The final weeks of the presidential election have been rife with misinformation. Some of it — like Haitian immigrants stealing and eating cats, for example — is completely untrue. But some start with a kernel of truth and either distort the facts, blow up small problems into huge ones, or ignore the very important role of context in explaining what happened.
This is most evident from the persistent claims, coming from Donald Trump and his allies, that the 2024 election will be rife with cheating on the part of Democrats.
But the facts still matter, and interestingly, the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing think tank best known for putting together the controversial 2025 Project, has detailed evidence to support the claim of widespread election fraud in the United States. Experts at that organization have been tracking cases of election fraud across the country, and their database is so comprehensive that it lists specific examples and names of people who have been convicted of some type of criminal act in connection with voting.
Scrolling through the Heritage Database at first glance gives the impression of a lot of fraud, 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 election fraud were found, and none were found. It affected the election results
To illustrate just how little fraud there is in US elections, we took Heritage's own data to construct the following table of voter fraud in federal elections – presidential and congressional elections.
Looking at the seven closest states, for example, in Arizona, Heritage had to go back 25 years, where 36 elections were held and 42,626,379 ballots were cast, in order to find 36 instances of fraud. The percentage of fraudulent votes was very small, at 0.0000845%, and not a single election result was changed due to ballot fraud during that time period. In hotly contested Pennsylvania, Heritage data goes back 30 years and covers 32 elections in which more than 100 million votes were cast, and found only 39 cases of voter fraud. As the table indicates, this is the case with all other states where the vote is likely to be close. A few cases of fraud have been reported among millions upon millions of ballots, none of which changed the outcome of the election.
Voter fraud is serious, which is why there are many protections built into the system to guard against fraud. In an effort to “pre-respond” to the inevitable accusations of fraud, election officials across the country are working hard to inform voters of how voting will actually work.
In one of the lesser-known aspects of the vote counting process, Democrats and Republicans have teams of lawyers, armed with depositions, who are allowed into the rooms where votes are being counted. In order to assume that a massive amount of voter fraud is occurring, you also have to assume that the Democrats or Republicans have really stupid or just lazy lawyers, which is what it is.
So, as Darrell West and I argue in our Brookings Press book Lies That Kill: A Citizen's Guide to Disinformation, context matters in the fight against disinformation. Are the Social Security Administration scammed millions of dollars every year? Yes. But every year, Social Security sends out $1.5 trillion in benefits.
The bottom line – whether it's voter fraud or government fraud – facts matter, and isolated cases of fraud do not constitute a widespread trend.
