The Truth About Election Fraud: Why Americans Shouldn't Worry

Until people started lying about stolen elections in this country, most Americans hadn’t worried about election fraud. They shouldn’t be worrying now. Contemporary American elections have been overwhelmingly honest. For instance, the Trump-supporting think tank The Heritage Foundation is eager to convince us that election fraud is widespread. It cites 1,561 "proven instances of voter fraud" in an ongoing study. Assuming we accept this work as accurate, does that sound like a lot? Does it sound like a serious threat to democracy?

Think again. The study covers "fraud" reports that stretch as far back as 36 years. That means an average of about 43 cases a year for the whole nation. There are 19,495 cities and towns in the United States. Each of these cities and towns have a federal, state, or local election every year. So, each year, there were 19,945 elections and an average of 43 cases of "fraud," making the annual instances of "fraud" in the Heritage report a phenomenon of 0.0022 of the total elections. This doesn’t suggest the imminent collapse of democracy, does it?

And what does the study mean by "fraud?" A stolen election? That would be serious in 43 instances despite it still being a tiny, tiny number of cases. But that's not what "fraud" means in the report. The report includes election law violations of the broadest sort and does not mean the average of 43 affected annual elections were stolen, far from it. The most typical violation was the misuse of absentee ballots ranging from illegally helping someone to fill out a ballot to filling out a ballot without the voter’s permission. Of course, this sort of thing must be prosecuted but that doesn’t mean the elections were stolen or even affected in any way where the bogus ballots were never counted.

Of the 1,561 cases Heritage cites only the tiniest fraction of them caused an election to be overturned. Because Heritage doesn’t readily disclose the number itself, let’s be generous and put that number at 5 percent. That would mean a total of 78 election outcomes ranging from local boards to state offices changed outcomes in the 36-year period covered by Heritage (Heritage cites no federal elections overturned). This means two per year among 19,945 annual elections in America or 0.0001. So, taking Heritage at its word in terms of the information it gathered, we should feel pretty safe, shouldn’t we?

Nope. Heritage and others play the bogeyman card too. Keep being afraid. Use your imagination. Think of all the fraud that hasn’t been detected! Be scared! And so, people are. A poll shows that most Americans, including 86 percent of Republicans are scared about imaginary election fraud. And when this happens, people start acting irrationally.

Like the Georgia election board's unsuccessful attempt to potentially block election results with its rules allowing election officials to refuse to certify vote counts and demand hand counts. Like the unsuccessful attacks in Georgia on 63,000 people’s right to vote. Like the unsuccessful attack on mail-in ballots in Nevada. Like the failed attacks on overseas voting rights in Michigan and North Carolina and the dozens of other attacks on voting rights brought by Trump supporters across the United States. And all of this is topped off with Trump calling for military intervention on election day against, "the enemy within." Considering the microscopic amount of fraud in American elections, this stuff is just plain cuckoo—or malicious.

But our democracy is deep. American poll workers are typically community volunteers getting low pay or no pay. Elections officials are our friends and neighbors. No vote-warping mafia is overseeing balloting in this country. Equally important, those recent failed attempts at interference in Georgia, Nevada, Michigan, North Carolina, and elsewhere failed because American judges—regardless of their political parties—sided with the law and the truth in those cases. They are doing now what they did in 2020 when Trump lost over 60 bogus lawsuits trying to overturn that year’s presidential election.

So, Americans should be confident that our election system works despite efforts to turn us against one another and our institutions. When it comes to election fraud, the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.

Thomas G. Moukawsheris a former Connecticut complex litigation judge and a former co-chair of the American Bar Association Committee on Employee Benefits. He is the author of the new book, The Common Flaw: Needless Complexity in the Courts and 50 Ways to Reduce It.

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.