Is voter fraud a problem in the US?

Short answer: No — extensive research shows voter fraud in the U.S. is extremely rare and does not occur on a scale that affects election outcomes.

What the evidence shows

Academic and nonpartisan research consistently finds negligible fraud rates:

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. Reviewing elections that had been meticulously studied for voter fraud, researchers found incident rates between 0.0003 percent and 0.0025 percent — a rate so low that an American "will be struck by lightning than that he will impersonate another voter at the polls."

A 2016 investigation similarly found nothing significant: a study of 2,068 alleged election-fraud cases in 50 states between 2000 and 2012 found the level of fraud was infinitesimal compared with the 146 million voters registered over the 12-year period.

Even conservative-leaning tallies show tiny numbers relative to ballots cast:

The Heritage Foundation maintains the most frequently cited database of proven fraud cases, and even by their count, the numbers are minuscule relative to total votes. For example, in Arizona, over the 25 years covering the bulk of the cases cited by Heritage, there were 36 elections held, meaning around 42.6 million votes cast with only 36 cases of fraud in total. In Pennsylvania, there were over 100 million votes cast in 32 elections across 30 years and only around 39 cases of voter fraud. Brookings scholar Darrell West summarized this succinctly: "There are a few cases of election fraud in every campaign, but it's not systemic. It's not widespread."

Mail-in voting — often singled out as especially vulnerable — also shows extremely low fraud rates. Brookings found of the minuscule 0.000043 percent of mail voting found to be fraudulent out of all mail ballots cast in the 2016–2022 general elections.

The 2020 and 2024 elections specifically: After the highly contested 2020 election, 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 that were cast in those six states. Crucially, the AP study also found no systematic collusion or "rigging" in those cases; nearly every one was an individual acting alone.

Peer-reviewed political science consensus: A 2024 academic paper summarized two decades of research this way: Research conducted during the past two decades has concluded that there is no evidence of significant election fraud in contemporary American national elections.

But belief in fraud is widespread — even though evidence isn't

There's a notable gap between public perception and documented reality. Belief in widespread fraud remains common among the public even as empirical studies find it rare. NPR/legal experts note this disconnect too: there is a big gap between "the rhetoric and the actual reality" of how many instances of voter fraud some state officials identify and refer for prosecution.

Bottom line

Election systems in the U.S. have significant safeguards. As one election law expert put it: Our elections are so decentralized and laced with safeguards, transparency, and verification systems that any fraud that does occur is either detected and reversed or on a scale too small to make a difference.

While isolated cases of fraud do happen and get prosecuted every cycle, decades of research — from academic studies, journalistic investigations, and even conservative-leaning databases — converge on the same conclusion: voter fraud exists but is not a systemic problem, and there's no credible evidence it has changed the outcome of any recent U.S. federal election.