The final weeks of the presidential election were full of misinformation. Some of them – like Haitian immigrants stealing cats and eating them, for example – are downright false. But some of them start from a kernel of truth and either distort the facts, turn small issues into huge problems, or ignore the crucial role of context in interpreting what happened.
Nowhere is this more evident than in persistent claimscoming from Donald Trump and his allies, that the 2024 election will be marked by cheating on the part of the Democrats.
But facts always matter and, interestingly, Heritage Foundationa right-wing think tank famous for developing the controversial Project 2025, has detailed evidence that supports the claim that there is widespread voter fraud in the United States. Experts at this organization have tracked voter 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 sort of criminal action in connection with the vote.
Browsing the Heritage database gives the impression at first glance that there is a lot of fraud going on, but a closer look reveals quite the opposite. To find thousands of cases of voter fraud across the country, Heritage staff had to go back decades, where hundreds of millions of votes were cast and a very small number of cases of voter fraud were discovered, none of which were noted. affected the election results.
To illustrate how minimal voter fraud is in US elections, we used Heritage’s own data to construct the following chart of voter fraud in federal elections – presidential and congressional.
Looking at the seven closest states, for example, in Arizona, Heritage had to go back 25 years, during which there were 36 elections and 42,626,379 ballots cast, to come up with 36 cases of fraud. The percentage of fraudulent votes was a tiny 0.0000845%, and no election results were changed by voter fraud during this period. In the hotly contested state of Pennsylvania, Heritage data goes back 30 years and covers 32 elections with more than 100 million votes cast and found only 39 cases of voter fraud. As the table indicates, this is the case for all other states where the vote is likely to be close. A handful of cases of fraud were reported among millions and millions of ballots cast, and none of them changed the outcome of the election.
Voter fraud is serious, so there are many protections built into the system to protect against fraud. In an effort to “pre-mask” the inevitable accusations of fraud, election officials across the country are working hard to inform voters on how voting actually works.
And — in one of the lesser-known aspects of the vote count — both Democrats and Republicans have teams of lawyers, armed with depositions, who are allowed into the rooms where the count is taking place. To assume massive voter fraud, you also have to assume that Democrats or Republicans have really stupid lawyers or just plain lazy lawyers, and it’s neither.
So, as Darrell West and I argue in our Brookings Press book, “The lies that kill: a citizen’s guide to disinformation” In the fight against disinformation, context is important. Are millions of dollars swindled from the Social Security Administration every year? Yes. But every year, Social Security sends $1.5 trillion in advantages.
Ultimately, whether it’s election fraud or government fraud, facts matter and isolated instances of fraud do not constitute a widespread pattern.
