The facts behind Trump’s false voter fraud rhetoric

Former President Donald Trump’s election-year message to his supporters is clear and often repeated: If Democrats win the November election, blame voter fraud. 

Fraud by mail-in voting. Fraud by noncitizen voting. Fraud by a vast interstate conspiracy. Fraud orchestrated by the Democratic Party. 

Trump sent a fundraising appeal in August that said his victory needed to be “TOO BIG TO RIG” by the Democrats. 

He works similar talking points into rallies and interviews.

“We have to vote and we have to make sure that we stop them from cheating, because they cheat like dogs,” Trump said Aug. 3 in Atlanta.

“Watch for the voter fraud, because we win without voter fraud, we win so easily,” he said Sept. 6 to the Fraternal Order of Police.  

“Anytime you have a mail-in ballot, there is going to be massive fraud,” he told Dr. Phil McGraw on Aug. 27.  

Trump vowed “long-term prison sentences” for election “cheaters.” At a Sept. 13 rally in Las Vegas, he said, “We have a good lead, but we’ve got to be careful because remember, they cheat like hell.”

Trump summarized his concerns into one rant in an interview with conservative radio host Wayne Allyn Root: “We have a rigged election. We have bad borders, we have very bad elections. We have a bad voting system. We have mail-in ballots.” 

It’s important for voters to know that his election claims are wildly false, just as they were in 2016 and 2020. We wanted to help voters understand why.

Trump’s claims could discourage voters, including Republicans, from participating in the election. If they think their votes won’t count as a result of Democratic scheming, fraudulent mail-in voting, and noncitizens participating illegally, then why should they bother? 

“As a Republican, it bothers me when Trump says that we win without voter fraud,” said Trey Grayson, former Kentucky secretary of state. “On the one hand, it is literally true. There is not a lot of voter fraud in this country, and Republicans win elections all the time. I won twice; Trump won the presidency once. But Trump’s continued insistence that voter fraud is why Republicans lose elections has been very harmful for the party.” 

When we asked Trump’s campaign to provide evidence that shows the only way Trump loses is with voter fraud and that mail-in voting has massive fraud, Republican National Committee spokesperson Anna Kelly said, “How can you fact check something that hasn’t happened yet?”

If recent elections serve as a guide, falsehoods about voter fraud will intensify as millions of Americans begin to cast ballots by mail, at early voting sites, and then on Election Day. But the election system in our country makes the heist Trump has long described both unlikely and impossibly elaborate. 

“We should call this what it is: Trump laying the groundwork so he can cast doubt on the 2024 results if he doesn’t win,” said Joanna Lydgate, CEO of the nonpartisan States United Democracy Center.

Elections are administered by local jurisdictions that have protections in place

Miami-Dade County Supervisor of Elections Christina White, right, examines signatures on vote-by-mail ballots with Judge Raul Cuervo, left, and Judge Betsy Alvarez-Zane, center, on Oct. 26, 2020, at the Miami-Dade County Board of Elections. (AP)

The U.S. has a decentralized election system largely administered by local election officials.

States set laws on election policies such as sending mail ballots or requiring voters to show a photo ID. Local election officials handle the day-to-day tasks of running elections. Their offices send ballots to voters, train volunteers to check in voters at local precincts, and oversee the machines at voting sites. 

Consider Michigan, a battleground state where elections are administered by about 1,600 county and local officials.

Those officials are “Republicans, Democrats and independents — along with thousands of poll workers from both parties and every community,” Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson said Sept. 26 as voting by mail began.

To build a sufficient Electoral College margin, bad actors would have to collaborate across battleground states in a coordinated but secret way, with hundreds of people risking felonies for the same goal. 

Pulling this off would require thousands of illegal votes. A database maintained by the conservative Heritage Foundation shows about 1,500 proven instances of voter fraud over decades. But during that time period there were billions of votes.

The web of election security laws and practices makes widespread fraud unrealistic.

Election security starts with voter registration. The Help America Vote Act of 2002 typically requires that people who register to vote provide an ID, often a driver’s license. Local election officials, in compliance with federal law, complete an effort to remove ineligible voters from the rolls such as those who moved not later than 90 days before an election. (Some removals still take place after that deadline, such as when people alert the elections office that they have moved or that a family member died.)

But there are additional steps election officials take to protect the election. About two-thirds of states have laws requiring voters to show ID at the polls.

The remaining 14 states verify voters’ identities in other ways, such as a signature which is checked against information on file. 

Mail-in voting has safeguards

From left, Carol Hamilton, Cristo Carter and Cynthia Huntley prepare ballots Sept. 5, 2024, for mailing to the Mecklenburg County Board of Elections in Charlotte, N.C. (AP)

Trump has spread many falsehoods about voting by mail, even though he has sometimes used it himself as a Florida voter. 

Mail-in voting provides more opportunity for fraud than in-person voting, but it’s still rare. 

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There are protections in place to prevent people from casting multiple ballots.

Take California, which Trump has falsely criticized as sending seven ballots to every voter. 

California is one of eight states plus Washington, D.C., that send a ballot to all registered, active voters. 

Once a voter submits a mail ballot, the system flags that the person already voted, according to the California secretary of state’s office. A second ballot would not be counted. Similar protections are in place for in-person voting. 

Politicians, usually Republicans, also talk about the threat of dead people voting in close elections. In this scenario, a relative would fill out a ballot in the name of a dead relative and send it in, even though that is illegal. 

This has happened, but it’s not at the scale that would tip an election. 

A Marple, Pennsylvania, man who voted for Trump on behalf of his dead mother in 2020 told the judge: “I was isolated last year in lockdown. I listened to too much propaganda and made a stupid mistake.”

Federal law makes it a crime to vote more than once in an election for candidates for federal office. The penalty is a fine of up to $10,000 or prison up to five years, or both. Many state laws also list double voting as a felony punishable by fines or jail time.

In the U.S., 94% of registered voters live in states that have some version of ballot tracking. That reduces the probability of fraud because individual voters and election officials can track the progress of ballots through the system, said Paul Gronke, director of Reed College’s Elections and Voting Information Center. 

States that allow ballot drop boxes often have laws that require security features, such as locks or monitoring. Ballot drop boxes were used in some places for decades without controversy until 2020, when Trump described them, without evidence, as a “voter security disaster.”

Noncitizen voting is illegal and rare 

Former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris debate Sept. 10, 2024, in Philadelphia. (AP)

Another cornerstone of Trump’s effort to cast doubt on election results involves voting by noncitizens.

During the Sept. 10 presidential debate with Vice President Kamala Harris, Trump said Democrats are trying to get illegal immigrants to vote, “and that’s why they’re allowing them to come into our country.” That’s Pants on Fire. 

Only U.S. citizens can vote in federal elections. Immigrants who arrive now can’t vote because the process to get U.S. citizenship takes years. 

Noncitizens who vote face up to a year in jail and deportation, said David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research.

Immigrants who have often risked everything to come to the U.S., whether legally or not, do not want to risk their presence in the U.S. “for the right to cast one ballot in an election in which 160 million are going to be cast,” Becker said during a Sept. 20 media briefing by the National Task Force on Election Crises.

There have been instances of noncitizens ending up on the voter rolls, sometimes by accident when getting a driver’s license. And states have sometimes erroneously flagged citizens as noncitizens.

The Republicans have pointed to some examples of states removing noncitizens on the voter rolls as reason for concern. Ohio officials announced in August that they had found about 600 noncitizens who registered to vote, including 138 who appear to have voted without  U.S. citizenship The statement did not say when they voted. There are about 8 million registered voters in Ohio.

Other RNC allegations in lawsuits against Democratic-led states have not yet been proven in court.

The RNC sued Nevada on Sept. 11, alleging that about 4,000 individuals who used immigration paperwork at the Department of Motor Vehicles cast a ballot in the 2020 general election. But then-Secretary of State Barbara Cegavske, a Republican, investigated a similar allegation after the election and dismissed it. While thousands of people present immigration paperwork at the DMV, it’s possible that they later became citizens. 

The RNC also sued North Carolina to enforce a state law requiring courts to forward to the state elections board forms showing when people indicate they can’t serve on juries because they are noncitizens. 

The North Carolina State Board of Elections told PolitiFact that it is enforcing the new law and that it found nine such individuals and is investigating their citizenship status.

States, including North Carolina, take several steps to ensure that only citizens cast ballots including that people registering to vote must sign an application, under penalty of perjury, attesting that they are U.S. citizens. 

‘Vice President Kamala Harris speaks May 1, 2024, in Jacksonville, Fla. (AP)

Voter enthusiasm and the presidential candidates’ positions on the economy, abortion or immigration will drive voters’ decisions and influence the election — not fraud.

As of Oct. 2, polls showed a tight contest between Trump and Harris in battleground states.

“Trump’s two previous elections also featured very close races in the states that decided the election,” said Kyle Kondik, managing Editor, Sabato’s Crystal Ball at the University of Virginia Center for Politics.

“It stands to reason that this race should be close again.”

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