Electoral fraud in the United States

Electoral fraud in the United States is considered to be a rare occurrence. A small number of elections in United States history have been invalidated due to electoral fraud, mostly at the local level. False accusations of electoral fraud have often been linked to the election denial movement in the United States.

Most electoral fraud discussions in the United States center around voter impersonation, also called in-person voter fraud, and absentee or mail-in ballot fraud. Existing research and evidence shows that voter impersonation, where a person who is not eligible to vote does so by voting under the name of an eligible voter, is extremely rare. While mail-in voting is considered by some experts to be more vulnerable to fraud than in-person voting, studies have also shown mail-in ballot fraud to be highly uncommon.

Voter impersonation
Between 2000 and 2014, there were only 31 documented instances of voter impersonation in the United States. According to the Associated Press, the New York Times, NPR, CNBC, the Guardian, and FactCheck.Org, the available research and evidence point to the type of fraud that would be prevented by voter ID laws as "very rare" or "extremely rare". According to PolitiFact, "in-person voter fraud—the kind targeted by the ID law—remains extremely rare". PolitiFact finds the suggestion that "voter fraud is rampant" false, giving it its "Pants on Fire" rating. It is considered difficult for someone to coordinate widespread voter impersonation to steal an election. Even if they paid people to vote for their preferred candidate, they could not confirm whether the people they paid voted at all, much less 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 since 2000. The same study found that for every case of voter impersonation, there were 207 cases of other types of election fraud. This analysis has, in turn, been criticized by the executive director of the Republican National Lawyers Association, who has said that the study was "highly flawed in its very approach to the issue." Also a 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 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, Justin Levitt, a professor at Loyola Law School, reported in the Washington Post's Wonkblog that he had identified only 31 credible cases of voter impersonation since 2000. Levitt has also claimed that of these 31 cases, three of them occurred in Texas, while Lorraine Minnite of Rutgers University–Camden estimates there were actually four during the 2000–2014 period. The most serious incident identified involved as many as 24 people trying to vote under assumed names in Brooklyn, but even this would not have made a significant difference in almost any American election. Also that year, a study in the Election Law Journal found that about the same percentage of the U.S. population (about 2.5%) admitted to having been abducted by aliens as admitted to committing voter impersonation. This study also concluded that "strict voter ID requirements address a problem that was certainly not common in the 2012 U.S. election." In 2016, News21 reviewed cases of possible voter impersonation in five states where politicians had expressed concerns about it. They found 38 successful fraud cases in these states from 2012 to 2016, none of which were for voter impersonation.

Outdated voter registration
A 2012 report by the Pew Center on the States titled "Inaccurate, Costly, and Inefficient: Evidence That America's Voter Registration System Needs an Upgrade", 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. Pew's election program director clarified in 2016 that they had found "millions of out of date registration records due to people moving or dying", but "no evidence that voter fraud resulted". 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 article published in Business Insider, the author noted these voter registration irregularities left some people concerned that the electoral system was vulnerable to the impersonation of dead voters. However, registration irregularities do not intrinsically constitute fraud: in most cases the states are simply slow to eliminate ineligible voters. By 2016, most states had addressed concerns raised by the Pew 2012 report.

According to a Newsday report in 2013, since 2000, there had been 270 cases of 6,000 dead people previously registered to vote in Nassau County, NY, who supposedly cast ballots at some point after their deaths. However, the paper explained: "The votes attributed to the dead are too few, and spread over 20 elections since 2000, to consider them a coordinated fraud attempt. More likely is what investigators in other states have found when examining dead voter records: Clerical errors are to blame, such as a person's vote being assigned to a dead person with a similar name."

Mail-in 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. Among the thousands of elections from 2000 to 2012, there were 491 known cases of absentee ballot fraud. 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."

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." 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.

Organized absentee ballot fraud has caused some elections, such as a 1994 Pennsylvania State Senate election, the 1997 Miami mayoral election, and the 2023 Bridgeport, Connecticut mayoral election Democratic primary, to be invalidated by courts.

Non-citizen voting
Illegal non-citizen voting is considered extremely rare due to the severe penalties associated with the practice including deportation, incarceration or fines, as well as the jeopardizing of naturalization efforts. Since the federal form to register a voter does not require proof of citizenship, some commentators, such as former Republican Federal Election Commission member Hans von Spakovsky, have argued that non-citizen voting is a threat. The process of verifying the citizenship of voters varies by state, and not all states conduct verification.

In the 2018 Fish v. Kobach case, where Kansas voters challenged the state's voter identification law, U.S. District Court Judge Julie Robinson ruled that the law was unconstitutional, in part because Secretary of State Kris Kobach had not shown that illegal non-citizen voting was widespread enough to justify it. She wrote that "at most, 67 noncitizens registered or attempted to register in Kansas over the last 19 years". Judge Robinson noted that 400 individuals in Kobach's Election Voter Information System had "birth dates after their date of registration, indicating they registered to vote before they were born", and concluded that the 67 noncitizen cases were consistent with administrative error.

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. A 2023 study in Arizona found that 1,934 voters out of over 4 million registered were non-citizens at the time of registration.

Old Dominion University study (2014)
A 2014 study by Old Dominion University professors Jesse Richman and David Earnest, which used data developed by the Cooperative Congressional Election Study, concluded that more than 14 percent of self-identified non-citizens in 2008 and 2010 indicated that they were registered to vote, approximately 6.4% of surveyed non-citizens voted in 2008, and 2.2% of surveyed non-citizens voted in 2010. Proponents of voter ID laws pointed to the study as justification, although the study also concluded that voter ID requirements would be ineffective at reducing non-citizen voting. This study has been criticized by numerous academics. A 2015 study by the managers of the Cooperative Congressional Election Study found that Richman and Earnest's study was "almost certainly flawed" and that, in fact, it was most likely that 0% of non-citizens had voted in recent American elections. Richman and Earnest's findings were the result of measurement error; some individuals who answered the survey checked the wrong boxes in surveys. Richman and Earnest therefore extrapolated from a handful of wrongfully classified cases to achieve an exaggerated number of individuals who appeared to be non-citizen voters. Richman later conceded that "the response error issues ... may have biased our numbers". Richman has also rebuked President Trump for claiming that millions voted illegally in 2016. Brian Schaffner, Professor of Political Science at University of Massachusetts, Amherst, who was part of the team that debunked Richman and Earnest's study said that the study

"... is not only wrong, it is irresponsible social science and should never have been published in the first place. There is no evidence that non-citizens have voted in recent U.S. elections ... It is bad research, because it fails to understand basic facts about the data it uses. Indeed, it took me and my colleagues only a few hours to figure out why the authors' findings were wrong and to produce the evidence needed to prove as much. The authors were essentially basing their claims on two pieces of data associated with the large survey—a question that asks people whether they are citizens and official vote records to which each respondent has been matched to determine whether he or she had voted. Both these pieces of information include some small amounts of measurement error, as is true of all survey questions. What the authors failed to consider is that measurement error was entirely responsible for their results. In fact, once my colleagues and I accounted for that error, we found that there were essentially zero non-citizens who voted in recent elections."

Notable cases of fraud
Electoral fraud has led to several convictions in United States history, and has caused some election results to be affected or annulled. This list does not include elections such as the 1960 United States presidential election in Illinois or the 2008 United States Senate election in Minnesota where allegations of fraud received widespread attention, but were not definitively proven.

20th century

 * In the 1948 United States Senate election in Texas, according to a 1990 book by historian Robert A. Caro, Democrat Lyndon B. Johnson won the election due to electoral fraud, which included county officials casting ballots for absent voters and changing vote tally numbers.
 * Between 1968 and 1984, eight 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.
 * 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 US 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 former U.S. Attorney Dan K. Webb found that tens of thousands of ballots were fraudulently cast in the Democratic primary.
 * In the 1993 Hialeah, Florida mayoral election, 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.
 * In the 1994 Pennsylvania State Senate elections, 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.
 * In the 1996 United States House of Representatives elections in California, an investigation by the House Oversight Committee found that 624 non-citizens had voted in the 46th district race between Bob Dornan and Loretta Sanchez. The race was ultimately decided by 979 votes, so it did not affect the result.
 * In the 1997 Miami, Florida mayoral election, the result was invalidated by a judge who cited "a pattern of fraudulent, intentional and criminal conduct" in the casting of absentee ballots.

21st century

 * In the 2003 East Chicago, Indiana mayoral election, the Indiana Supreme Court invalidated the Democratic primary citing "a widespread and pervasive pattern" of absentee ballot fraud.
 * 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 2012 Massachusetts House of Representatives election, Republican candidate Enrico "Jack" Villamaino pled guilty to absentee ballot fraud, after prosecutors found he and his wife had changed more than 280 voters' registrations to make them eligible to vote in the Republican primary, and forged the voters' names on absentee ballot requests.
 * In the 2014 and 2018 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania elections, former Democratic congressman Michael "Ozzie" Myers was found to have bribed election workers to stuff ballot boxes in local races. Myers pled guilty in 2022 and was sentenced to 2 1/2 years in prison.
 * In the 2016 United States presidential election in North Carolina, Alamance County prosecutors charged twelve people (known as the Alamance 12) for illegally voting while under probation or parole for felony convictions. Five of those charged pled guilty to misdemeanors.
 * In the 2018 United States House of Representatives elections in North Carolina, 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 the 2020 Iowa elections, Sioux City resident Kim Phuong Taylor illegally submitted or caused others to submit dozens of voter registrations, absentee ballot request forms, and absentee ballots containing false information. Taylor did this to help her husband, Jeremy Taylor, who was running for Congress and Woodbury County supervisor. She was sentenced to four months in prison in 2024.
 * In 2020 and 2022, Ohio resident James Saunders illegally cast ballots in both Ohio and Florida. Saunders was convicted of and sentenced for these crimes in 2023. He was also found to have voted twice in 2014 and 2016, but he was not prosecuted as the statute of limitations had expired.
 * In the 2023 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.

2016 presidential election
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.

Trump claimed that "millions voted illegally in the election" based on "studies and evidence that people have presented him". At that time, CNN reported that Trump had based his fraud voter claims on information from Gregg Phillips, VoteStand founder. 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 seemed to refer to the 2012 Pew Research Center (PEW) study but 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)
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, calls for stricter voter ID laws in the United States. Kobach claims 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
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 leadup 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 Trump for this in a November 1, 2020 Washington Post op-ed. He stated that in the four decades he had worked, "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".

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. At least four cases involving allegations of, and convictions for, voter fraud in favor of Donald Trump emerged in April 2021. In April 2021, Barry Morphew of Colorado admitted to FBI agents that he cast a ballot in November 2020 in favor of Trump in the name of his missing wife. In a further twist, in May 2021, he was charged with murdering his wife, who had disappeared in May 2020. Also in April 2021, Bruce Bartman of Pennsylvania was convicted of voter fraud charges after he cast a ballot for Trump in the name of his dead mother. As of April 30, 2021, two other Pennsylvanians had criminal cases pending regarding accusations of voter fraud by casting illegal ballots for Donald Trump.

Another case of voter fraud in favor of Donald Trump emerged from Nevada. In October 2021, Republican Donald Kirk Hartle of Nevada was charged with two felony counts of voter fraud, one for voting twice and one that he forged his deceased wife's name to vote with her ballot. Nevada law calls for all registered voters to receive a mail-in ballot. Election officials discovered that a ballot was received from the deceased but still registered Rosemarie Hartle. A few days after the election of November 2020, Donald Hartle told election investigators that his wife's ballot never came to the house. While Rosemary Hartle's ballot was illegally cast by a Republican, the story was used by Tucker Carlson on Fox News to support claims of voter fraud by Democrats.

By 2021, there were 510 pending election fraud offenses against 43 defendants and 386 active election fraud investigations, in the state of Texas alone.

Voter ID laws
In the United States, voter ID laws (laws requiring identification to vote) have been enacted in a number of Republican-controlled states since 2010 with the aim of preventing voter impersonation. In many states, voters have other options besides "in-person" voting, such as absentee voting, or requesting an absentee ballot (which includes online voting and voting by mail). Absentee voting fraud, for example, is not "deterred by ID laws".

A 2015 article by University of Virginia Law School's Michael Gilbert in the Columbia Law Review contended that voter ID laws "intentionally depress turnout by lawful voters". Critics of voter ID laws have argued that voter impersonation is illogical from the perspective of the perpetrator, as if they are caught, they will face harsh criminal penalties, including up to 5 years in prison and a fine of up to $10,000 for citizens and possible deportation for non-citizens. Even if they are not caught, they will have cast only one vote for their candidate.

A 2017 study in The Journal of Politics found that strict voter ID laws have a "differentially negative impact" on the turnout of racial and ethnic minorities. The results of this study were criticized as inaccurate in a paper by Stanford political scientist Justin Grimmer and four other political scientists. The authors of the original study stood by their findings in a response. Columbia University statistician and political scientist Andrew Gelman said that the response by the authors of the original study "did not seem convincing" and that the finding of racial discrepancies in the original study does not stand.

The strictest voter ID law in the United States is Senate Bill 14, which was signed by the Governor of Texas Rick Perry in 2011 and came into effect on January 1, 2012, although it was blocked a few months later. It was reinstated in 2013, but was later found to be discriminatory against minorities in a July 2015 U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals ruling. A lower court was required to develop a fix for the law before the November 2016 elections. Jeff Sessions dropped challenges against Senate Bill 14 early in his tenure at the Department of Justice.

Proof of citizenship
In July 2024, the United States House of Representatives passed the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act (SAVE Act), which would mandate that Americans show proof of citizenship when voting. It is considered unlikely to become law due to opposition from the Democratic Party.

Signature verification
Signature verification is carried out by most states in order to prevent forged paper ballots. Signature mismatches were the most common reason for rejecting mail-in ballots in 2016 and the second most common, after late arrival, in 2018. 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.