Is voter fraud a concern in U.S. elections? I'll examine the latest data and research on how widespread it actually is.
In the United States, voter fraud exists but is documented as extremely rare relative to total ballots cast:
•Multiple rigorous academic studies, major news investigations and official reviews converge: voter fraud exists but is vanishingly rare in absolute and relative terms — orders of magnitude below levels that would flip national elections.
•Studies agree that impersonation fraud by voters very rarely happens, and most reported incidents are traceable to other sources, such as clerical errors or bad data matching practices.
•Numerical estimates include:
•Brennan Center review of elections meticulously studied for fraud found incident rates between 0.0003 percent and 0.0025 percent
•Comprehensive reviews put the rate in federal contests at essentially zero for practical purposes, with rates between roughly 0.0003% and 0.0025%
•MIT 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
•In a Brennan Center review across 42 jurisdictions in 2016, analysts estimated 30 incidents of suspected noncitizen voting out of 23.5 million votes cast (or .0001% of votes)
•Databases of proven cases show small numbers across decades:
•Heritage Foundation's Election Fraud Database across all elections in all states going back to 1982 found a total of 1,561 instances resulting in 1,325 convictions
•As of November 2023, there were 1,465 proven cases listed in 44 years, an average of 33 cases per year
•In Texas, Heritage found 103 cases between 2005 and 2022, in a period where 107 million ballots were cast, or 0.000096% of all ballots cast
•Research has consistently found that voter fraud in the United States is very rare, and fraud is more likely to occur in and affect the outcome of local elections, where the potential impact of a small number of votes can be greater. Electoral fraud was significantly more prevalent in earlier US history, particularly in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
•Mail-in voter fraud occurs more often than in-person voter fraud, but both are rare. An analysis by News21 found 491 known cases of absentee ballot fraud between 2000 and 2012, while other analyses note misconduct in mail voting is "meaningfully more prevalent" than voting in person but still amounts to only a tiny fraction of mail ballots.
•Government and election security reviews reach the same conclusion:
•Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) issued a statement calling the 2020 election "the most secure in American history" and noting there is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised
•A specialized United States Department of Justice unit formed to find instances of federal election fraud examined the 2002 and 2004 federal elections and were able to prove that 0.00000013 percent of ballots cast were fraudulent
Bottom line from studies: Instances of voter fraud are extremely uncommon relative to hundreds of millions of ballots cast, and databases show only a tiny number of proven cases. Scholars describe the rate as "infinitesimally rare" and "almost never occurs on a scale that would affect an election outcome", though isolated cases do occur and are prosecuted.