Is voter fraud a problem in the US?

Short answer: No — extensive, nonpartisan research consistently shows that voter fraud in the U.S. is extremely rare, even though public perception of fraud is widespread.

What the research shows

Academic and government studies find vanishingly low rates. The Brennan Center's seminal review found that most reported incidents of voter fraud are actually traceable to other sources, such as clerical errors or bad data matching practices, and that elections meticulously studied for voter fraud showed incident rates between 0.0003 percent and 0.0025 percent. That report concluded an American "will be struck by lightning than that he will impersonate another voter at the polls."

A widely cited 2016 analysis found 31 credible allegations of fraud among some 1 billion ballots cast between 2000 and 2014, and even that small number was likely an overcount.

State-by-state audits confirm the pattern. In Pennsylvania, the Heritage Foundation analyzed 30 years of data across 32 elections, and just 39 cases of voter fraud were identified — 0.000039 percent of the more than 100 million ballots cast. In Arizona, around 42.6 million votes were cast with only 36 cases of fraud in total. A 2025 analysis of Pennsylvania data similarly found that 165 allegedly fraudulent ballots were cast since mid-2015, out of more than 67 million votes cast, meaning the rate of alleged fraudulent voting was roughly 0.00024%.

Specific fraud types are essentially nonexistent. Noncitizen voting is often raised as a concern, but studies find it at a rate of 0.0001%, less than the odds of being struck by lightning in a lifetime. In Washington state, researchers found 15 cases of noncitizen voting have been prosecuted from 1982 through 2025, or about 0.000006% of ballots cast. Mail-ballot fraud involving dead voters was similarly minuscule: only 14 out of 4.5 million voters from 2011 to 2018 "might have been cast suspiciously long after their death," which is 0.0003% of all voters in the state.

Mail-in voting, despite being a frequent target of fraud claims, also shows low fraud rates. Brookings researchers examined cases of fraud reported during elections in 2016, 2018, 2020, and 2022 and estimated there were about four cases of fraud for every 10 million mail ballots cast, on average.

Even conservative-leaning trackers find small numbers. The Heritage Foundation's own Election Fraud Database — often cited by those concerned about fraud — laid out cases in every state, finding 1,561 instances of voter fraud that resulted in 1,325 convictions, with 20 cases brought in 2024. Given that over 150 million Americans vote in presidential elections, this represents a tiny fraction of a percent.

Errors get mistaken for fraud. Sometimes apparent fraud turns out to be administrative error rather than intentional wrongdoing. For example, in New Jersey, about 6,600 people who identified as noncitizens were erroneously registered to vote in 2023 and 2024 due to a software error, and a preliminary analysis showed that fewer than 400 of those people actually voted.

The gap between perception and reality

Despite this evidence, public concern remains high. A 2024 NPR/PBS/Marist poll found that six in ten U.S. adults were concerned or very concerned about voter fraud ahead of the presidential election, with this fear particularly pronounced among Republican-leaning voters at 86 percent, versus 55 percent of Independents and just 33 percent of Democratic-leaning voters. Academic surveys similarly find that substantial proportions of U.S. registered voters believe that various types of election fraud are common, even though the documented evidence doesn't support that belief.

Bottom line

Isolated, individual cases of fraud do occur — people have been convicted of things like voting twice, voting on behalf of a deceased relative, or registration fraud. But decades of research across different methodologies and political leanings converge on one conclusion: fraud occurs at rates far too low to affect election outcomes, and it is not a systemic problem in U.S. elections.