A Fox News poll conducted in early October found that 55 percent of those surveyed were extremely or very concerned about voter fraud. Among Republicans, nearly three-quarters said they were that concerned.
These fears have been further fanned by the constant refrain by former president Donald Trump and his allies that Joe Biden triumphed in the 2020 race only because he stole the election — a lie that has been debunked over and over again.
— 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.
There are logical reasons for this.
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.
It is true that election results can be manipulated. Politicians, for instance, might draw election district boundaries to make it all but certain that one political party will win. Trump allies sought to undermine the 2020 results with schemes involving fake electors, an effort to block Congress from affirming the outcome.
But that’s different from ballot stuffing, illegal voting and other types of behavior that would directly affect the outcome at the ballot box and have become the obsession of many election deniers.
Indeed, false claims about the prevalence of voter fraud are nothing new.
Long before Trump sought to undercut the legitimacy of the 2020 election, Republican officials at both the state and federal levels often made dubious claims of election fraud to justify new and potentially burdensome rules such as Voter ID laws. When Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016 but lost the popular vote by more than 3 million votes, he embraced false claims that the margin was the result of fraudulent votes cast by undocumented immigrants. Trump even assembled a voting integrity commission to validate such claims — but it was disbanded after it uncovered no evidence of fraudulent votes being cast.
Let’s unpack the details.
Few cases of documented fraud
Whenever experts and reporters have tried to tally cases of election fraud, the numbers remain minuscule.
Nearly 160 million votes were cast in the 2020 election. By the popular vote count, Biden beat Trump by 7 million votes. But the presidency goes to the person who wins the most electoral college votes, which are awarded to a state’s victor. That can magnify the importance of votes cast in states where the margins are tight.
But an Associated Press review of every potential case of voter fraud in six battleground states found fewer than 475 out of more than 25 million votes cast in those states — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. The disputed ballots amounted to just 0.15 percent of Biden’s victory margin.
In Pennsylvania, for instance, 26 votes were flagged by election officials as potentially fraudulent — and Biden won there by more than 80,000 votes. In one case, a man went twice to the polls, voting once on his own behalf and once for his son.
The state with the most cases is Arizona, with 198 potentially fraudulent votes — such as a woman suspected of sending in a ballot for her dead mother — but Biden still won the state by more than 10,000 votes.
In the 1960 race between Republican Richard M. Nixon and Democrat John F….
Read More: The truth about election fraud: It’s rare
