Electoral fraud in the United States

Electoral fraud in the United States, also known as voter fraud, involves illegal voting in or manipulation of United States elections. Types of fraud include voter impersonation or in-person voter fraud, mail-in or absentee ballot fraud, illegal voting by noncitizens and double voting.

Electoral fraud is considered by most experts to be extremely rare in the United States, with some experts stating that mail-in voting is more vulnerable to fraud than voting in-person. In the last half-century, there have been occasional examples of electoral fraud affecting United States elections, mostly on the local level. Electoral fraud was significantly more prevalent in earlier United States history, particularly in the 19th and early 20th centuries, and has long been a significant topic in American political discourse. In recent years, false accusations of electoral fraud have often been linked to the election denial movement in the United States.

Frequency

Electoral fraud is considered by most experts to be extremely rare in the United States, and often accidental when it occurs. Fraud is more likely to occur in and affect the outcome of local elections, where the potential impact of a small number of votes can be greater.

Voter impersonation

Voter impersonation, or in-person voter fraud, is described by experts as extremely rare. Between 1978–2018, no elections were overturned by courts due to voter impersonation fraud. Cases of voter impersonation are often difficult to prove.

Rutgers professor Lorraine Minnite has maintained that voter impersonation is illogical from the perspective of the perpetrator due to the high risk and limited upside of casting one vote. If caught, perpetrators of voter impersonation can face up to 5 years in prison and a fine of up to $10,000 for citizens and deportation for immigrants. Proponents of voter identification laws have argued that it can be difficult to detect voter impersonation if voter ID is not required. University of Virginia law professor Michael D. Gilbert agreed with Minnite in 2014 that theory and evidence suggest voter impersonation "rarely occurs", though agreed with voter ID proponents that "the failure to observe fraud does not mean that no fraud takes place". Gilbert noted that it is difficult for someone to coordinate widespread voter impersonation to steal an election, as even if they paid people to vote in-person for their preferred candidate, they could not confirm whether these people voted the way they were paid to.

ABC News reported in 2012 that only four cases of voter impersonation had led to convictions in Texas over the previous decade. A study released the same year by News21, an Arizona State University reporting project, identified a total of 10 cases of alleged voter impersonation in the United States between 2000 and 2012. Another 2012 study found no evidence that voter impersonation (in the form of people voting under the auspices of a dead voter) occurred in the 2006 Georgia general elections.

In a 2013 study, the New York City Department of Investigation (DOI) sent investigators to vote under the names of 63 ineligible voters, who were either deceased, felons or had moved outside New York City. 61 of those investigators were allowed to illegally vote under their assumed identities. One of the two who was not allowed to vote was recognized by the mother of the felon they were impersonating, who worked at the polling place. In five instances, investigators in their 20s or 30s successfully posed as voters age 82 to 94. The DOI report stated that this result, while not large enough to be statistically significant, "indicates vulnerability in the system".

In April 2014, Federal District Court Judge Lynn Adelman ruled in Frank v. Walker that Wisconsin's voter ID law was unconstitutional because "virtually no voter impersonation occurs in Wisconsin ...". In August 2014, Loyola Law School professor Justin Levitt reported in the Washington Post's Wonkblog that he had identified only 31 credible cases of voter impersonation since 2000. The most serious incident identified involved as many as 24 people trying to vote under assumed names in Brooklyn, which would still not have made a significant difference in most American elections. A 2014 study in the Election Law Journal found that when surveyed, about the same percentage of Americans indicated they had been abducted by extraterrestrials as having committed voter impersonation. In 2016, News21 reviewed cases of possible voter impersonation in five states where politicians had expressed concerns about it. They found 38 successful state prosecutions for voter fraud, none of which were for voter impersonation.

Mail-in ballot fraud

See also: Postal voting in the United States § Reliability of postal ballots

Mail-in ballot fraud is considered quite rare, though some experts consider it more likely to occur than in-person voter fraud. Between 1978–2018, at least fourteen elections were invalidated or overturned by courts due to absentee ballot fraud.

Postal ballots have been the source of "most significant vote-counting disputes in recent decades", according to Edward Foley, director of the Election Law program at Ohio State University. The New York Times wrote in 2012 that according to election administrators, fraud in voting by mail was "far less common than innocent errors" but "vastly more prevalent" than in-person voting fraud. University of Chicago political scientist Anthony Fowler said in 2020 that with mail-in ballots, "it could be easier for someone to fraudulently vote on behalf of someone else or for someone to tamper with ballots" and "one might be more concerned about coercion or vote buying", but that in practice, "voter fraud is very rare, and the risk of widespread fraud is probably very minimal, even with all-mail elections".

Justin Levitt, a law professor at Loyola Marymount, has stated "misconduct in the mail voting process is meaningfully more prevalent than misconduct in the process of voting in person", but that misconduct "still amounts to only a tiny fraction of the ballots cast by mail". Lonna Atkeson, an expert in election administration, said about mail-in voting fraud, "It's really hard to find ... The fact is, we really don't know how much fraud there is ... There aren't millions of fraudulent votes, but there are some." Lorraine Minnite, a professor at Rutgers University says “my sense is that it is not much more frequent than in-person voter fraud, which rarely occurs.” Richard Hasen, a professor at University of California, Irvine School of Law, said in 2020 that "problems are extremely rare in the five states that rely primarily on vote-by-mail."

An analysis by News21 found 491 known cases of absentee ballot fraud between 2000 and 2012. In April 2020, a voter fraud study covering 20 years by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found the level of mail-in ballot fraud "exceedingly rare" since it occurs only in "0.00006 percent" of individual votes nationally, and, in one state, "0.000004 percent — about five times less likely than getting hit by lightning in the United States." A 2020 Washington Post analysis of data from three vote-by-mail states (Colorado, Oregon and Washington), with help from the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC), found that officials had identified just 372 possible cases of double voting or voting on behalf of deceased people out of about 14.6 million mail votes cast in 2016 and 2018.

Ballot harvesting, or third parties collecting and delivering absentee ballots for voters, is legal in some states but illegal or restricted in others. Other types of fraud have included pressure on voters from family or others, since the ballot is not always cast in secret; collection of ballots by dishonest collectors who mark votes or fail to deliver ballots; and insiders changing, challenging or destroying ballots after they arrive.

In many cases, ballot drop boxes are placed in locations where they can be monitored by security cameras or election staff.

Noncitizen voting

See also: Non-citizen suffrage in the United States § 21st century

Illegal noncitizen voting is considered extremely rare by most experts. This is due in part to the more severe penalties associated with the practice including deportation, up to five years of incarceration or fines, as well as the jeopardizing of naturalization efforts.

According to the Associated Press, election administration experts say it is provable and demonstrated that the number of noncitizens voting in federal elections is infinitesimal. The federal form to register a voter requires a unique identification number such as a Social Security or driver's license number, but it does not require proof of citizenship. New voters are only required to check a box attesting that they are a citizen. The process of verifying the citizenship of voters varies by state, and not all states conduct verification. States that have examined their voter rolls, however, have found very few noncitizen voters and typically have safeguards that prevent noncitizen voting. When noncitizens are added to voter rolls, it is usually by mistake, as the result of a federal law that requires states to offer people voter registration when they visit a motor vehicle office.

A Brennan Center for Justice study of 2016 data from 42 jurisdictions found an estimated 30 incidents of suspected noncitizen voting out of 23.5 million votes cast (or .0001% of all votes cast). A database by The Heritage Foundation that includes a "sampling" of voter fraud cases brought by prosecutors found only 24 noncitizen voting cases in the database between 2003 and 2023. San Francisco State University professor and noncitizen voting expert Ron Hayduk referred to noncitizen voting as a "problem that doesn't exist". In an audit of the 2016 elections, the North Carolina State Board of Elections found that 41 out of 4.8 million total votes were by noncitizens. In 2018, CNN reported that in the three years since Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach had the authority to prosecute election crimes, he convicted 3 noncitizens of voting out of 1.8 million voters.

Richard Hasen has said that noncitizens are not voting in large numbers and cited a 2016 U.S. Court of Appeals ruling as showing "there is no evidence it is a serious problem", though he has also said it cannot be dismissed as an imaginary occurrence. Glenn Kessler in The Washington Post stated there was "scattered evidence" of noncitizen voting and little to support the idea that it ever affected the outcome of a major election, but that the scarcity of evidence "does not necessarily prove that the phenomenon does not happen". He wrote that "if a noncitizen casts a ballot, there is no obvious victim to make a complaint and little public documentation to prove that a voter is not a citizen".

Prominent Republicans such as House Speaker Mike Johnson have argued that noncitizen voting is a threat, though claims of widespread noncitizen voting have been unsupported by evidence. Several Republican-led states have flagged and removed small numbers of purported noncitizens from voter rolls, ranging in the hundreds or thousands. These figures have been criticized by voting rights organizations for erroneously including legal voters, particularly naturalized citizens.

In 2014, Old Dominion University (ODU) professors Jesse Richman and David Earnest published a study based on Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES) data, which claimed that 6.4% of noncitizens had voted in 2008 and 2.2% in 2010. The study was criticized by numerous academics and has been described as discredited or debunked. A 2015 study of the same data by CCES administrators found that at most, one survey respondent was a noncitizen voter; co-author Brian Schaffner said the ODU study "is irresponsible social science and should never have been published in the first place. There is no evidence that noncitizens have voted in recent U.S. elections." 200 political scientists signed an open letter saying the ODU study should "not be cited or used in any debate over fraudulent voting." and the CCES sent out a newsletter encouraging researchers not to use their data as the study had. Methodology issues included the study's sample size and the unreliable database of Internet respondents. Richman later conceded that measurement error may have biased the numbers. In 2017, Richman rebuked Donald Trump for inaccurately citing his study to justify false claims that millions of noncitizens had voted.

Double voting

Double voting is considered extremely rare. When someone votes twice within the same state, it is often inadvertent, for example if a voter thinks their absentee ballot will not be delivered in time. As of 2023, the only system that can detect double voting across states is the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC), which close to half of states participate in.

A 2008 Election Law Journal article found that a number of claims from the early 2000s purporting to have found double voters were due largely to the 'Birthday problem', or the statistical probability of people sharing the same name and birthday across multiple states. It noted that substantiated instances of double voting are 'notable mostly for their rarity.' In 2007, the Secretary of State of Washington checked voter signatures to verify whether or not double-voting occurred among people with the same name and birthday, and the check exonerated all but one person.

An American Political Science Review study of voter data from the 2012 presidential election estimated that at most 1 in 4,000 voters illegally cast two ballots, though it noted accounting errors could account for most if not all of those numbers. The study found that many apparent double-voters were the result of incorrectly marking someone as having voted. It also concluded that when two voter records share the same name and birthdate, removing the earlier registration could impede approximately 300 legitimate votes for each double vote prevented.

Being registered to vote in multiple states without voting in more than one is allowed. The legal definition of double voting varies between states.

Felony voting

See also: Felony disenfranchisement in the United States

In the United States, depending on the state, a person may have their voting rights suspended or withdrawn due to the conviction of a criminal offense, usually a felony. Felons who cast a ballot in those states often do not know that they were ineligible to vote.

A North Carolina State Board of Elections audit of the 2016 elections found that 441 felons had voted before their right to vote had been restored. Out of 12 people on probation for a felony who were charged with illegal voting in Alamance County, North Carolina in 2016, five stated in separate interviews with The New York Times that they had thought they were allowed to vote. At least seven pled down to misdemeanors.

Petition fraud

A type of fraud that sometimes occurs is falsification of signatures on nominating petitions. Experts say that as the cost of gathering paid signatures goes up, there is a greater incentive for fraud.

Outdated voter registration

Outdated voter registration has not been linked to voter fraud despite allegations connecting the two.

A 2012 report by the Pew Center on the States based on data collected in 2008, found that over 1.8 million dead people were registered to vote nationwide and over 3 million voters were registered in multiple states. According to PolitiFact, the study investigated "outdated voter rolls, not fraudulent votes", and made "no mention of noncitizens voting or registering to vote".

Pew researchers found that military personnel were disproportionately affected by voter registration errors. Most often these involved members of the military and their families who were deployed overseas. For example, in 2008 alone, they reported almost "twice as many registration problems" as the general public. In an October 2016 Associated Press fact-check, the author noted these voter registration irregularities left some people concerned that the electoral system was vulnerable to the impersonation of dead voters. However, voter rolls with dead voters are usually due to the states being slow to eliminate dead voters. By 2016, most states had addressed concerns raised by the Pew 2012 report.

A 2004 analysis by The Chicago Tribune that compared voter rolls with Social Security Administration death claims found that more than 181,000 dead voters were on voter rolls across six swing states, including 64,889 in Florida and 50,051 in Michigan. The Tribune wrote that outdated voter registration "is considered cause for concern, especially in states where the presidential election was decided by just a few thousand votes". It noted that new laws to be adopted in 2006 were "designed to fix some of those problems".

Notable cases

19th century

1872 depiction of electoral fraud in Philadelphia.

Electoral fraud was prevalent in the United States during the 19th century, when safeguards against fraud and electioneering were considerably weaker, and political machines wielded significantly more power. Political parties would produce their own ballots, and as of the mid-19th century, seven states still conducted elections by voice voting. States only began to adopt the secret ballot in the 1880s and 1890s.

Voter fraud was so common that it developed its own vocabulary. "Colonizers" were groups of bought voters who moved en masse between wards. "Floaters" were voters who cast ballots for multiple parties. "Repeaters" were voters who voted multiple times, sometimes in disguise. Cooping was a form of electoral fraud where people were kidnapped, drugged and forced to repeatedly vote, and is notably thought to have contributed to the October 7, 1849 death of Edgar Allan Poe.

Elections in cities such as New York City, Chicago, San Francisco, Pittsburgh and Kansas City were influenced by political machines. The Democratic Tammany Hall machine in New York City, for example, encouraged residents to vote multiple times by shaving their beards, registered voters under fake names, physically intimidated voters and granted citizenship to newly arrived immigrants. According to University of Chicago professor John Mark Hansen, cheating also regularly occurred in suburban and rural areas. Voter fraud and suppression against African-Americans was common in the Jim Crow South.

A glass ballot box, patented in 1858 to prevent electoral fraud.

In the 1850s Kansas Territory elections, pro-slavery forces seeking to ratify the Lecompton Constitution carried out voter fraud on multiple occasions by importing pro-slavery people from Missouri to cast ballots.

In the 1876 United States presidential election between Republican Rutherford B. Hayes and Democrat Samuel J. Tilden, voter fraud was widespread, with South Carolina reporting an impossible 101 percent turnout. Violence and intimidation by Democrats against Black Republican voters also occurred. In four contested states, Republicans and Democrats filed separate tallies favoring their respective candidates. The election was ultimately decided by the Congress-appointed Electoral Commission in favor of Hayes.

In the 1888 United States presidential election, there was evidence of voter fraud in some states that favored Republican Benjamin Harrison, particularly in his home state of Indiana. Public backlash contributed to the implementation of secret ballots nationwide. Two races in that year's United States House of Representatives elections were also overturned due to fraud. In Arkansas, Republican John M. Clayton lost to Democrat Clifton R. Breckinridge after a ballot box with a large majority of Clayton votes was stolen. Clayton was assassinated the following year while challenging the election, but was posthumously declared the winner. In Maryland, Democrat Barnes Compton was initially elected, but his Republican opponent Sydney E. Mudd successfully contested the election the following year alleging fraud.

Evidence suggests that the 1892 Alabama gubernatorial election, where Reuben Kolb lost to incumbent Democrat Thomas Goode Jones, was decided by fraud. This included ballot boxes being stolen, votes being swayed by bribery or threats, and counties in the Black Belt announcing results before later changing them. Kolb was not allowed by law to contest the results, and lost the gubernatorial race in 1894 under similar circumstances.

20th century

Electoral fraud caused several notable elections in the 20th century to be affected or annulled.

In the early 20th century, electoral fraud was common and similar in nature to the 19th century. The election to ratify the Alabama Constitution of 1901 was dubbed by columnist David Sher as "one of the most consequential voter fraud incidents in U.S. history", as widespread fraud in the election led to Alabama adopting a constitution still largely in effect as of 2024. In the 1905 New York City mayoral election, there was electoral fraud against William Randolph Hearst linked to the Tammany Hall machine. Hearst lost to Democrat George McClellan by 3,472 votes. In the 1918 United States House of Representatives elections in Pennsylvania, Democrat Patrick McLane was declared the winner in the 10th district, but a congressional committee determined in 1921 that "wholesale fraud" had cheated Republican John R. Farr out of the election, and McLane was unseated.

1948 Texas U.S. Senate Democratic primary runoff results, with Johnson counties in blue, and Stevenson counties in green.

In the 1948 United States Senate election in Texas, according to a 1990 book by historian Robert A. Caro, Democrat Lyndon B. Johnson won his primary against Coke R. Stevenson due to electoral fraud, which included county officials casting ballots for absent voters and changing vote tally numbers. Johnson won the primary by 87 votes, and the Texas Democratic Party executive committee upheld his victory by a vote of 29 to 28. The event became known as the Box 13 scandal, as six days after polls had closed, 202 additional votes were added to the totals for Precinct 13 of Jim Wells County: 200 for Johnson and two for Stevenson.

Some historians believe the 1960 United States presidential election in Illinois was decided by fraud in favor of Democrat John F. Kennedy, who ran against Republican Richard Nixon. Multiple judges and one independent prosecutor determined that the election was fair, though historian Robert Dallek, who wrote biographies on both candidates, concluded the Chicago machine run by mayor Richard J. Daley "probably stole Illinois from Nixon". Nixon would not have won the electoral college even if he had carried Illinois. According to Politico in 2016, "over a half century after the fact, it’s impossible to judge what really happened". Nixon conceded the election the following morning, though he encouraged recount efforts in Illinois and other states, which were shut down after setbacks in several key court hearings.

Between 1968 and 1984, eight Democratic primary elections in Brooklyn, New York were marked by repeated fraud according to the findings of a grand jury. The fraud included multiple voting by teams of political workers with fake voter identification cards. Richard Hasen has argued that this fraud, because it involved election officials colluding with one another, could not have been prevented by a voter ID law.

U.S. Attorney Dan Webb prosecuted voter fraud in the 1982 Illinois elections.

In the 1982 Illinois elections, there were 62 indictments and 58 convictions for election fraud, many involving precinct captains and election officials. A grand jury concluded that 100,000 fraudulent votes had been cast in Chicago. Authorities found fraud involving vote buying and ballots cast by others in the names of registered voters. The case was prosecuted in November 1982 by U.S. Attorney Dan K. Webb. In the 1987 Chicago mayoral election, two reviews conducted by the Chicago Board of Election Commissioners and an election watchdog group headed by Webb found that tens of thousands of ballots were fraudulently cast in the Democratic primary.

In the 1994 Pennsylvania State Senate election, a federal judge invalidated a race in Philadelphia after finding that the Democratic candidate, William G. Stinson, had stolen the election through absentee ballot fraud. The fraud involved hundreds of residents being encouraged to vote absentee without a legal justification. Republicans took control of the State Senate as a result of the ruling. In the 1996 United States House of Representatives elections in California, an investigation by the House Oversight Committee found that 748 illegal votes had been cast in the 46th district race between Bob Dornan and Loretta Sanchez, including 624 by noncitizens. The race was ultimately decided by 979 votes, so it did not affect the outcome.

The 1997 Miami mayoral election is known for being one of the worst examples of electoral fraud in recent history, with the result invalidated by a judge who cited "a pattern of fraudulent, intentional and criminal conduct" in the casting of absentee ballots. The neighboring city of Hialeah, Florida had its own mayoral contest overturned in 1993, when a judge ruled that so many ballots had been cast from a retirement home housing schizophrenics and drug addicts that the election had to be re-run.

21st century

A vacant name plate in the U.S. House of Representatives during the 2018 North Carolina's 9th congressional district election fraud investigation.

In the 21st century, there have been scattered examples of electoral fraud affecting the outcome of elections, and attempts at widespread electoral fraud are notable when they occur at all. Fraud was alleged by losing candidates in several major close elections, including the 2004 Washington gubernatorial election, the 2008 United States Senate election in Minnesota and most notably, the 2020 United States presidential election, but nothing that would account for the margin of victory was proven in court.

In the 2003 East Chicago, Indiana mayoral election, the Indiana Supreme Court invalidated the Democratic primary victory of Robert Pastrick citing "a widespread and pervasive pattern" of absentee ballot fraud. Forty-six people, mainly city workers, were found guilty in a wide-ranging conspiracy to purchase votes through the use of absentee ballots, which included the coercion of sick people and people with limited English skills.

In the 2012 United States House of Representatives elections in Florida, Jeffrey Garcia, chief of staff to 26th district incumbent Joe Garcia, was charged with orchestrating an attempt to illegally request nearly 2,000 absentee ballots. Garcia pled guilty to a misdemeanor and was sentenced to 90 days in jail. In the 2014 and 2016 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania elections, former Democratic congressman Michael "Ozzie" Myers was found to have bribed election workers to stuff ballot boxes in local races, and was sentenced to 2 1/2 years in prison after pleading guilty in 2022.

One of the most notable recent cases of fraud occurred in the 2018 United States House of Representatives elections in North Carolina, where Mark Harris won the 9th district Republican primary by 900 votes, but allegations of absentee ballot tampering related to a Harris campaign consultant stopped the North Carolina State Board of Elections from certifying the result. A new election was held in 2019, in which Harris did not run.

Bridgeport, Connecticut mayor Joe Ganim won re-election in 2024 after a primary invalidated for ballot stuffing.

In the 2023–24 Bridgeport, Connecticut mayoral election, a judge ordered the Democratic primary to be re-run after ruling that there was enough evidence of ballot stuffing to throw the results into doubt. According to the New York Times, illegal ballot manipulation is not uncommon in Bridgeport elections, and has included apartment residents being pressured to apply for absentee ballots they were not entitled to. Incumbent mayor Joseph Ganim, who had won the initial primary, also won the do-over primary and the general election.

Other notable 21st-century cases have included 2012 Massachusetts House of Representatives Republican candidate Enrico "Jack" Villamaino, who along with his wife forged more than 280 voters' names on absentee ballot requests; Cincinnati, Ohio poll worker Melowese Richardson, who made national headlines in 2012 for using her position to illegally vote twice; Southfield, Michigan poll worker Sherikia Hawkins, who pled no contest to misconduct after she was accused of covering up a failure to count 193 absentee ballots in 2018 and Kim Phuong Taylor, wife of 2020 Iowa congressional candidate Jeremy Taylor, who illegally filled out or submitted dozens of voter registrations and absentee ballots.

Public perception

A 2016 nationwide poll published in the Washington Post found that 84% of Republicans, 75% of independents and 52% of Democrats believed that a "meaningful amount" of fraud occurred in United States elections. A 2022 poll by the Institute of Governmental Studies at UC Berkeley found that 39% of California voters thought illegal voting was a "major threat" to state elections, and 21% thought it was a "minor threat". A series of Monmouth polls conducted between 2020 and 2023 found that 29%–32% of Americans believed the 2020 presidential election was fraudulent.

A June 2021 poll by the Texas Tribune and University of Texas found that 19% of Texas voters think that ineligible people frequently cast ballots. A July 2021 poll published by NPR found that more Americans were concerned about ensuring everyone who wants to vote can cast a ballot (56%) versus ensuring that nobody who is ineligible votes (41%). 90% of Democrats said access was more important versus 75% of Republicans who said stopping ineligible voting was more important.

Perception gap

See also: Election denial movement in the United States § Analysis, and Foreign interference in the 2024 United States elections

Flawed research is one factor that can widen a gap in perception that significant voter fraud has occurred between supporters of the candidate that lost an election and the supporters of a candidate that won.

False claims of fraud have lowered overall levels of trust in elections. A nationwide study conducted after the 2018 United States elections and published in the Journal of Experimental Political Science found that exposure to claims of voter fraud reduces confidence in electoral integrity, though does not reduce support for democracy itself. Corrective messages from mainstream sources did not measurably reduce this distrust.

Sciences Po academic Jérôme Viala-Gaudefroy suggests that much of the United States' political and media class is "willing to accept, exploit, and organise conspiracy thinking for its benefit", and that right-wing false narratives of electoral fraud tap into Americans' longstanding political paranoia. Jon Schwarz of The Intercept lists examples of false voter fraud claims from Republicans going back decades. The New York Times cites the loosening of content moderation on social media by early 2024 as a driver in beliefs about conspiracy theories including those around election fraud. The Times also cites disinformation by autocracies such as Russia and China increasingly using AI and other tools to undermine the democratic process.

A 2016 study published in State Politics & Policy Quarterly found that Republicans living in states with voter identification laws were on average more confident in their state's elections than Republicans who did not. However Democrats in states with voter identification laws were less confident in their elections than other Democrats. The study found that this dynamic "was polarized and conditioned by party identification". October 2020 polling by University of Miami professor Joseph Uscinski found that 70% of Republicans believed the 2020 presidential election would be rigged with mail-in ballots, but nearly the same number of Democrats believed the election would be rigged by their mail-in ballots not being delivered.

According to Politico, many figures in the 2004 vote-fraud conspiracy movement, which claimed that the 2004 presidential election had been stolen from Democrat John Kerry, later believed the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Donald Trump, despite the two being ideological opposites.

Consequences

See also: Democratic backsliding in the United States

"Major threats" for US elections in 2022 according to voters in California

Political violence and threats

See also: Stochastic terrorism and Brooks Brothers riot

The combination of false claims about electoral fraud and violent, warlike rhetoric has been noted to raise the likelihood of election workers receiving threats, as well as political violence such as the January 6 attacks. Some election experts worry that Trump's voters would resort to violence again in 2024 if he lost the election. In September, Trump threatened to jail people "involved in unscrupulous behavior" in the 2024 election, prompting widespread condemnation from election officials that it could provoke violence, including against election workers.

A 2024 Brennan Center survey found 4 in 10 election workers had experienced threats, harassment or abuse. In some cases where poll workers were intimidated, such as Detroit in 2020 when poll watchers banged on the glass during vote counting and screamed 'stop the steal,' they were given additional protections for subsequent elections, including the electronic screening of poll watchers and a greater distance from them.

Voter intimidation

See also: Electoral fraud § Intimidation

While voter intimidation has been relatively rare, it has increased since 2020 with the false claims of fraud and concerted efforts to recruit poll watchers. In 2020 Donald Trump encouraged his supporters to go to the polls and "watch very carefully". CNBC cited voter intimidation as a bigger concern for analysts than voter fraud ahead of the 2020 elections. According to The Washington Post, voting rights advocates worry that the rhetoric about noncitizen voting could have a 'chilling effect' on Latino citizens and naturalized immigrants exercising their right to vote. In Arizona in 2022, there were instances of people surveilling drop boxes and taking photos of people's license plates.

Overturning election results

See also: Independent state legislature theory

In some cases, the spreading of fraud claims is done to lay the groundwork for overturning election results. The 2020 presidential election saw a number of failed attempts to overturn the results based on unfounded claims of voter fraud. The 2024 presidential election has seen similar claims, which some experts have warned could be seeds planted in case Trump loses and tries to overturn the result. The New York Times cited Georgia as the most likely state for this to occur in due to recent changes in election laws.

Voter turnout

Democrats and voting rights advocates argue that the Republican rhetoric around illegal voting is not a sincere effort to address voter fraud, but is designed to increase turnout of the Republican base.

Donald Trump fraud claims

See also: False or misleading statements by Donald Trump

2016 presidential election

Main article: Donald Trump 2016 presidential campaign § Uncertainty over accepting the election results

President Donald Trump claimed without evidence that between 3 and 5 million people cost him the popular vote to Hillary Clinton by voting illegally. He claimed that he narrowly lost to Hillary Clinton in 2016 in New Hampshire (and that Senator Kelly Ayotte also lost her bid for re-election in New Hampshire) because thousands of people were illegally bused there from Massachusetts. There is no evidence to support Trump's claims, which the New Hampshire Attorney General's Office determined were unfounded.

CNN reported in January of 2017 that Trump had based his fraud voter claims on information from Gregg Phillips. While members of Trump's cabinet and family were registered to vote in multiple states, this was considered to be oversight, not fraud. In response to Trump's allegations, on February 10, Ellen L. Weintraub, the Federal Election Commission (FEC) Commissioner, requested that Trump provide evidence of the "thousands of felony criminal offenses under New Hampshire law". In a CNN interview on February 12, Stephen Miller was unable at that time to support claims of voter fraud as evidence. There is no evidence to support Trump's assertion that there was substantial voter fraud in the 2016 election.

Voter fraud commission (2017)

Main article: Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity

President Trump signing the Executive Order establishing the Voter Fraud Commission

On May 11, 2017, Trump signed an executive order to establish a voter fraud commission to conduct an investigation into voter fraud. He had announced his intention to create the commission on January 25. The commission's chairman was Vice President Mike Pence with Kris Kobach as vice chairman. Kobach, who is the Secretary of State of Kansas, called for stricter voter ID laws in the United States. Kobach claims, without evidence, that there is a voter fraud crisis in the United States. Trump's creation of the commission was criticized by voting rights advocates, scholars and experts, and newspaper editorial boards as a pretext for, and prelude to, voter suppression.

In January 2018, Trump abruptly disbanded the commission, which met only twice. The commission found no evidence of widespread voter fraud in the United States.

2020 presidential election

See also: Attempts to overturn the 2020 United States presidential election, Post-election lawsuits related to the 2020 United States presidential election, and Republican efforts to restrict voting following the 2020 presidential election

During the 2020 presidential campaign, Trump indicated in Twitter posts, interviews and speeches that he might refuse to recognize the outcome of the election if he were defeated; Trump falsely suggested that the election would be rigged against him. Trump repeatedly claimed that "the only way" he could lose would be if the election was "rigged" and repeatedly refused to commit to a peaceful transition of power after the election. Trump also attacked mail-in voting throughout the campaign, falsely claiming that the practice contained high rates of fraud. In September 2020, FBI Director Christopher A. Wray, a Trump appointee, testified under oath that the FBI has "not seen, historically, any kind of coordinated national voter fraud effort in a major election, whether it's by mail or otherwise."

In the lead-up to the election, citing fraud concerns, Republicans filed lawsuits in several states seeking to limit the use of mail-in voting, and prepared to challenge individual mail-in ballots. Republican election lawyer Benjamin Ginsberg criticized his party for this in a November 1, 2020 Washington Post op-ed, writing that over the last four decades, "Republicans found only isolated instances of fraud", and that "Proof of systematic fraud has become the Loch Ness Monster of the Republican Party. People have spent a lot of time looking for it, but it doesn’t exist".

Trump claims of electoral fraud in the run-up to elections.

After most of the major news organizations declared Biden the President-elect on November 7, Trump refused to accept his loss, declaring "this election is far from over" and alleging election fraud without providing evidence. Multiple lawsuits alleging electoral fraud were filed by the Trump campaign, all of which were dismissed as having no merit. Republican officials questioned the legitimacy of the election and aired conspiracy theories regarding various types of alleged fraud. In early 2021, motivated by the claims of widespread voter fraud and the resulting legitimacy crisis among the Republican base, GOP lawmakers in a number of states initiated a push to make voting laws more restrictive.

In December of 2021, the Associated Press released a detailed fact-check which found fewer than 475 instances of voter fraud out of an estimated 25 million votes cast in the six battleground states. They involved both Democrats and Republicans and were almost always caught before the votes were counted. While some seemed intentional, others involved involved clerical error or voter confusion.

2024 presidential election

In the 2024 Republican New Hampshire primary, Trump repeated false claims that from other states voted in the primary. According to the New York Times, Trump escalated use of "rigged election" and "election interference" statements in advance of the 2024 election compared to the previous two elections. The statements were described as part of a "heads I win; tails you cheated" rhetorical strategy.

In January 2024, Richard Hasen wrote that Trump's fraud claims "still captivate millions of people". An August 2024 poll found that 17% of Americans are not prepared to accept the outcome of the 2024 election and that two-thirds of Americans do not believe Trump is prepared to accept the outcome. 34% of survey respondents lack confidence that votes will be tallied correctly.

In 2024, the Republican National Committee launched a swing state initiative to mobilize thousands of poll watchers, poll workers and attorneys to act as "election integrity" watchdogs. The party will deploy monitors to observe the election process, create hotlines for poll watchers to report perceived problems and escalate issues through legal action. Critics have argued that these efforts could undermine trust in elections and are targeted on polling places where more Democrats cast their ballots. The 2024 election also saw an increase in volunteers recruited by nonpartisan voter advocacy groups to assist poll workers and voters.

Prevention

Voter ID laws

Main article: Voter identification laws in the United States

In the United States, voter ID laws (laws requiring identification to vote) have been enacted in 36 states as of 2024 with the stated aim of preventing voter impersonation. They have mostly been introduced by Republican legislators since 2011. Specific forms of ID required vary between states, with some requiring photo identification. Some laws have been struck down in court as an undue burden.

Voter ID requirements are generally popular among Americans, though they are also a divisive issue. Critics of voter ID laws have argued that they depress turnout by lawful voters under the pretense of addressing voter impersonation, which is quite rare. Americans who have lower incomes, are younger or transgender are less likely to have an updated ID.

Proof of citizenship

A type of voter ID law is the requirement of proof of citizenship either to vote or register to vote. Proponents of proof of citizenship laws have argued that they are necessary to prevent illegal noncitizen voting, while critics have said that noncitizen voting does not occur and the laws would disenfranchise eligible voters who lack easy access to such documents. A June 2024 Brennan Center study estimates that 21.3 million citizens (9% of voters) do not have easy access to documentary proof of citizenship, and that 3.8 million citizens lack access to any form of documentary proof of citizenship, often because their documents were lost, destroyed or stolen.

Fish v. Kobach (Kansas)

In the 2018 Fish v. Kobach case, U.S. District Court Judge Julie Robinson ruled that Kansas' proof of citizenship law was unconstitutional, in part because the state had not shown that illegal noncitizen voting was widespread enough to justify it. She concluded "at most, 67 noncitizens registered or attempted to register" in the past 19 years, and that these cases were consistent with administrative error or confusion. Robinson dismissed evidence presented by Hans von Spakovsky, a member of Trump's voter fraud commission, as an expert witness for Kobach, as "premised on several misleading and unsupported examples". The ruling was upheld in 2020 by an appeals court that ruled that of the 39 noncitizens that appear on the Kansas voter rolls, most of them could be due to administrative anomalies. The court also said the law had an undue impact by cancelling or suspending the voter registrations of 31,089 voters.

SAVE Act

In July 2024, the United States House of Representatives passed the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act, which would mandate that Americans show proof of citizenship when registering to vote. It is considered unlikely to become law due to opposition from the Democratic Party and a 2013 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that deemed it illegal to require additional citizenship documentation in order to register to vote. According to The Guardian, " The bill could lead to people who are able to vote, such as naturalized citizens, college students and tribal voters, being removed from voter rolls."

Arizona law

In August 2024, the Supreme Court allowed Arizona to enforce a law requiring proof of citizenship to register to vote, pending appeal. Analysis by Votebeat found a higher concentration of people living near college campuses who could only vote in federal elections due to the law being enforced for state elections.

In 2023, Jesse Richman examined Arizona state voter and DMV files as an expert witness for a case about the law. Richman said that he found 1,934 registered voters (or 0.04%) of more than 4 million voters whose records indicated they were noncitizens at the time of registration or afterward. He also examined nationwide data from the 2022 Cooperative Election Study (CES), and found that just under one percent of noncitizens were registered to vote. Richman estimated that half a percent of noncitizens had voted in 2022. U.S. District Judge Susan R. Bolton wrote in her ruling on the case that "the Court found Dr. Richman’s testimony credible and affords his opinions considerable weight." Justin Levitt, who was skeptical of Richman's earlier research, said that while the CES data looked more reliable than in Richman's prior work, more information was needed to assess its reliability, and that actual turnout among noncitizens could be lower than Richman estimated.

Signature verification

Further information: Postal voting in the United States § Signature verification process

Signature verification is carried out by a majority of states in order to prevent forged paper ballots. According to the Election Administration and Voting Survey, 27.5% of rejected absentee ballots in 2016 and 15.8% of rejected mail-in ballots in 2018 were due to signature mismatches. Tossing ballots due to signature mismatches can depend on the method of signature verification used. As of 2024, 31 states conduct signature verification on returned absentee or mail-in ballots. Nine states do not conduct signature verification, but require the signature of either a witness, two witnesses, or a notary. Ten states and Washington, D.C. neither conduct signature verification nor require a witness signature.

Mississippi is the only state to both conduct signature verification and require a witness signature (in this case, a notary). Four states (Arkansas, Georgia, Minnesota and Ohio) additionally require either a copy of the voter’s ID or a voter identification number.

Researchers at Protect Democracy found that "an explosion of misinformation" about how much cheating occurs among voters using mail-in ballots caused a spike in rejected signatures during the 2021 Georgia Senate runoffs compared to the 2020 presidential election.

Election audits

Further information: Election audit § Current practices in election results auditing in the United States

As of 2024, 48 states conduct some type of post-election audit, which check if the equipment and procedures used to count votes worked properly, and detect discrepancies using a hand count of paper records. The two exceptions are Alabama and New Hampshire, both of which nonetheless piloted different audit types in 2022. The type and scope of audit significantly varies between states.

Voter roll management

Voter roll purges

See also: Voter suppression in the United States § Purging of eligible voters from the rolls

Voter caging is the process of challenging the voter registration status of someone who is registered to vote. It often involves sending that person a postcard to the address on file and removing the voter if they do not respond within a certain time period. The practice can be controversial with some civil rights groups successfully suing some states that target voters of a particular political party or race in such a way as to make it meaningfully impact election outcomes and voter's rights.

Interstate databases

The Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck Program was a database established in 2005 and run by Kansas that compared voting records across multiple states to prevent double voting. At least 28 states opted into the program, but academics and several states found that it returned high rates of false positives that would disenfranchise legal voters. Some states left as a result. In 2017, the program was put on hold after the Department of Homeland Security discovered security vulnerabilities. In 2019, the program was indefinitely suspended as part of a settlement of a class-action lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union.

In 2012, the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC) was established with a goal of improving the accuracy of voter rolls through comparisons between states. At its peak, 33 states and the District of Columbia were members. Beginning in 2022, nine Republican-led states left ERIC. States cited complaints about governance issues, including that ERIC mailed newly eligible voters who had not yet registered ahead of federal elections, and that it had become subject to alleged partisan influence. ERIC was the subject of repeated false claims from allies of Donald Trump that it was a voter registration vehicle for Democrats. Several states that left ERIC subsequently created their own partnerships.

Prosecution

According to NOLO, in most states, a prosecutor must prove that an individual committed voter fraud intentionally or knowingly. In some states, however, any mistake on the part of a voter that leads to voting illegally can be grounds for prosecution.

According to the New York Times, prosecutions of voter fraud can lead to significantly varied outcomes depending on socioeconomic status and the state in which someone is being tried. Most violations "draw wrist-slaps", while some high-profile prosecutions have produced multiple-year jail terms. Often, prosecutions net people who did not realize they were breaking the law. Lorraine Minnite has argued that almost all cases of illegal voting are due to misunderstandings or administrative error, which does not constitute fraud in states where intent is required.

Prosecutions are exceedingly rare – as of 2022, an average of one and a half people per state per year were charged with voter fraud. Voter fraud can be difficult to prove or prosecute, depending on the type of fraud alleged. Voter fraud is largely ignored unless an election is questioned, someone complains or a voter is investigated on other charges.

Wisconsin Watch evaluated voter fraud cases from 2012-2022 and found about 0.0006% of votes cast were challenged by a district attorney, with a voter's probation status as the most common reason. A 2022 investigation by KING-TV found that the likelihood of being charged for voter fraud in Washington state varied depending on the county; King County, with a voting population of 1.3 million, had charged 9 cases of voter fraud since 2007, while the much smaller Lewis County had charged 8 (at least 3 of which were dismissed).

The Justice Department has published Federal Prosecution of Election Offenses in eight editions from 1976 to 2017, under Presidents Ford, Carter, Reagan, Clinton, Bush and Trump. It says the Department "does not have authority to directly intercede in the election process itself" and that "overt criminal investigative measures should not ordinarily be taken ... until the election in question has been concluded, its results certified, and all recounts and election contests concluded."

Further reading

• Campbell, Tracy (2005). Deliver the Vote: A History of Election Fraud, an American Political Tradition, 1742-2004. Carroll & Graf. ISBN 978-0-7867-1591-6.

External links

• Electoral fraud on Ballotpedia
• "Explainer: Refuting the Myth of Voter Fraud Yet Again" by the Brennan Center for Justice (January 6, 2021)
• "Fact Check: Re-examining how and why voter fraud is exceedingly rare in the U.S. ahead of the 2022 midterms" by Reuters (June 2, 2022)