Is there widespread voting fraud?
The answer is no. And decades of investigations by many, including two Republican administrations, have confirmed it.
Claims of widespread voting fraud are decades old. During the Bush Jr. Administration, the Justice Department initiated a five-year crackdown on voter fraud, but only eighty-six people were convicted of any kind of election crime, despite hundreds of millions of votes being cast. No major efforts to skew national or statewide elections were found.
According to election experts, the current claim that illegal immigrants are voting is meant to intimidate legitimate voters and set the stage for Donald Trump to deny the results of the presidential election should he lose. Such claims also serve as the basis to pass laws, such as voter identification laws, aimed at making it harder for American citizens to register and to vote.
“Our elections are bad, and a lot of these illegal immigrants coming in, they’re trying to get them to vote,” former President Donald Trump said during the September presidential debate with his Democratic rival, Vice President Kamala Harris. “They can’t even speak English. They don’t even know what country they’re in practically. And these people are trying to get them to vote. And that’s why they’re allowing them to come into our country.” Trump has infamously said he would have won the popular vote in 2016 but for “millions of people who voted illegally.” Trump lost the popular vote in 2016 by almost 3 million votes or 2.1%. He asserted that three million to five million people voted illegally in 2016.
The Trump Administration formed a Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity to investigate the false claim that millions had voted illegally in 2016. The commission shut down in 2018 without publishing any evidence of widespread voter fraud. Republican governors who established Special police units also came up empty-handed when they searched for widespread fraud during the 2022 midterm elections.
An Associated Press investigation of the 2020 presidential election found fewer than 475 potential cases of voter fraud out of 25.5 million ballots cast in the six states where Trump and his allies disputed his loss to President Joe Biden.
No evidence has ever been provided by anyone to show there’s widespread voting fraud. The most recent incarnation of this lie was started by activist Gregg Phillips of the conspiracy theory group True the Vote. The Texas-based nonprofit is responsible for amplifying conspiracies that the 2020 presidential election was stolen. The group has raised millions on the promise that they would reveal widespread voter fraud yet have never supplied any evidence the 2020 election was stolen. The group is being investigated after millions were paid to its founder, a longtime board member romantically linked to him, and the group’s general counsel, according to Reveal.
Illegal voting by noncitizens, according to all available data, is extremely rare. “There is no evidence that noncitizen voting has ever been significant enough to impact an election’s outcome,” according to the Bipartisan Policy Center. The nonpartisan and not-for-profit organization was formed in 2007 to assist policymakers in working across party lines to craft bipartisan solutions and it was founded by Senate leaders including Tom Daschle, George Mitchell and prominent Republicans Bob Dole and Howard Baker.
Illegal voting by noncitizens is extremely rare in part because of severe penalties which include deportation and up to five years of incarceration. As of July 2024, the conservative Heritage Foundation database includes only 24 noncitizen voting cases for the 20 years between 2003 and 2023. In 2020 and 2024, the libertarian Cato Institute said that there was no detectable amount of noncitizen voting. A Brennan Center study found miniscule incident rates of ineligible individuals fraudulently casting ballots at the polls – no more than 0.0025 percent of votes cast.
On October 23, 2024, Republican Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said an audit of his state’s voter rolls had found that out of 8.2 million registered voters in the state, just 20 turned out to not be U.S. citizens. Of those, only nine had ever voted in elections. An 18-month investigation by South Carolina officials could not turn up a single case of “illegal activity” by ineligible voters.
Polling shows that most Republicans believe the myth. Only 35% of self-identified Trump supporters are very or somewhat confident that noncitizens will be stopped from voting, compared with 92% of Harris supporters, according to survey results from Pew Research Center that were released this month.
The Republican Party and its allies have pursued recent lawsuits to force election officials to remove people from voter rolls despite a federal prohibition on “systematic” purges within 90 days of an election. The 90-day “quiet period” is meant to ensure voters have sufficient time to prove their eligibility in the event they are mistakenly removed from the rolls.
Last week, a Trump-appointed judge in North Carolina shot down an attempt by Republicans to invalidate 225,000 voter registrations in the state. From the start of 2023 through August 2024, county boards of elections in North Carolina have removed more than 747,000 registration records from the state’s voter rolls.
Alabama placed 3,251 registered Alabama voters on a path to removal from the voter rolls eighty-four days before this election. A federal judge has since ordered Secretary of State Wes Allen to stop the deactivation. Testimony from state officials in Alabama showed that at least 2,000 people on the list ― nearly two-thirds ― were citizens and legal voters. Similar GOP suits in recent months that alleged improper voter list maintenance and sought purges have been dismissed in Nevada and Michigan. A separate ongoing lawsuit in Nevada alleges thousands of noncitizens are on their voter rolls. The state’s then-Republican secretary of state debunked the same claim in 2021.
Recently, political parties and groups have filed nearly 100 lawsuits across the battleground states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. The Electoral College votes in these states will all but certain determine the outcome of the 2024 presidential election. The vast majority of these suits were brought by Republicans and allied groups claiming they’re focused on rooting out alleged voter fraud, despite the lack of evidence of fraud. Many suits have sought to purge voter rolls or claimed voters didn’t provide adequate proof of citizenship. According to experts, the suits are not designed to succeed but to sow further distrust in the voting system.
Keeping in mind that in 2020 Joe Biden won Arizona by just over 10,000 votes, any effort that affects ballots can change the outcome of the presidential race.
Trump-aligned groups have also sued several counties across the U.S. alleging violations of rules governing drop boxes, ballot chain of custody and ballot signature verification practices. In 2022, drop boxes were banned in Wisconsin yet in July the Wisconsin Supreme Court reinstated the use of most ballot drop boxes across the crucial battleground state.
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