How widespread is election fraud in the United States? Not very | 국외연구자료

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How widespread is election fraud in the United States? Not very

Brookings

2024.10.31

The closing weeks of the presidential election have been full of disinformation. Some of it―like Haitian immigrants stealing cats and eating them, for instance―is downright false. But some of it starts with a kernel of truth and either misrepresents the facts, blows small problems into huge ones, or ignores the all-important role of context in interpreting what happened.

Nowhere is this more evident than in persistent claims, coming from Donald Trump and his allies, that the 2024 election will be rife with cheating on the part of the Democrats.

But facts still matter, and interestingly enough, the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing think tank famous for pulling together the controversial Project 2025, has detailed evidence that bears on the claim that there is widespread election fraud in the United States. Experts at that organization have been tracking election fraud cases across the country, and their database is so comprehensive that it lists specific examples and names of people who have been convicted of some kind of criminal action with regard to voting.

Scrolling through the Heritage database at first glance offers the impression that there’s a lot of fraud―but a more careful look reveals just the opposite. To come up with thousands of instances of voter fraud around the country, Heritage staff had to go back decades in time where there have been hundreds of millions of votes cast and a very small number of cases of election fraud have been found, none of which affected election outcomes.

To illustrate just how miniscule fraud is in American elections, we took Heritage’s own data to construct the following table of voter fraud in federal elections―presidential and congressional.

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