Election fraud rare in US elections, despite persistent claims otherwise

Rigged machines. Illegal ballot harvesting. Repeat, noncitizen and even dead voters.

Claims of election fraud exploded in 2020 as former President Trump and his allies sought to portray their narrow election loss as something more nefarious. With just a week until Election Day, concern that widespread fraud could tilt the scale is on the rise again.

But pervasive fraud would be difficult to achieve in the United States, thanks to layers of protection embedded in the nation’s election system. When it does occur — rarely — it’s most often caught and prosecuted.

Safeguards prevent widespread fraud

American election fraud, in fact, is “miniscule,” said Elaine Kamarck, a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution.

“It's never affected an election in recent memory. It's amazing that they find the people that have committed fraud because they're so small.”

“It just, frankly, doesn't happen,” she added.

Through an analysis of the conservative Heritage Foundation’s election fraud database, Kamarck determined that the share of reported cases of fraud over the past 13 to 38 years across several key swing states is less than 1 percent.

In Pennsylvania, for example, the Heritage Foundation analyzed 30 years of data, across which 32 elections were held. Just 39 cases of voter fraud were identified — 0.000039% of the more than 100 million ballots cast in those elections.

Any widespread voter fraud is unlikely due to the decentralized nature of American elections.

There are more than 10,000 independent voting jurisdictions in the U.S, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Different counties, which typically administer elections, list different names in down-ballot races.

Most states require or request in-person voters to provide some sort of ID or to verify their identity through other methods, like stating their name and address. For absentee voters, all states require a signature. Some 31 states conduct signature verification, 10 states require a different form of verification and the other nine states, plus the District of Columbia, only confirm a ballot envelope has been signed.

Federal law requires states to maintain voter rolls that are regularly updated. On top of that, ballots are created with special paper so they are not easily replicated.

“The whole process is under lock and key, from the time those ballots are printed and delivered to polling places to the time that they're put through the counting machines at the polling place,” Kamarck said.

Even when election fraud is committed, there are consequences.

Destroying ballots, vote-buying, voting multiple times and submitting fraudulent votes or registrations are all election crimes, with penalties spanning hefty fines to prison time. Violating election law as a non-U.S. citizen can lead to deportation.

“Protecting the right to vote, prosecuting election crimes, and securing our elections are all essential to maintaining the confidence of all Americans in our democratic system of government,” the Justice Department said in a statement Wednesday.

Election misinformation pervasive

The 2024 presidential race has been rife with misinformation. More than 50 false election narratives have been published since the start of September, with 15 of those narratives emerging in recent weeks, according to NewsGuard, an organization that tracks misinformation.

Many of those false claims have targeted key battleground states, stoking unfounded fears about high rates of absentee ballot returns in Michigan being evidence fraud, voting machines in Georgia switching votes from Trump to Vice President Harris and double Pennsylvania’s actual Amish population being registered to vote in the state.

A video purporting to show ballots with votes for Trump being ripped up in Buck County, Pa. — another false claim — was “manufactured and amplified” by Russian actors, said the FBI, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) in a joint statement last week.

As social media companies take a more hands-off approach to monitoring election misinformation than in previous years, those networks have also formed breeding grounds for false claims.

On the social media platform X, a group called “Election Integrity Community” has more than 35,000 members. The group – moderated by X owner Elon Musk’s PAC under the verified username @America – urges members to “share potential incidents of voter fraud or irregularities you see while voting in the 2024 election” and is teeming with allegations of misconduct.

The nonprofit Global Witness issued an Oct. 17 report that TikTok approved 50 percent of ads containing false information about the election, despite its policy plainly banning all political ads. Facebook approved one of eight ads with disinformation, the report said.

Falsehoods could stoke violence

As the perception that fraud is widespread persists, voters may not exercise their right to vote – or grow restless over a system they believe is rigged.

Hundreds of rioters who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, as Congress certified the results of the 2020 election, were motivated by the false notion that the presidential race had been stolen from Trump.

“We cannot overstate the role of conspiracy theories in all of this,” said Wendy Via, president of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism (GPAHE), during a pre-election webinar Tuesday.

Heidi Beirich, GPAHE co-founder, said on the call that the “general refusal to accept any kind of losses at the polls” since 2020 is largely driven by distrust in American elections, which has in turn spurred political violence, like the two assassination attempts against Trump and the shooting of a Democratic National Committee office in suburban Phoenix.

Plus, election-denying bad actors are “flush with cash and much more organized” this time around, Beirich said.

Though many experts, including Via and Beirich, agree that a Jan. 6 Capitol riot repeat is unlikely, the falsehoods that underpinned the attack persist. The violent rhetoric tied to politics has, too.

“Some of the same language that we're seeing on the fringe sites is also showing up in the mainstream political discourse, which is extremely troubling,” Via said. “And it illustrates the fact that it's just a matter of degrees, where we are with election denialism, with violence, with racism, white supremacy — it's just a matter of degrees.”