Truth about election fraud: It’s rare, says The Fact Checker

The 2022 midterm elections are underway and many Americans have voiced concern over election fraud. An October Fox News poll showed that more Republicans than Democrats are worried that fraud could play a part in election outcomes. They shouldn't worry so much, writes Glenn Kessler of The Fact Checker column of The Washington Post, who shares his analysis:

• By every single metric, election fraud is rare in the United States.
• Almost no elections in the past 50 years have been flipped because of documented voter fraud, with occasional exceptions at the local level.
• Whenever experts and reporters have tried to tally cases of election fraud, the numbers remain minuscule.
• False claims about the prevalence of voter fraud are nothing new.

There are logical reasons for this," Kessler writes. "The decentralized system of American elections — where elections are run by more than 8,000 local governments and almost 90 percent of Americans vote on paper ballots, according to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission — make it impossible to steal a nationwide election through voter fraud." He notes The Associated Press's comprehensive report on the 2020 election, which found 475 fraud cases out of 25 million votes in the six decisive states, and rulings against Donald Trump's claims by "at least 86 judges, including Trump appointees." (AP allows any weekly newspaper to republish its report, with a link to it.)

The Heritage Foundation says it knows of 1,384 proven cases of vote fraud, dating back to 1979, and is "following dozens of other prosecutions that are ongoing," Heritage Senior Fellow Hans von Spakovsky told Kessler. That’s 32 per year, out of 2 billion votes cast, "according to a calculation for The Fact Checker by the Brennan Center for Justice," Kessler reports. "In a critical review of the Heritage numbers, the center said the database “confirms that widespread voter fraud does not exist.”

The most notable recent case of vote fraud was in North Carolina in 2018, when courts "ordered a new congressional election after an absentee-ballot scheme was discovered in one county that helped to narrowly tip the election to the Republican," Kessler notes. "Suspicions rose after 61 percent of the vote-by-mail ballots in the county were cast for the Republican candidate, despite the fact that only 16 percent of them were registered Republicans." The case illustrated a general rule of vote fraud: The smaller and poorer the electorate, the easier fraud can be accomplished.