Voter Fraud in US Federal Elections 2000–2024

What the data says about the narrative

A widely-repeated political narrative claims that voter fraud is widespread enough to swing US federal elections. This map shows every documented, court-verified case the team could find that occurred during a US federal-election cycle from 2000 through 2024, drawing primarily on US Department of Justice prosecutions, state Attorney General announcements, and contemporaneous reporting from major news outlets.

Why case numbers rise after 2016

The data shows a clear uptick from the 2016 cycle onward, peaking at 20 cases during the 2020 cycle. This almost certainly reflects more aggressive detection and prosecution rather than more underlying fraud:

• Dedicated election-integrity units were created or expanded at the state level — Texas (2017), Florida (Office of Election Crimes and Security, 2022), and the federal Public Integrity Section visibly increased prosecutions.
• Mail-in ballots in 2020 (COVID-era) created both more opportunity and far more scrutiny; many of the 2020 cases here are individual voters who tried to cast a deceased relative's mail ballot and were caught and prosecuted.
• Political and media attention rose dramatically after 2016, meaning even small cases that would have been a one-paragraph local item before became fully prosecuted and publicly documented.
• Source-database coverage is sparser pre-2014. Earlier cycle counts here are likely undercounts of what was actually prosecuted at the time, not a true picture of what occurred.

The crucial point: even at the 2020 peak, with 20 documented cases against 158,429,631 ballots cast, the case rate is 0.0000126%, or 1 case per 7.9 million ballots. That is the highest detection rate in the entire 24-year window — and it still does not approach the scale required to alter a federal-election outcome.

Both parties have appeared in the prosecutions

The party tally is not symmetric, but it is not one-sided either. Republican perpetrators dominate the post-2016 dataset, primarily because individual Trump voters who attempted to vote twice (in their own name plus a deceased spouse or in two different states) drove a wave of single-ballot prosecutions in 2016, 2020, and 2022. Democratic perpetrators include former US Congressman Michael "Ozzie" Myers of Philadelphia, Bridgeport city councilman Michael DeFilippo, and Maryland congressional candidate Wendy Rosen. Election officials who committed fraud — nine separate cases — are tagged as a distinct bucket since their personal party is irrelevant to the crime. Use the party filter above to inspect the distribution yourself.

Why the Republican tally dominates — without bias in the dataset. The 29-vs-9 Republican-to-Democrat split is honest, not partisan, and it has a specific explanation. Most of the Republican cases on this map are individual voters — not operatives — who tried to cast a second ballot in 2016, 2020, or 2022 (their own ballot plus a deceased relative's, or their ballot in two states). These cases surged in three cycles when high-profile claims of a "rigged" election were most loudly broadcast; voters who believed the system was being stolen from their preferred candidate were disproportionately the ones who tried to "balance" what they thought was already happening — and they got caught. The Democratic cases on the map are smaller in number but include far more institutional defendants: former US Congressman Michael "Ozzie" Myers (Philadelphia), Bridgeport city councilman Michael DeFilippo, Maryland congressional candidate Wendy Rosen, and Edinburg, Texas mayor Richard Molina. The party tally counts heads; it does not measure scheme severity or institutional reach. If you want to weight by ballots affected or by election-overturning impact, the picture changes considerably.

Claims vs Reality

The most widely-repeated specific voter-fraud claims of the last decade, set side-by-side with the documented record. Every "Reality" entry is sourced to a primary or counter-partisan source: a court ruling, an audit report, a Republican-led legislative investigation, the Brennan Center, the Bipartisan Policy Center, the state Secretary of State, or peer-reviewed academic work.

Methodology

What counts as a case

A case is included only if all four conditions are met:

• The fraudulent act occurred in connection with a US federal general election in November of an even-numbered year from 2000 to 2024 inclusive.
• The case ended in a criminal conviction, a guilty plea, or an election result being officially overturned or voided.
• A verifiable, independent primary source exists for the case (court record, DOJ or state AG press release, board-of-elections finding, or major news coverage).
• Each case is attributed to the specific state and, where the source identifies it, the specific county.

How party affiliation was tagged

For each defendant we sought a public record of party affiliation: voter registration (where reported in news coverage), the party of the campaign or office the fraud was committed in support of, or explicit reporting on which candidate the defendant voted for fraudulently. Where the public record does not establish party we tag the case "Unknown" rather than guess. Election officials acting in their official role are tagged "Election-official" because their personal party is incidental to the crime — they violated their oath of office regardless of party.

About undetected fraud — could we be missing most of it?

This is the strongest possible counterargument to the map, and we want to address it head-on rather than hope nobody asks. The objection runs: "Of course documented fraud is rare — you're only counting the cases that got caught. Most fraud is, by definition, undetected."

The reply is the detection-incentive argument, and it carries a lot of weight in this specific topic. Over the last decade, the political and financial reward for proving widespread federal-election fraud has been enormous. If meaningful fraud existed at scale, the people most motivated to find it have had every tool and every dollar required to do so, and the absence of results from those investigations is itself evidence. Specifically:

• The Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity (Pence-Kobach Commission, 2017–2018) was a bipartisan body with subpoena power, federal funding, and an explicit mandate from a sitting president to find evidence of fraud. It was disbanded in January 2018 without producing evidence of widespread fraud; even the commission's own Republican secretary, Matthew Dunlap, later released documents showing no proof of meaningful fraud was found.
• The Cyber Ninjas Maricopa County audit (2021) was funded with at least $9 million, most of it from dark-money groups whose entire purpose was to surface fraud. After months of hand-counting 2.1 million ballots, the audit confirmed Biden won — and actually widened his margin by 360 votes.
• The 60+ post-2020 election lawsuits filed by the Trump campaign and aligned groups had access to discovery, sworn affidavits, and friendly judges in many jurisdictions. All were rejected or withdrawn; many of the dismissals were written by Trump-appointed federal judges who explicitly noted the lack of evidence.
• State-level Republican investigations — Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger's signature audits, the Michigan Senate Oversight Committee's Republican-led probe of Antrim County and Detroit, Wisconsin's Republican-controlled legislature's review — have all reached the same conclusion: no fraud sufficient to change the outcome.
• Risk-Limiting Audits are now used in at least 17 states (Colorado, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Rhode Island, Virginia and others), explicitly designed by election-security researchers to statistically prove the outcome of an election with quantifiable confidence. A 5% risk-limit audit catches a wrong outcome 95% of the time. None of these audits has overturned a federal outcome in the period covered by this map.
• The most thorough independent count of voter-impersonation fraud — the form most commonly cited to justify strict voter-ID laws — found 31 credible incidents in more than one billion ballots cast (Justin Levitt, Loyola Law School, Washington Post 2014). Even that figure included allegations, not just convictions.

Put more plainly: if widespread federal-election fraud existed, the people most motivated to prove it — with subpoena power, millions of dollars, friendly courts, and a decade of opportunity — would have found it by now. They have not. The combination of zero-result well-funded investigations and the modern statistical audit toolkit (which mathematically bounds the probability of an undetected wrong outcome) places a hard ceiling on how much fraud could be going undetected. The ceiling is small enough that even if every undetected case were three or four times the documented count, the rate would still be a tiny fraction of a percent of the vote.

What "ballots affected" counts

For most cases this is 1 (one person voted twice, or cast one improper ballot). For larger conspiracies, this is the number widely reported by prosecutors or election boards as part of that operation. The Bladen County NC-9 absentee-ballot scheme is the only case with a large figure (~250 ballots reported by the North Carolina Board of Elections across the operation), and the four sub-operatives are tagged 1 each to avoid double-counting. Transparency check: if the Bladen operation is excluded entirely from the dataset, the remaining 59 cases account for 455 fraudulent ballots, or roughly 1 in 3.3 million ballots cast — still a vanishingly small share of the vote. Removing the single largest case does not change the conclusion.

A note on sourcing — and why this map does NOT rely on the Heritage Foundation database

The Heritage Foundation maintains a widely cited Election Fraud Database. Heritage is a conservative think tank with explicit policy-advocacy commitments (most prominently as the lead organizer of Project 2025), and citing it as a primary source on a fact-checking page would be reasonable to challenge on independence grounds. This map deliberately does not use Heritage as a primary source for any case.

The Heritage database was used only as a research-discovery aid. Every case in this final dataset is sourced to an underlying independent primary source: a Justice Department press release, a state Attorney General announcement, a court filing, or contemporaneous reporting from a major news organization. Any candidate case that could not be independently re-sourced outside Heritage was excluded.

A closing note on evidence and belief

This map argues from court records, prosecutions, audits, and primary sources. None of that guarantees it will change a mind that is already settled. A few honest observations on that, since the topic is hard:

A hard truth is hard to swallow. When the facts cut against a story we believe deeply, the easier reflex is to attack the facts than to update the story. That is human, not partisan. It happens on every side of every contested topic.

Belief can be manufactured. If enough money, attention, and repetition are aimed at a claim — any claim — a meaningful share of people will come to hold it as obvious common sense, regardless of whether the underlying record supports it. This is not a comment about voter fraud specifically; it is a comment about how the information environment of the last decade works in general, and about why a page like this one is needed at all.

Everyone has a right to their own opinion. No one has a right to their own facts. Every opinion is valid as an opinion; not every opinion turns out to be true. The point of this page is not to tell anyone what to think. It is to put the documented record — sourced, dated, and citation-linked — in front of any reader who wants to look at it before they decide.

— Patrick Neil Bradley

Source breakdown

↓ Download full dataset (CSV) All 60 cases, all fields, all source links — for independent audit.

Where each of the 60 cases in this map gets its primary source:

References & further reading

• US Department of Justice, Public Integrity Section — federal election fraud prosecutions; the single most important primary source for this map.
• Brennan Center for Justice: The Myth of Voter Fraud — comprehensive review of the empirical evidence.
• Bipartisan Policy Center: The 2020 elections litigation by the numbers — the 60+ post-election lawsuits and their outcomes.
• News21 / Carnegie-Knight Election Fraud Database — academic project that documented 2,068 alleged cases between 2000 and 2012 using public records requests; used as a case-discovery aid.
• Brookings: How widespread is election fraud in the United States? Not very.
• US Federal Election Commission — official election returns
• US Elections Project (Dr. Michael McDonald, University of Florida) — midterm turnout figures.
• Disclosure on Heritage Foundation: The Heritage Election Fraud Database exists and was used as a research-discovery aid only. Heritage is a partisan-aligned organization and is not cited as a primary source for any case on this map.

Each individual case in the map links to its primary source. Lightning strike odds from the US National Weather Service.