Electoral fraud in the United States
[55][56] Rutgers professor Lorraine Minnite has maintained that voter impersonation is illogical from the perspective of the perpetrator due to the high risk and limited upside of casting one vote.
[68][69] In August 2014, Loyola Law School professor Justin Levitt reported in The Washington Post 's Wonkblog that he had identified only 31 credible cases of voter impersonation since 2000.
[85] Between 1978 and 2018, at least fourteen elections were invalidated or overturned by courts due to absentee ballot fraud, twelve of which were at the local level (for such offices as county clerk, sheriff, judge, and mayor).
[54] Postal ballots have been the source of "most significant vote-counting disputes in recent decades" according to Edward Foley, director of the Election Law program at Ohio State University.
[146][147][148] Before the 2014 midterm elections in Florida, then-governor Rick Scott announced a purge of 180,000 suspected foreign nationals from voter rolls, though only 85 names were removed and only one person was prosecuted.
[182] In 2022, Florida governor Ron DeSantis arrested more than 20 people who were ineligible to vote related to a felony conviction, nearly all of whom were confused about their eligibility after having received voter registration cards from the state.
Sabato and Simpson posited that Democrats have had more opportunities to commit fraud due to more often having control of both local and legislative offices and a greater percentage of their voter base appearing "to be available or more vulnerable to participation".
[216][217] In the 1876 United States presidential election between Republican Rutherford B. Hayes and Democrat Samuel J. Tilden, voter fraud was widespread, with South Carolina reporting an impossible 101 percent turnout.
[228] In the 1948 United States Senate election in Texas, according to a 1990 book by historian Robert A. Caro, Democrat Lyndon B. Johnson won his primary against Coke R. Stevenson due to electoral fraud, which included county officials casting ballots for absent voters and changing vote tally numbers.
Multiple judges and one independent prosecutor determined that the election was fair, although historian Robert Dallek, who wrote biographies on both candidates, concluded the Chicago machine run by mayor Richard J. Daley "probably stole Illinois from Nixon".
Nixon lost the Electoral College and conceded the election the following morning, although he encouraged recount efforts in Illinois and other states, which were shut down after setbacks in several key court hearings.
[246] The 1997 Miami mayoral election is known for being one of the worst examples of electoral fraud in recent history, with a judge invalidating the result for "a pattern of fraudulent, intentional and criminal conduct" in the casting of absentee ballots.
[248][249] The neighboring city of Hialeah, Florida had its own mayoral contest overturned in 1993, when a judge ruled that so many ballots had been cast from a retirement home housing schizophrenics and drug addicts that the election had to be re-run.
[267][268] In the 2023–24 Bridgeport, Connecticut mayoral election, a judge ordered the Democratic primary to be re-run after ruling that there was enough evidence of ballot stuffing to throw the results into doubt.
[272] A 2016 nationwide poll published in The Washington Post found that 84% of Republicans, 75% of independents and 52% of Democrats believed that a "meaningful amount" of fraud occurred in United States elections.
[278] A January 2021 study by the Harvard Kennedy School Misinformation Review found that a majority of Donald Trump supporters, particularly those who were more politically knowledgeable and more closely following election news, believed that electoral fraud was widespread.
[285] He argues that many prophets in the movement preached that Trump was anointed by God and won the election before the votes had been counted helps to explain why members of charismatic Christian groups were also overrepresented at the Capitol on January 6.
[292] A 2005 report by Democratic House Judiciary Committee ranking member John Conyers titled What Went Wrong in Ohio claimed that "numerous serious election irregularities" and voter suppression by Republicans had caused Bush to win the state.
[304] Trump's creation of the commission was criticized by voting rights advocates, scholars and experts, and newspaper editorial boards as a pretext for, and prelude to, voter suppression.
[333] In December 2021, the Associated Press released a detailed fact-check which found fewer than 475 instances of voter fraud out of an estimated 25 million votes cast in the six battleground states.
[330][340] Richard Hasen wrote that in January 2024 that, "Trump has been able to manufacture doubt out of absolutely nothing; fraud claims untethered to reality still captivate millions of people looking for an excuse as to why their adored candidate may have lost.
[372] According to The New York Times, disinformation efforts by autocratic countries led by Russia and China "push narratives undermining democratic governance" designed to "accelerate the recent rise in authoritarian-minded leaders".
[366] Russia's Internet Research Agency focused voter fraud memes at right-wing groups, with its most-shared Facebook post of the 2016 United States elections reading "Like if you think only US citizens should be allowed vote" while showing a photo of Latinos waiting in line.
[383] The combination of false claims about electoral fraud and violent, warlike rhetoric has been noted to raise the likelihood of election workers receiving threats, as well as political violence such as the unprecedented January 6 attacks.
[405] According to the Bipartisan Policy Center as of July 2024, access to federal citizenship data is "difficult, costly, and burdensome", and state election officials have "long struggled" to obtain it.
[406] In the 2018 Fish v. Kobach case, U.S. District Court Judge Julie Robinson ruled that Kansas' proof of citizenship law was unconstitutional, in part because the state did not demonstrate that any meaningful illegal noncitizen voting occurred and that 31,089 citizens without the right documentation had their voter registration cancelled or suspended.
[421][422][423][424] In a 2023 case in Arizona, U.S. District Judge Susan R. Bolton struck down the documentary proof of citizenship requirement along similar lines but upheld some provisions, citing as credible estimates of 2022 noncitizen voting rates by Jesse Richman, which other scholars have disputed.
[430][431] Researchers at Protect Democracy found that "an explosion of misinformation" about how much cheating occurs among voters using mail-in ballots caused a spike in rejected signatures during the 2021 Georgia Senate runoffs compared to the 2020 presidential election.
States cited complaints about governance issues, including that ERIC mailed newly eligible voters who had not yet registered ahead of federal elections, and that it had become subject to alleged partisan influence.
[55][56][449] According to Bob Hall, former director of Democracy North Carolina, political will is especially required to investigate more complicated electoral fraud schemes, and prosecutors are more inclined to pursue easier cases such as when someone illegally votes while on probation.
