Is voter fraud a problem in the US?

Short answer: No — not in the sense of widespread, systemic fraud that changes election outcomes. It does exist, but at extremely low, isolated rates.

Here's what extensive research shows:

The data consistently shows fraud is rare

Academic and government studies going back decades have reached the same conclusion. 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, and the analysis found only 10 cases of voter impersonation. Similarly, a follow-up study looking for fraud in states where politicians have argued fraud is a pernicious problem found zero successful prosecutions for impersonation fraud in five states from 2012–2016.

Looking at a longer timeframe, a database search of billions of ballots cast over 40 years of US elections found roughly 1,000 individual examples of voter fraud. Other research on double voting found similarly tiny numbers — of 132 problematic votes in one study of the 2012 election, 97 were never cast and 27 people voted by absentee ballot before they passed away, meaning even if the remaining 8 were actual fraud, that would indicate about 0.0027 percent of votes in that election were fraudulent.

Even the most comprehensive fraud database confirms this

The Heritage Foundation (a conservative think tank) maintains what's considered the most comprehensive public list of fraud cases, and even that undercuts claims of widespread fraud: Heritage's "Election Fraud Database" found 1,561 instances of voter fraud that resulted in 1,325 convictions, with 20 cases brought in 2024 — spread across decades and hundreds of millions of votes cast. A political scientist reviewing this data noted "there are a few cases of election fraud in every campaign... but it's not systemic. It's not widespread."

No evidence of a stolen 2020 or 2024 election

Despite extensive claims after 2020, a rigorous statistical review concluded that none of the prominent claims casting doubt on the 2020 result were even remotely convincing, and in each case the purportedly anomalous fact was either not a fact or not anomalous. This was echoed even within the Trump administration: senior officials including Attorney General Bill Barr and cybersecurity official Chris Krebs confirmed that no significant fraud was present. Fact-checkers found the same held true in 2024: the difference in vote totals between 2020 and 2024 is not evidence of fraud, and just as there was none in 2020, there is no evidence of widespread fraud in the 2024 election.

Noncitizen voting specifically

This is another commonly cited concern, but noncitizens are barred by federal and state law from voting, and every legitimate study on the question shows that voting by noncitizens in state and federal elections is exceptionally rare. A specific 2014 analysis put a number on it: the likely percent of non-citizen voters in recent US elections is 0.

The bottom line

As one summary puts it: 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.

An interesting gap: perception vs. reality

Despite this evidence, public concern remains high. Six in ten U.S. adults were concerned or very concerned about voter fraud ahead of the 2024 presidential election, with the fear particularly pronounced among Republican-leaning voters at 86 percent, versus 55 percent of Independents and just 33 percent of Democratic-leaning voters — a stark partisan divide despite the fraud itself not being a partisan phenomenon in the data.

Where legitimate concerns do exist: Isolated cases of fraud (a handful per election cycle) do occur and are prosecuted, and separate from "fraud," there are real administrative issues worth scrutiny — like mail-ballot rejection rates (around 1.4–1.5% in recent elections) — though these reflect errors/eligibility issues rather than fraud per se.

If you want, I can dig into a specific angle — like a particular state, a particular election, or the difference between "fraud" and other election-integrity concerns like list-maintenance errors or foreign interference.