To be 100% clear, Voter Fraud is rare and has NEVER played a substantial role in any recent presidential election.
Lost not Stolen – Download the report here
As part of his post-election attempts to retain the presidency, Donald Trump and his supporters filed 64 cases containing 187 counts in the six key battleground states, in addition to utilizing some of the recount and contest procedures available to them under state law. The former president maintains to this day that the 2020 election was stolen and the results fraudulent.
This Report takes a hard look at the very serious charges made by Trump and his supporters. The consequences of a president and a major party candidate making such charges are monumental. If true, our electoral system is in desperate need of repair. If not true, that must be said because such false charges corrode our democracy and leave a significant share of the population doubting the legitimacy of our system, seriously weakening the country. To have 30 percent of the country lack faith in election results based on unsubstantiated claims of a “stolen” election is not sustainable in a democracy, and it discredits the political party making those charges. We hope that setting out the full record in this Report will help restore faith in the reliability of our elections.
- The Brennan Center’s seminal report on this issue, The Truth About Voter Fraud, found that most reported incidents of voter fraud are actually traceable to other sources, such as clerical errors or bad data matching practices. The report reviewed elections that had been meticulously studied for voter fraud, and found incident rates between 0.0003 percent and 0.0025 percent. Given this tiny incident rate for voter impersonation fraud, it is more likely, the report noted, that an American “will be struck by lightning than that he will impersonate another voter at the polls.”
- A study published by a Columbia University political scientist tracked incidence rates for voter fraud for two years, and found that the rare fraud that was reported generally could be traced to “false claims by the loser of a close race, mischief and administrative or voter error.”
- A 2017 analysis published in The Washington Post concluded that there is no evidence to support Trump’s claim that Massachusetts residents were bused into New Hampshire to vote.
- A comprehensive 2014 study published in The Washington Post found 31 credible instances of impersonation fraud from 2000 to 2014, out of more than 1 billion ballots cast. Even this tiny number is likely inflated, as the study’s author counted not just prosecutions or convictions, but any and all credible claims.
- Two studies done at Arizona State University, one in 2012 and another in 2016, found similarly negligible rates of impersonation fraud. The project found 10 cases of voter impersonation fraud nationwide from 2000-2012. The follow-up study, which looked for fraud specifically in states where politicians have argued that fraud is a pernicious problem, found zero successful prosecutions for impersonation fraud in five states from 2012-2016.
- A review of the 2016 election found four documented cases of voter fraud.
- Research into the 2016 election found no evidence of widespread voter fraud.
- A 2016 working paper concluded that the upper limit on double voting in the 2012 election was 0.02%. The paper noted that the incident rate was likely much lower, given audits conducted by the researchers showed that “many, if not all, of these apparent double votes, could be a result of measurement error.”
Attorney General under Trump says no evidence of Voter Fraud
US Attorney General William Barr says his justice department has found no proof to back President Donald Trump’s claims of fraud in the 2020 election.
“To date, we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have affected a different outcome in the election,” he said.
His comments are seen as a big blow to Mr. Trump, who has not accepted defeat.
But what about reported cases of absentee ballot voter fraud?
The conservative Heritage Foundation has compiled data that they have relied on for more than a decade to promote the erroneous idea that voter fraud is real, rampant, easy to commit, and easy to hide. Their database, going back to 1988, actually contains just 206 cases of “Fraudulent Use of an Absentee Ballot,” or roughly six or seven cases per year. Over this same period, more than 1.6 billion votes were cast in federal elections alone, which means mail ballot fraud is quite rare relative to the number of ballots cast in U.S. elections.