Widespread Voter Fraud: What Was Claimed, What Was Proven
Every national election since 1992, checked against the courts, the audits, and the prosecutions.
Has widespread fraud changed the result of a national election since 1992?
The AnswerNo. Individual illegal votes and counting errors turn up in every election, and most are caught, but no court, audit, or investigation since 1992 has found fraud on a scale that changed who won the presidency or Congress. The one proven scheme that tainted a federal race, North Carolina's 9th District in 2018, was caught, and the race was run again.
The Text"To date, we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election."
The Claims
How Many, In 2020
The Associated Press reviewed every potential case of voter fraud in the six battleground states Donald Trump disputed in 2020, and found fewer than 475. The disputed ballots came to 0.15% of Joe Biden's margin in those states. The cases were bipartisan. In southeast Pennsylvania, a 72-year-old registered Republican was sentenced to three years' probation after pleading guilty to voting twice.
Most referrals never become charges. In Wisconsin, election officials referred 31 cases of potential fraud, and prosecutors declined to bring charges in 26. Some cases turn out to be clerical errors or a confused voter. Others are crimes, and they are charged one person at a time.
Noncitizens On The Rolls
Georgia checked its voter rolls in 2024 and found 20 noncitizens among 8.2 million registered voters. Nine of them had voted in earlier elections. In Ohio, the secretary of state referred 597 noncitizen registrations to the attorney general that year, including 138 people who appeared to have voted.
Over Time
A 2012 investigation by News21 at Arizona State University examined 2,068 alleged election-fraud cases since 2000. It found 10 cases of voter impersonation, and 46 percent of the allegations whose outcome could be traced ended in acquittals, dropped charges, or no charges at all. The Brennan Center's 2007 study reached the same place: voter fraud is extraordinarily rare, in part because a single fraudulent vote risks five years in federal prison.
What It Shows
Illegal votes are real. They are found, counted, and prosecuted as individual crimes, and they come from voters of both parties. Hundreds of cases spread across a country of more than 150 million voters move no national result.
Antrim County, Michigan, 2020
On election night in 2020, Antrim County, Michigan, posted unofficial results that were wrong. Michigan's Department of State traced the problem to user error in the county clerk's office. Every tabulator had counted the ballots correctly. The mistake was in the unofficial reports.
The fix brought new mistakes. When county staff corrected the numbers by hand, they made data entry errors, and the state's outside analysis found that the county canvass should have caught them and did not. The same analysis found no credible evidence that anyone caused the incident on purpose.
Then came the last check. A bipartisan hand count of every presidential ballot in the county confirmed the certified result, with a net difference of 12 votes out of 15,718. The Republican-led Michigan Senate Oversight Committee reached the same conclusion: the cause was human error and lack of training.
Georgia, 2020
Georgia's full hand count of the 2020 presidential race turned up memory cards that some counties had never uploaded. Those counties uploaded the cards and certified again, and the audit still confirmed the original winner.
Minnesota, 2008
Minnesota's 2008 Senate race went to a recount with Republican Norm Coleman ahead of Democrat Al Franken by 206 votes. Officials and the campaigns found absentee ballots that had been wrongly rejected. Once those were counted, the state certified Franken the winner by 225 votes. The fight went to the Minnesota Supreme Court, which noted that neither side claimed fraud, in the election or in the recount.
What It Shows
An error is a wrong number, caught and corrected in public by the officials whose job is to catch it. Fraud is a deliberate act to change a result. Every case in this claim is the first kind.
537 Votes
Florida's official count gave George W. Bush 2,912,790 votes and Al Gore 2,912,253, a margin of 537. The state certified Bush the winner on Nov. 26. The recount fight that followed ended on Dec. 12, when the Supreme Court reversed the Florida Supreme Court's order for manual recounts.
What The Justices Said About Fraud
The Justices disagreed about nearly everything in the case except this. Chief Justice William Rehnquist, writing for himself and Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, put it in one sentence:
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No one claims there was any fraud in the election.
Justice Stephen Breyer, in dissent, agreed: neither side claimed electoral fraud.
What Went Wrong Instead
The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights investigated, and its finding was about voters shut out: widespread voter disenfranchisement, it wrote, was the extraordinary feature of the Florida election. It did not find that the state's highest officials conspired to cause it. In Palm Beach County, the butterfly ballot confused voters, and more than 19,000 punched two holes for president, which voided their votes.
The Fraud Case That Was Heard
One Florida case did turn on a fraud allegation. In Seminole County, Republican Party workers had used the elections office to add missing voter ID numbers to absentee ballot request forms. The Florida Supreme Court upheld the trial court's finding that the evidence did not support a finding of fraud.
The Media Recount
In 2001, a consortium of news organizations reviewed Florida's uncounted ballots. Under the standard most local officials said they would have used in the recount the Florida Supreme Court ordered, Bush would have come out 493 votes ahead. A full statewide count of every rejected ballot, which neither campaign asked for, could have tipped it to Gore by as few as 42 votes. The consortium said it was not challenging the official result.
What It Shows
Florida 2000 is the closest presidential election on the record, fought over in court for five weeks. Both campaigns had every reason to find fraud, and Justices on both sides wrote that neither claimed any.
The Margin
Ohio declared George W. Bush the winner over John Kerry by 118,775 votes. The recount that followed put Kerry 285 votes closer.
The Democrats' Report
The House Judiciary Committee's Democratic staff, under Rep. John Conyers, investigated and documented numerous, serious election irregularities that it said disenfranchised voters. In Mahoning County, the report said evidence strongly suggested some Kerry votes were recorded for Bush, and that it could not tell how many, or whether a machine failed or someone tampered with it. On whether the problems changed the result, its own answer was that it was not known.
The Objection In Congress
On Jan. 6, 2005, Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones of Ohio and Sen. Barbara Boxer of California objected to counting Ohio's electoral votes. The Senate rejected the objection 74 to 1, and the House 267 to 31. Tubbs Jones told the House the objection was not an attempt to overturn the President's victory.
The Court Case
Voters who contested the result in the Ohio Supreme Court, in Moss v. Bush, withdrew their case on Jan. 11, 2005, before any ruling on their claims.
The Misconduct That Was Proven
The misconduct the record does show happened inside the recount. In January 2007, a jury convicted two Cuyahoga County election workers of rigging how ballots were picked for the recount, so that the hand check would not trigger a full count. The special prosecutor did not claim it changed the outcome: in the county's recount, Kerry gained 17 votes and Bush lost six. A different judge later took up the workers' request for a new trial, and in November 2007 they pleaded no contest under a deal with no finding of guilt.
What It Shows
Democrats had every reason to prove the 2004 machine claims, and their own staff report could not show the problems changed the result. The one proven misconduct, in the recount, changed no outcome.
The Claim
On Nov. 27, 2016, three weeks after winning the Electoral College, Donald Trump posted that he had won the popular vote too, if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally. He gave no evidence. In January 2017, a Democratic aide told the Associated Press that Trump had told congressional leaders 3 million to 5 million immigrants living in the country illegally had voted.
The Commission
In May 2017, Executive Order 13799 created the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, with a charge to report on vulnerabilities that could lead to improper and fraudulent voting. Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach served as its vice chair.
The Shutdown
Many states refused to hand over the voter data the commission asked for. On Jan. 3, 2018, Trump signed Executive Order 13820, which terminated it. The White House statement that day still claimed substantial evidence of voter fraud. The commission never issued a report.
What Its Own Records Showed
Matthew Dunlap, Maine's secretary of state, sat on the commission and went to court for its records. After reviewing them, he wrote to Vice President Mike Pence and Kobach that the White House's statements were false. The records, he wrote, do not contain evidence of widespread voter fraud, and the draft report's sections on that evidence were glaringly empty.
What It Shows
The 2016 claim had a commission built to prove it. The commission's own files came up empty.
The Race
In the November 2018 count, Republican Mark Harris led Democrat Dan McCready by 905 votes in North Carolina's 9th Congressional District. The State Board of Elections never certified that result.
The Scheme
After a four-day hearing, the board found a coordinated, unlawful and substantially resourced absentee ballot scheme run in Bladen and Robeson counties. At its center was McCrae Dowless, a Bladen County operative who worked absentee-by-mail votes for the candidates who hired him. North Carolina law makes collecting absentee ballots a felony.
The Hearing And The Vote
Harris called for a new election on the hearing's final day. He told the board:
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Through the testimony I have listened to over the past three days, I believe a new election should be called. It has become clear to me that the public's confidence in the Ninth District seat in the general election has been undermined to an extent that a new election is warranted.
Later that afternoon, the board voted unanimously to throw out the 2018 result. Its written order said the election was corrupted by fraud so pervasive that its results were tainted.
The Charges
State Bureau of Investigation agents arrested Dowless in Bladenboro on Feb. 27, 2019. He was indicted in Wake County on three counts of felonious obstruction of justice, two counts of conspiracy to obstruct justice, and two counts of possessing absentee ballots.
The New Election
Voters went back to the polls on Sept. 10, 2019. Unofficial results gave Republican Dan Bishop 96,081 votes to McCready's 92,144, and McCready conceded that night.
What It Shows
This is what fraud that changes a result looks like on the record: named people, a paper trail of ballots, a public hearing, criminal charges, and a new election. Every claim in this explainer gets held to the same test.
The Lawsuits
In a report titled Lost, Not Stolen: The Conservative Case That Trump Lost And Biden Won The 2020 Presidential Election, eight conservatives counted 64 cases in the six battleground states. Trump and his supporters won one, a Pennsylvania case involving far too few votes to change the result.
What The Judges Said
Most of the cases were dismissed before anyone ruled on whether fraud happened. Where judges did write about the evidence, they wrote plainly. In Pennsylvania, U.S. District Judge Matthew Brann found strained legal arguments without merit and speculative accusations, unsupported by evidence. On appeal, Judge Stephanos Bibas wrote for the Third Circuit:
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But calling an election unfair does not make it so. Charges require specific allegations and then proof. We have neither here.
In that same case, Trump's lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, told the court it was not a fraud case. The Supreme Court turned away Texas's attempt to overturn four states' results because Texas had no standing to challenge how other states run their elections. The Arizona Supreme Court, ruling on the evidence, found that the state's hand count audit revealed no discrepancies.
The Hand Counts
Georgia counted every presidential ballot by hand, and the audit confirmed the original winner. In Arizona, the Republican-led state Senate hired Cyber Ninjas to recount Maricopa County, the state's largest. Its own report found no substantial differences between its hand count and the official result.
The Officials
On Dec. 1, 2020, Attorney General William Barr told the Associated Press that the Justice Department had not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome. The federal and state officials who run election infrastructure called the election the most secure in American history. In Michigan, the Republican-led Senate Oversight Committee found no evidence of widespread or systematic fraud.
What It Shows
Every check built to catch fraud ran in 2020: courts, hand counts, a partisan review, the Justice Department, and Republican legislators. Each came back with the same answer.
The Paper
The Brennan Center, using data from Verified Voting and the Election Assistance Commission, expected around 98 percent of all votes in 2024 to be cast on paper. Paper is what makes a recount possible. In 2020, the officials who run election infrastructure noted that every state with a close presidential result had a paper record of each vote.
The Audits
Georgia's 2020 hand count confirmed the winner. A signature audit of 15,118 absentee ballot envelopes in Cobb County found no fraudulent absentee ballots. Georgia's 2024 risk-limiting audit, in an election Trump won, confirmed the outcome: 381 of its 442 batches matched the original count exactly, and the rest fell within the expected margin for a hand count.
In Wisconsin, local officials hand-counted 145,100 ballots cast in November 2020 to check the machines. The audit caught one type of equipment counting creases in absentee ballots as write-in votes, a programming issue that changed no outcome.
What An Audit Checks
An audit tests whether the machines counted the paper correctly. It does not test whether each voter was eligible. That is the work of registration checks and prosecutors, which claim 1 covers.
What It Would Take
The AP asked experts what stealing a presidential election would require. Their answer: large numbers of people willing to risk prosecution and prison, working with election officials from both parties willing to look away, and all of them keeping quiet.
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It would be the most extensive conspiracy in the history of planet Earth.
That is David Becker, a senior trial attorney in the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division under Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, who now runs the nonprofit Center for Election Innovation & Research.
What It Shows
Fraud that changes a result leaves what North Carolina's 9th District left: named people, ballots, a hearing, and charges. Every audit since 2020 checked the paper, and the count held.