Is Voter Fraud a Real Problem?

The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, keeps an Election Fraud Database (electionfraud.heritage.org). At its last update, on December 12, 2025, it listed 1,619 cases dated from 1982 to 2025. Each ended in a criminal conviction, a diversion program, a civil penalty, or a finding of fraud by a court or an official body. A diversion program clears the case once the defendant completes it. A case can be one person's single vote or a scheme involving many ballots.

Heritage calls the list "a sampling" that "does not capture all cases", and says that "nobody really knows the extent of election fraud."

In the 22 federal general elections from 1982 to 2024, Americans cast about 2.26 billion ballots. Heritage's 1,619 cases come to about 7 for every 10 million of those ballots, or 0.00007%. That rate is generous to the fraud claim, because Heritage's cases also come from primaries and from state and local elections, whose ballots are not in the total.

Fraud changes a result only if it wipes out the winning margin. In 2020 Joe Biden carried the three closest states, Georgia, Arizona and Wisconsin. He also carried Pennsylvania, the fourth closest by share of the vote.

Without Georgia, Arizona and Wisconsin he would have had 269 electoral votes, one short of a majority. So 42,918 votes of margin in the right three states was the least that fraud would have had to wipe out. Heritage's database holds 17 cases from the 2020 general election in those three states.

None of this shows that no fraud went undetected. It shows the size an undetected scheme would have needed.

The kinds of fraud in Heritage's cases are far from equally common. Voter ID laws are built to stop one kind: someone voting in another person's name at the polls. That kind is among the rarest: 34 of the 1,619 cases name it. By comparison, 387 involve absentee ballots.

Justin Levitt, a law professor, tracked every specific, credible allegation that someone had voted as another person at the polls. He found about 31 incidents from 2000 to 2014, some involving more than one ballot. In those years, general and primary elections alone drew more than a billion ballots (Washington Post, August 2014). He expected some to be debunked.

The Justice Department made election crimes a priority for all its offices in October 2002. In 2007 the New York Times reported, from court records and interviews, that the drive had turned up virtually no evidence of any organized effort to skew federal elections. By July 2008 the Department had charged more than 140 people and convicted more than 100.

Lorraine Minnite, writing for Project Vote, reviewed the Department's own list of cases to September 2005. Of the 24 people convicted of illegal voting, she found that 14 were noncitizens. Another 5 were still under state supervision for felony convictions, and 5 had voted in two states. None had voted in someone else's name.

Absentee ballots are the most common kind. Yet the Brookings Institution, a think tank, counted Heritage's cases for the general elections of 2016 to 2022 and put mail fraud at 0.000043% of mail ballots. That is about 4 in every 10 million.

A false registration becomes a false vote only if someone casts a ballot with it, in person or by mail. ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, ran registration drives with its partner Project Vote. The two groups told the New York Times that ACORN collected more than 1.3 million registration forms in 21 states for the 2008 election. About 400,000 were rejected as duplicates, incomplete or fraudulent, they said.

In Washington, seven ACORN workers were charged in 2007 over about 1,800 made-up registrations; none led to a vote, the Seattle Times reported.

For fiscal years 2001 through 2017, the Government Accountability Office counted 19 election fraud cases filed by the Justice Department's Public Integrity Section, which supervises election crime enforcement nationally. It counted 185 filed by the U.S. Attorneys' Offices, about 0.02% of their caseload.

A Kansas law in force from July 2015 let the secretary of state, Kris Kobach, prosecute election crimes himself, a power no other secretary of state held. In 2016 he told News21, a reporting project by college journalism students, that double voting was “amazingly frequent”.

In three and a half years he brought 15 cases. Thirteen ended in pleas, twelve by people who had voted in two states and one by a noncitizen. Two were dropped. Each plea brought a fine, and nobody went to jail (the Sunflower State Journal’s count).

In 2018 Kobach was the defendant at the trial of Kansas’s proof-of-citizenship law. Judge Julie Robinson found his evidence showed at most 39 noncitizens on the Kansas rolls since 1999, and struck the law down.

Lost, Not Stolen is a 2022 review by eight conservatives, three of them retired federal judges. By its count, Trump and his supporters brought 64 cases in the six battleground states. Fourteen were dropped, 20 were dismissed before any hearing on the merits and 30 were heard on the merits. The one win, in Pennsylvania, involved too few votes to matter.

On 28 January 2026 FBI agents searched Fulton County’s election hub in Union City, Georgia. They took more than 600 boxes of its 2020 election records, including the ballots, tabulator tapes, ballot images and voter rolls. The case began with a referral from Kurt Olsen, a lawyer who had worked on Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 result. Arizona courts had sanctioned Olsen over election suits for Kari Lake, the Republican candidate for governor in 2022. Trump had since made Olsen Director of Election Security and Integrity.

The search warrant affidavit, sworn by FBI Special Agent Hugh Raymond Evans, listed five “deficiencies or defects” in the count. Among them were missing ballot images and ballots scanned twice in the recount, both admitted by the county. The affidavit named no suspect and said the deficiencies would be crimes if they were intentional. The county called the seizure “dependent on unsubstantiated hypotheticals.”

The Washington Post reported in February 2026 that the Justice Department had struggled to meet White House demands to prosecute noncitizen voters, slowed, officials said, by a lack of evidence. On 18 September the Justice Department announced charges against 16 noncitizens in seven states, most of them accused of voting in federal elections.

A list of proven cases cannot show fraud nobody caught; Heritage says its own database “obviously cannot list fraud that goes undetected.” Three researchers tested the most prominent statistical claims about the 2020 election, from Dominion machines to turnout in Democratic strongholds. They found none “even remotely convincing” (Eggers, Garro and Grimmer, 2021).

Those with the power and the motive to find fraud have found individual cases and, in North Carolina, one scheme that forced a congressional election to be run again. None has found fraud near the scale that would change a presidential result.

Arizona’s Senate paid Cyber Ninjas $150,000 to review Maricopa County’s 2020 ballots. By the Arizona Republic’s count, the Senate spent nearly $1.1m in all by June 2022. Trump-aligned groups gave the firm about $5.7m, by its own account. The firm’s own hand count gave Biden 99 more votes and Trump 261 fewer, a net 360.

Wisconsin’s special counsel, Michael Gableman, was budgeted at $676,000. By Wisconsin Watch’s count he cost taxpayers nearly $2.8m, including a $432,000 records settlement in 2025. He found nothing that would overturn the result, and was fired by the Assembly speaker who hired him.

In Texas, the Houston Chronicle found, the attorney general’s office logged more than 22,000 staff hours on voter fraud in 2020 and resolved 16 cases. All were Harris County residents who gave false addresses on registration forms; none was jailed.

Voter fraud is real, and rare. The Heritage Foundation’s database lists 1,619 cases from 1982 to 2025. That is about 7 cases for every 10 million ballots cast in the federal general elections of those years, and the cases also come from local, state and primary elections. Heritage says the list is not complete, and fraud that is never caught cannot be counted.

Fraud that was caught has changed a result: an absentee-ballot scheme in North Carolina’s 9th congressional district led the state board to order a new election in 2019. Nothing found comes near a presidential result. Biden’s 2020 margins in Arizona, Georgia and Wisconsin came to 42,918 votes together, and reversing the result meant wiping them out. In those states Heritage lists 17 cases from that election. The investigations since, from Arizona’s 2021 review to the 2026 seizure of Fulton County’s records, have produced no evidence of fraud at that scale.

The kind voter ID is aimed at, voting in someone else’s name at the polls, is among the rarest: 34 of Heritage’s 1,619 cases.

Download the conclusion

The verdict above as one image, with three counts from Heritage’s own database: every case it lists from 1982 to 2025, 1,619; the cases of in-person impersonation, the fraud voter ID is aimed at, 34; and the cases from the 2020 general election in Arizona, Georgia and Wisconsin, where Biden’s margins came to 42,918 votes, 17.

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