political spectrum — consistently find that voter fraud happens at vanishingly small rates and has essentially no effect on election results.

What the data shows

Overall rarity: In the United States, electoral fraud, or voter fraud, involves illegal voting in or manipulation of United States elections, and it is very rare. A database search of billions of ballots cast over 40 years of US elections found roughly 1,000 individual examples of voter fraud.

Even the most comprehensive fraud database confirms this: Using the Heritage Foundation's own fraud database (a right-leaning source that specifically tracks fraud cases), Brookings researchers found that 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 — a minuscule .0000845% fraud rate, with no election outcome altered by ballot fraud. Similarly, 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.

2020 election specifically: After Trump's team disputed results, the Associated Press contacted local election officials in six swing states and found 475 potential voter fraud cases — an extraordinarily small percentage of the more than 25 million ballots cast in those six states. Of 62 lawsuits Trump and his allies filed challenging the election on fraud grounds, only one succeeded, before being overturned by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court.

Expert consensus: "Research has been consistent over time that voter fraud is infinitesimally rare and almost never occurs on a scale that would affect an election outcome," says Alice Clapman, senior counsel for voting rights at the Brennan Center for Justice. Courts have reached the same conclusion: courts, government commissions, and prosecutorial offices have overwhelmingly found this to be extremely rare, often concluding once they look at specific evidence that it just isn't there.

Noncitizen voting and impersonation fraud (two frequently alleged forms) are essentially nonexistent: A comprehensive 2014 study found 31 credible instances of impersonation fraud from 2000 to 2014, out of more than 1 billion ballots cast — and even that tiny number is likely inflated. A 2014 paper concluded that "the likely percent of non-citizen voters in recent US elections is 0."

Mail-in voting, often cited as riskier, still shows negligible fraud: 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.

Investigations by Republican officials themselves find little: In Ohio, Republican Secretary of State Frank LaRose announced in 2022 his office had found 75 voters who allegedly cast a ballot in the state and another state in 2020 out of almost 6 million ballots cast — his office referred 630 cases total over multiple elections while noting fraud "continues to be exceedingly rare" in the state.

Why the perception differs from reality

Despite this evidence, public concern remains high: 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. Researchers note this gap often stems from conflating different things — groups often lump cases where a voter mistakenly believed they were eligible together with cases of actual fraudulent intent, and these numbers don't distinguish between an incorrect allegation and someone who voted in good faith incorrectly.

Bottom line

Voter fraud is not a systemic problem in the U.S. — it is documented, prosecuted, exceedingly rare, and has never been shown to change a federal election outcome, according to multi-decade research from across the ideological spectrum (including conservative-leaning Heritage Foundation data). It remains a serious crime with real penalties, and states maintain numerous safeguards to prevent and catch it, but the scale of actual fraud is nowhere near what would be needed to "rig" an election.