Is voter fraud a problem in the US?

Short answer: No, not in any statistically significant way — extensive research consistently finds voter fraud is extremely rare in the US, even though public perception of it as a major problem remains widespread.

What the research shows

Multiple independent studies spanning decades, differing methodologies, and even politically opposed sources converge on the same conclusion.

The scale is vanishingly small. All credible empirical studies and public databases reviewed show voter fraud in the United States is vanishingly rare — measured rates fall many orders of magnitude below one percent and are typically expressed in millionths or ten-thousandths of a percent depending on the dataset and method. For context, one widely cited analysis found incident rates between 0.0003 percent and 0.0025 percent, concluding it is more likely an American "will be struck by lightning than that he will impersonate another voter at the polls."

State-level data confirms this. Even using data from the conservative Heritage Foundation, which actively tracks fraud cases, the rates are minuscule: in Arizona, around 42.6 million votes were cast with only 36 cases of fraud in total, while Pennsylvania had over 100 million votes cast in 32 elections across 30 years with only around 39 cases of voter fraud.

In-person impersonation fraud (the type voter ID laws target) is essentially nonexistent. A comprehensive study found 31 credible instances of impersonation fraud from 2000 to 2014, out of more than 1 billion ballots cast, and even this tiny number is likely inflated since it counted any credible claim, not just prosecutions. Separate research found 10 cases of voter impersonation fraud nationwide from 2000–2012, and a follow-up study looking specifically in states where politicians argued fraud was a major problem found zero successful prosecutions for impersonation fraud in five states from 2012–2016.

Mail-in voting fraud is also extremely rare. Research published by the Brookings Institute found that cases of mail-in voting fraud account for merely 0.000043% of all ballots cast by mail, equivalent to roughly four out of every 10 million.

Noncitizen voting is negligible. A 2014 paper concluded that "the likely percent of non-citizen voters in recent US elections is 0." More recent state-level tracking supports this: in Washington state, 15 cases of noncitizen voting have been prosecuted from 1982 through 2025, or about 0.000006% of ballots cast.

Prosecutions nationwide are few. Research tracking federal convictions found at the federal level, "an average of eight people a year" were convicted of voter fraud between 2002-2005.

A nuance: registration errors vs. actual fraud

It's worth distinguishing fraud from administrative issues. Outdated voter rolls are common — approximately 24 million voter registrations in the US are no longer valid or significantly inaccurate, more than 1.8 million deceased individuals are listed as voters, and approximately 2.75 million people have registrations in more than one state. However, having an inaccurate registration is not the same as someone actually casting a fraudulent vote — researchers often find such cases stem from clerical or technical errors, such as a 2005 Michigan case where 132 votes were alleged to have been cast by deceased voters because officials failed to properly match death records with voting lists.

Perception vs. reality gap

Despite this evidence, public belief in widespread fraud remains high. This issue has been raised so often that roughly 1 in 4 Americans believes that voter fraud is a real problem. More recent surveys show even higher numbers for specific claims — 40% of respondents in 2024 believed noncitizen voting was a common occurrence. Researchers attribute much of this gap to media coverage and political rhetoric rather than documented evidence.

Bottom line

The overwhelming scholarly, legal, and bipartisan-data consensus (including analyses using conservative-leaning sources like the Heritage Foundation's own database) is that voter fraud occurs at scales far too small to affect election outcomes, even in close races. It is not a "problem" in the sense of being widespread or systemic — isolated cases exist, but they are statistically negligible compared to the hundreds of millions of ballots cast.