Is voter fraud a problem in the US?

Short answer: It's not widespread, but it does happen in isolated cases

The overwhelming body of academic and nonpartisan research finds that voter fraud in the U.S. is extremely rare, not a "problem" in the sense of affecting election outcomes, despite significant public belief to the contrary.

What the data shows

Studies across the political spectrum reach similar conclusions. Even analysis of the conservative Heritage Foundation's own fraud database—compiled specifically to document such cases—shows the numbers are tiny relative to the volume of votes cast. Heritage's "Election Fraud Database" found 1,561 instances of voter fraud that resulted in 1,325 convictions, with 20 cases brought in 2024, with charges ranging from ineligible voting to false registrations, duplicate voting and ineligible voting.

When you compare these numbers to actual votes cast, the scale becomes clear:

Specific types of fraud are even rarer:

Academic consensus

Political scientists studying this systematically have reached a clear conclusion: research conducted during the past two decades has concluded that there is no evidence of significant election fraud in contemporary American national elections. Brookings researcher Elaine Kamarck summarized it bluntly, calling American election fraud "miniscule."

The gap between perception and reality

This is where things get interesting: there's a large disconnect between what the evidence shows and what many Americans believe. This issue has been raised so often that roughly 1 in 4 Americans believes that voter fraud is a real problem. Partisan beliefs diverge sharply—a Pew Research Center survey found that 54% of Republicans believe voter fraud is a major problem in U.S. elections, compared to 6% of Democrats. Academic research backs up this partisan split: multivariate analysis shows that partisanship correlates strongly with endorsement of types of election fraud, with Republicans consistently more likely to state that types of election fraud are common, even when controlling for a wide variety of other factors.

Bottom line

Isolated fraud cases do occur every election cycle—people voting twice, using a dead relative's ballot, etc.—but researchers across partisan lines agree it's not systemic, organized, or large enough to have altered an election outcome. As one Brookings researcher put it, "it's generally not organized, and I don't think [it's] ever affected the actual outcome, but people often pick on isolated cases and turn it into a systemic and widespread pattern."