Large-scale voter fraud is extraordinarily rare in America

With many states greatly expanding voters’ ability to vote by mail as a safety precaution in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, there have been some voices recently claiming that expanded use of mail-in ballots will only aggravate what is already a rampant problem of fraudulent elections across the United States.

But is “voter fraud” really a major issue in the country?

In a word, no.

Study after study and investigation after investigation have proven that election fraud is so rare in our country as to be effectively non-existent. When it does happen, it has been at nowhere near the scale necessary to rig the outcome of an election.

Expanded or first-time use of mail-in ballots certainly could pose logistical and security challenges for many states that haven’t managed them on this scale before. But that challenge comes in the context of an electoral system in which fraud is vanishingly rare with many protocols and procedures already in place to ensure the integrity of mail-in ballots and elections in general.

Here are 10 studies, investigations, and commissions that have all confirmed that large-scale voter fraud has proven to be extraordinarily rare throughout modern American political history.

1. An analysis by the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC) and Washington Post found that of 14.6 million ballots cast in 2016 and 2018 in Colorado, Oregon, and Washington, which conduct their elections entirely by mail, only 372 possible cases of illegal voting could be identified. That represented just 0.0025% of all votes cast.
2. A database maintained by the conservative Heritage Foundation identifies just 1,285 cases of potential voter fraud from among hundreds of millions of ballots cast over 20 years. Only 204 of those instances involved absentee or vote-by-mail ballots.
3. A 2014 study by election law expert Justin Levitt of Loyola Law School, Los Angeles, found merely 31 credible allegations of voter impersonation — a person intentionally misusing the identity of a registered voter — from 1 billion ballots cast over 14 years. That’s equal to one vote out of every 32 million cast.
4. In a 2016 analysis from News21, an investigative reporting project based at Arizona State University, out of 2,068 allegations in 50 states, it was determined that actual fraud amounted to an “infinitesimal” number of the 146 million registered voters in that 12-year span. The analysis found only 10 cases of voter impersonation.
5. In a check of the registration rolls in 2013 and 2015, then-Ohio Sectary of State Jon Husted concluded that 44 noncitizens had voted in at least one election dating back to 2000. To put that number in context, however, 3.26 million ballots were cast in Ohio in 2015 alone, and Husted told The Columbus Dispatch that “none of these affected the outcome of the election.”
6. A 2016 working paper by researchers at Stanford University, the University of Pennsylvania, and Harvard University concluded that the “upper limit” on how often people may have double-voted in the 2012 election was 0.02%. The paper noted that the actual incidence rate was likely much lower, given audits conducted by the researchers showing that “many, if not all, of these apparent double votes could be a result of measurement error.”
7. The state of Iowa spent $250,000 from 2012-2014 looking for potential examples of non-citizens voting illegally. After two years of investigation, county attorneys brought charges against a grand total of 27 alleged noncitizens.
   
8. The Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity was formed in May 2017 to investigate claims of widespread voter fraud by illegal immigrants in the 2016 election. The panel investigated purported cases of fraud in several states, but it turned up no evidence of widespread voter fraud or proof that millions of illegal immigrants voted illegally in the 2016 cycle. The commission disbanded less than a year after its creation.
9. A 2007 study by a Columbia University political scientist tracked incidence rates for voter fraud over two years, finding that what rare fraud that was reported generally could be traced to “false claims by the loser of a close race, mischief and administrative or voter error.”
10. The only recent high-profile incident involving corrupted mail-in ballots occurred in North Carolina’s 9th Congressional district in 2018. That scheme was initiated by a campaign operative and not individual voters.

The conclusion, supported by these 10 examples, is that claims of rampant voter fraud have no basis and are usually pretexts for voter suppression. They are meant to undermine faith in elections.

Check out the Kennedy Institute’s Getting to the Point on Voting Rights to learn more about America’s history with ensuring that every voice is heard at the ballot box. You can also learn more about the issues surrounding voter fraud on the JustVote.org website.