Is voter fraud a problem in the US?

Short answer: It exists, but at extremely low rates — not the widespread problem it's often portrayed to be.

What decades of research show:

Virtually every rigorous academic and government study has reached the same conclusion. The consensus from credible research and investigation is that the rate of illegal voting is extremely rare, and the incidence of certain types of fraud – such as impersonating another voter – is virtually nonexistent. A landmark Brennan Center report reviewed elections that had been meticulously studied for voter fraud, and found incident rates between 0.0003 percent and 0.0025 percent.

Specific data points illustrate just how rare it is:

Noncitizen voting specifically:

This has been a major focus recently, but investigations keep deflating the claims. In 2025, DHS and DOJ efforts to find large numbers of noncitizen voters largely fell apart under scrutiny:

Why "errors" often get mistaken for fraud:

Much of what looks like fraud turns out to be clerical/administrative error rather than intentional wrongdoing. For example, in July, New Jersey Governor Mikie Sherrill announced that about 6,600 people who identified as noncitizens were erroneously registered to vote in 2023 and 2024, through no fault of their own, due to a software error in the state's automatic voter registration system.

The gap between perception and reality:

Despite the data, public concern remains high — and sharply partisan. Six in ten U.S. adults were concerned or very concerned about voter fraud ahead of the presidential election, according to a poll by NPR/PBS News and Marist, with fear particularly pronounced among Republican-leaning voters at 86 percent, versus 55 percent of Independents and just 33 percent of Democratic-leaning voters.

Bottom line

Isolated cases of voter fraud do occur every election cycle — double voting, ineligible voting by felons in some states, occasional noncitizen registration errors — but the scale is minuscule relative to the hundreds of millions of ballots cast, and there's no credible evidence it has changed any election outcome. The bigger practical issues in U.S. elections tend to involve administrative errors, voter list maintenance problems, and (according to some researchers) low turnout rather than fraud itself.