The Rate of Voter Fraud is So Low It's Almost Statistically Impossible to Swing the Election

Recently, voter fraud has been a huge topic of focus in the upcoming election - brought up repeatedly by President Trump, including at the first presidential debate, as well as over the years as justification for stricter voter ID laws.

But just how prevalent is voter fraud, either with respect to mail-in ballots, in-person impersonation, or double voting? How often does it actually happen?

I compiled a meta-analysis by combining the findings from over a dozen studies/papers/reports on the subject, using sources ranging from President Trump's Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, to MIT, a fairly reputable university, to Reuters, as neutral/balanced a source as there is. The elections analyzed ranged from 1998 to 2018, with the research originating from universities, the Washington Post, Republican Administrations (both at the state and federal level), the Heritage Foundation (conservative think tank), and the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. When a range of outcomes was provided, I always took the highest end of the estimate. All voting data was gathered from the United States House of Representatives.

Voter turnout has been consistently increasing, so I found it most important to identify the percent of voter fraud, not the nominal number of cases, and then apply those percentages against 2016.

Overall, my meta-analysis estimate of voter fraud is 0.00089304% - or 1 in 111,977 ballots cast. This is equivalent to roughly 1,222 votes in the 2016 election, which was 0.0409% of the popular vote margin, and 1.57% of the electoral margin (if all applied to the 3 states that swung the electoral college: Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan).

• Minimum estimate: 0.00000013%
• 2000 to 2006 elections, all 50 states, US Department of Justice under George W Bush
• Maximum estimate: 0.02%
• 2012 election, all 50 states, unaffiliated group from Stanford, Penn, Harvard, and Microsoft

Rate	1 in...	Equivalent in 2016	% of Pop Vote Margin	% of Electoral Margin	Source #	Source
0.02%	5,000	27,357	0.92%	35.19%	1	Working Paper
0.007313%	13,675	10,003	0.335%	12.87%	2	Iowa Secretary of State
0.00614%	16,284	8,400	0.281%	10.80%	3	White House (Trump)
0.002548%	39,247	3,485	0.117%	4.48%	4	Washington Post
0.0025%	40,000	3,420	0.115%	4.40%	5	Brennan Center at NYU
0.0001713%	583,722	234	0.008%	0.30%	6	Arizona State
0.0001%	1,000,000	137	0.005%	0.18%	7	Brennan Center at NYU
0.00009032%	1,107,143	124	0.004%	0.16%	8	Reuters
0.00008741%	1,144,093	120	0.004%	0.15%	9	Heritage Foundation
0.00006%	1,666,667	82	0.003%	0.11%	10	MIT
0.00001%	10,000,000	14	0.0005%	0.02%	11	US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit
0.0000031%	32,258,065	4	0.0001%	0.005%	12	Loyola Law School
0.000002924%	34,196,797	4	0.0001%	0.005%	13	Washington Post
0.00000017%	588,235,294	0.23	0.00001%	0.0003%	14	Kansas Secretary of State
0.00000013%	769,230,769	0.18	0.00001%	0.00023%	15	US Department of Justice (W Bush)
0.00089304%	111,977	1,222	0.0409%	1.57%		Estimate (Meta-Analysis)

Each source is detailed and linked below:

Source #	Source	Institution Type	Election(s)	# States	Date
1	Working Paper	Unaffiliated	2012	50	Oct 2017
2	Iowa Secretary of State	Republican Administration	2012	1	May 2014
3	White House (Trump)	Republican Administration	2016	20	Aug 2018
4	Washington Post	Newspaper	2016, 2018	3	June 2020
5	Brennan Center at NYU	University	2000 to 2006	50	Nov 2007
6	Arizona State	University	2000 to 2010	50	Aug 2012
7	Brennan Center at NYU	University	2016	42	May 2017
8	Reuters	International News	1998 to 2018	1	July 2020
9	Heritage Foundation	Conservative Think Tank	2000 to 2018	50	Oct 2020
10	MIT	University	2000 to 2018	50	April 2020
11	US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit	Federal Court	2000 to 2010	1	July 2016
12	Loyola Law School	University	2000 to 2012	50	Aug 2014
13	Washington Post	Newspaper	2016	50	Dec 2016
14	Kansas Secretary of State	Republican Administration	2010 to 2014	1	Jun 2015
15	US Department of Justice (W Bush)	Republican Administration	2000 to 2006	50	Apr 2007
	Estimate (Meta-Analysis)	Unaffiliated	All	All	Oct 2020

What would these rates look like in every presidential election in the last 50 years? To be as conservative as possible, I'll apply both my estimate (above) and the maximum incident rate I found - 0.02% (even though the paper acknowledged "An audit of poll books, however, suggests that such measurement error could explain many of these apparent double votes.")

Election	Popular Vote MOV	% of Margin (Max)	% of Margin (Estimate)
2016	2,984,757	0.92%	0.04%
2012	5,081,900	0.50%	0.02%
2008	9,550,176	0.27%	0.01%
2004	4,078,211	0.59%	0.03%
2000	530,893	3.82%	0.17%
1996	8,203,716	0.21%	0.01%
1992	5,805,339	0.29%	0.01%
1988	7,077,523	0.26%	0.01%
1984	16,878,120	0.11%	0.00%
1980	8,423,115	0.19%	0.01%
1976	1,683,247	0.95%	0.04%
1972	17,995,488	0.08%	0.00%

Never would either estimate of voter fraud have swung the popular vote. In fact, only once would it have surpassed 1% of the popular vote margin (2000; more on that later).

But the United States isn't decided by popular vote - it's decided by the Electoral College. In three elections in the last 50 years, a handful of swing states have decided the election:

• 2016
• Swing states: Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan
• Margin in swing states (3): 77,744 votes
• Fraud estimate (Max): 27,357 votes
• Fraud estimate (Meta-Estimate): 1,222 votes
• 1976
• Swing states: Wisconsin, Ohio
• Margin in swing states (1): 44,578 votes
• Fraud estimate (Max): 16,321 votes
• Fraud estimate (Meta-Estimate): 729 votes
• 2000
• Swing states: Florida
• Margin in swing state (1): 537 votes
• Fraud estimate (Max): 21,119 votes
• Fraud estimate (Meta-Estimate) 943 votes

Only one presidential election ever could have possibly been swung by fraudulent votes - the 2000 election of Bush over Gore, decided by Florida - and that's if the estimated fraudulent votes were all cast in the same state for the same party. No other election, even the contests of 1976 or 2016, come close.

Whether fraudulent or not, at margins that close, a mistake can swing an election just as easily as voter fraud, like the infamous butterfly ballot in Palm Beach County (in which thousands of people mistakenly voted for a third-party candidate):

The overwhelming conclusion is that the election has to be extremely close for any of this to matter - something that FiveThirtyEight currently gives a 4% chance of happening.

When you discount that 4% chance down further, by the fact that the fraudulent votes would have to ALL be in the same "one or more decisive states" AND all be in the same direction for the same party, it's almost statistically impossible for voter fraud to change the outcome of the election.

It's far more likely, as of this post, while living in the United States, that you would have tested positive for COVID (2.58% of US population) or died from it (0.068%).