Voter fraud claims are everywhere — I'll pull the latest research and data to see what the evidence actually shows.
Voter fraud exists but is not considered a widespread problem in the US by most studies, courts and government investigations.
Instances of fraud do occur, but they are exceedingly rare:
•Multiple studies conducted over the past two decades consistently find that the rate of fraudulent ballots is a tiny fraction of total votes, often measured in the range of a few dozen cases per several million ballots cast
•Bottom line for readers weighing the evidence: The weight of rigorous academic studies, major news investigations, and official reviews converge: voter fraud exists but is vanishingly rare
Research estimates:
•The Brennan Center's seminal report reviewed elections that had been meticulously studied for voter fraud, and found incident rates between 0.0003 percent and 0.0025 percent
•That report noted it is more likely an American "will be struck by lightning than that he will impersonate another voter at the polls."
•Claims that the Heritage Foundation document contains almost 1,100 proven instances of voter fraud are grossly exaggerated and devoid of context, Brennan Center researchers found. It confirms what numerous studies have consistently shown: Voter fraud is vanishingly rare, and impersonating a voter at the polls is less common a phenomenon than being struck by lightning
Analysis of Heritage Foundation data:
•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
•In Arizona, Heritage had to go back 25 years... in order to come up with 36 cases of fraud. The percentage of fraudulent votes was a minuscule .0000845%, and no election outcome was altered
•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
•The percentage of fraudulent votes in Arizona over the last 25 years ... was a minuscule .0000845%, and no election outcome in the U.S. has ever been altered by ballot fraud
•The database includes an assortment of cases, many unrelated or tangentially related, going back decades, with only a handful pertaining to non-citizens voting or impersonation at the polls. They add up to a molecular fraction of the total votes cast nationwide
Other reviews:
•A comprehensive 2014 study published in The Washington Post found 31 credible instances of impersonation fraud from 2000 to 2014, out of more than 1 billion ballots cast
•A 2012 study exhaustively pulled records from every state... and found the overall fraud rate to be "infinitesimal" and impersonation fraud by voters at the polls to be the rarest fraud of all: only 10 cases alleged in 12 years
•Academic and public‑interest research has repeatedly concluded that voter impersonation and noncitizen voting are either undetectable or occur at rates far too small to affect federal contests ... the libertarian Cato Institute said there was "no detectable amount of noncitizen voting" in recent elections
•Even the libertarian think tank the Cato Institute has debunked the idea that noncitizens vote in significant numbers
Courts and government investigations have reached similar conclusions, finding that fraud by voters at the polls is vanishingly rare, and does not happen on a scale even close to that necessary to "rig" an election