Is voter fraud a significant issue? I'll pull the latest data on how often it occurs and what research shows.
Voter fraud does occur in the United States, but extensive research and official reviews find it is extremely rare and not at a scale that has altered modern federal election outcomes.
How is voter fraud defined?
Types of fraud include voter impersonation or in-person voter fraud, mail-in or absentee ballot fraud, illegal voting by noncitizens, and double voting. The United States government defines voter or ballot fraud as one of three broad categories of federal election crimes.
Experts say mail-in voter fraud occurs more often than in-person voter fraud, but both are considered extremely rare.
How common is it?
Multiple studies and official reviews place the rate at effectively zero for practical purposes when measured against total ballots cast:
•The best available public studies and official reviews place the rate of proven voter fraud in the United States at effectively zero for national elections — measured in tiny fractions of a percent. Examples range from ~0.00000017% to ~0.0000845% in cited analyses.
•A Brennan Center for Justice report The Truth About Voter Fraud found that in-person voter impersonation occurs at rates between 0.0003% and 0.0025%. The report reviewed elections that had been meticulously studied for voter fraud, and found incident rates between 0.0003 percent and 0.0025 percent.
•The Brennan Center concluded that "an American is more likely to be struck by lightning than to impersonate another voter at the polls".
•A Massachusetts Institute of Technology study of mail ballots over two decades called mail-in fraud "exceedingly rare" and reported rates on the order of 0.00006 percent of votes nationally. Other large reviews find mail-ballot fraud at roughly 0.000043% of mail ballots cast — about four cases per 10 million mail votes.
•A Brennan Center examination covering 23.5 million votes found roughly 30 suspected incidents of noncitizen voting, about 0.0001 percent, with 40 of 42 jurisdictions reporting none at all.
What do case counts show?
Because rates are so low, researchers also count verified cases:
•The Heritage Foundation's Election Fraud Database, a conservative think tank that maintains the most-cited public compilation, across all elections in all states going back to 1982 found a total of 1,561 instances of voter fraud resulting in 1,325 convictions. The same database is also described as listing roughly 1,561 "proven instances" yielding about 1,325 convictions across its time window.
•An earlier edition of the database documented 1,088 proven instances of election fraud, including 949 cases that have resulted in criminal convictions.
•Overall, the Heritage Foundation has catalogued approximately 1,500 proven cases spanning multiple decades, and records approximately 1,500 proven cases across the United States between 1982 and 2023 — an average of roughly 40 cases per year in a nation where 158 million ballots were cast in 2020 alone.
•The Brookings Institution examined Heritage's own data and found, for example, that in Arizona, Heritage had to search 25 years across 36 elections and over 42 million ballots to find 36 cases of fraud — a rate of 0.0000845 percent.
•An analysis of Heritage data found it contained just 68 cases of proven noncitizen voting dating back decades.
For recent federal elections:
•An Associated Press review of every potential case of voter fraud in the six battleground states disputed by former President Donald Trump has found fewer than 475 — a number that would have made no difference in the 2020 presidential election. The disputed ballots represent just 0.15% of his victory margin in those states.
•A recap described that review as just shy of 475 potential cases of voter fraud across six battleground states out of more than 25 million votes cast.
What do election security officials say?
•The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has consistently stated that it found no evidence of foreign interference that altered the outcomes of the 2020 or 2024 presidential elections.
•CISA declared the 2020 election to be "the most secure in American history", stating "[t]here is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised". The statement that the 2020 election was "the most secure in American history" came from CISA under Christopher Krebs.
•CISA also said the 2020 election was "the most secure in American history," with no evidence that voting systems deleted, lost or compromised votes.
Does that mean it never happens?
No. Documented cases exist, including double voting, absentee ballot fraud, registration fraud, and illegal voting by noncitizens, but investigations consistently find them to be isolated, small in number, and typically result in detection and prosecution due to penalties including prison and deportation.
Aggregated summaries conclude that voter fraud is real but vanishingly rare and not a systemic problem sufficient to alter presidential outcomes, while supporters of stricter integrity measures argue that even rare cases justify safeguards to maintain confidence in elections, and that the Heritage totals undercount fraud because not all cases are detected or prosecuted.