Is voter fraud a problem in the US?

Voter Fraud in the US: What the Research Shows

The overwhelming body of academic and nonpartisan research finds that voter fraud is extremely rare in the United States, though it is not literally zero.

What multiple studies have found

Academic consensus: Research conducted during the past two decades has concluded that there is no evidence of significant election fraud in contemporary American national elections.

In-person impersonation fraud — the type most often cited to justify voter ID laws — is essentially nonexistent:

Mail-in voting fraud is also minuscule: research published by the Brookings Institute found that cases of mail-in voting fraud account for merely 0.000043% of all ballots cast by mail, and in the 2020 election that figure was just 0.000051% of mail ballots cast.

Noncitizen voting: Noncitizens are not permitted to vote in state and federal elections, and it's a federal crime for them to do so, and every legitimate study ever done on the question shows that voting by noncitizens in state and federal elections is vanishingly rare.

Even conservative-leaning sources find similar patterns. Reviewing the Heritage Foundation's own "Election Fraud Database" (which tracks fraud cases going back decades), a Brookings analysis noted that scrolling through the database at first glance offers the impression that there's a lot of fraud—but a more careful look reveals just the opposite, since compiling thousands of instances required going back decades over hundreds of millions of votes cast. A Brookings scholar summarized: "There are a few cases of election fraud in every campaign. But it's not systemic. It's not widespread."

No election outcome has been altered: Looking at Arizona specifically, the percentage of fraudulent votes over the last 25 years of elections was a minuscule .0000845%, and no election outcome in the U.S. has ever been altered by ballot fraud.

Bipartisan officials agree: Even under the first Trump administration, statements by senior officials, including Attorney General Bill Barr and chief cybersecurity official Chris Krebs, confirmed that no significant fraud was present in the 2020 election.

The gap between belief and evidence

Despite this evidence, public perception differs sharply from the data — and that gap tracks political affiliation. Partisanship correlates strongly with endorsement of types of election fraud, with Republicans consistently more likely to state that types of election fraud are common, and conspiratorial thinking is also strongly correlated with belief in the occurrence of election fraud.

Bottom line

As one researcher put it, the amount of voter fraud in the United States is not zero, but it is very close to zero. Isolated cases do occur and are prosecuted, but decades of studies across partisan lines find no evidence of the widespread, systemic fraud that would be needed to actually alter election outcomes.