Instances of Voter Fraud: Prosecuted Cases, Non-Citizen Voting, and Detection

Documented instances of voter fraud in the United States are real but extraordinarily rare. The most careful reviews put the rate somewhere between 0.0003 percent and 0.0025 percent of ballots cast, and a 2014 investigation found just 31 credible cases of in-person voter impersonation out of more than a billion ballots cast between 2000 and 2014.¹ The cases that do get prosecuted tend to be individual acts or small absentee ballot schemes, not organized efforts large enough to alter statewide results.

How Often It Actually Happens

The national numbers are consistent across sources that have looked hard. A Department of Justice unit that scrutinized the 2002 and 2004 federal elections produced a fraudulent ballot rate of 0.00000013 percent and found no evidence of a concerted effort to manipulate results.¹ An Associated Press review of the 2020 election identified fewer than 475 potential cases of fraud across more than 25 million votes cast in six battleground states.²

State-level reviews land in the same range. Arizona: 36 cases over 25 years and more than 42 million ballots, roughly 0.00008 percent, according to figures compiled by the Heritage Foundation itself. Pennsylvania: 39 proven cases over 30 years and more than 100 million ballots.³ Texas: two convictions for in-person voter impersonation out of 20 million votes in the decade before the state passed a strict photo ID law.¹

The largest public catalog, the Heritage Foundation’s Election Fraud Map, listed 1,620 proven instances as of December 2025, including 1,382 criminal convictions, 138 diversion programs, 50 civil penalties, and 25 judicial findings, accumulated across decades and involving members of both major parties.⁴ Heritage describes the database as “a sampling of recent proven instances” and acknowledges that “nobody really knows the extent of election fraud.”⁵ The Brennan Center for Justice, reviewing the database in 2017, found that most entries were “unrelated or tangentially related” to the common understanding of voter fraud and that the cases represented a “molecular fraction” of votes cast nationwide.⁶

What the Documented Cases Look Like

Not every “instance” of voter fraud is the same thing. The Heritage database and the FBI’s enforcement framework sort proven cases into several distinct categories.⁴⁷

Absentee or mail ballot fraud, where someone requests, intercepts, or forges ballots without the voter’s knowledge. This accounts for a significant share of prosecuted cases.
Impersonation at the polls, where a person shows up and votes under another name. Studies find this the rarest form.
Duplicate voting across two jurisdictions.
Ineligible voting, usually by someone with a disqualifying felony conviction, non-citizen status, or residency problem.
Vote buying.
False registration using fake names, addresses, or other people’s identities.
Altering the vote count, typically by an election official.
Ballot petition fraud involving forged signatures on candidate or ballot measure petitions.

There is a legal distinction worth keeping straight. “Voter fraud” refers to illegal acts by individual voters. “Election fraud” involves interference with the electoral process itself and is typically committed by officials, campaign workers, or operatives who tamper with ballots or counts.⁷

Notable Prosecuted Cases

A handful of concrete prosecutions show what proven fraud actually tends to involve.

North Carolina’s 9th Congressional District, 2018

Republican Mark Harris led Democrat Dan McCready by about 905 votes, but the state board of elections refused to certify after evidence surfaced of an organized absentee ballot operation. Voters reported strangers coming to their homes and collecting unsealed absentee ballots, and some said they received ballots they had never requested. Multiple people said they had been paid by Republican political operative Leslie McCrae Dowless to collect ballots, which is illegal under North Carolina law.⁸ The election was voided and a new one ordered. Dowless was indicted on felony counts including obstruction of justice, perjury, and illegal possession of absentee ballots, along with seven alleged co-conspirators.⁹ Harris was not named in the indictments and did not run in the special election.

Kim Phuong Taylor, Iowa

In November 2023, a federal jury convicted Kim Phuong Taylor of Sioux City on 52 counts related to a scheme during the 2020 primary and general elections. Taylor had generated fraudulent votes for her husband’s campaigns by submitting dozens of voter registrations, absentee ballot requests, and completed ballots containing false information, in some cases signing forms for other voters without their permission.¹⁰

Kimberly Zapata and Harry Wait, Wisconsin

Two Wisconsin cases involve people who committed fraud to try to prove the system was vulnerable. Kimberly Zapata, a former deputy director of the Milwaukee Election Commission, used her work credentials in 2022 to request three military absentee ballots under fake names. She was convicted in March 2024 of election fraud and misconduct in public office, and an appellate court affirmed in May 2026.¹¹ Harry Wait, an activist who had promoted 2020 election fraud claims, requested absentee ballots in the names of Wisconsin Assembly Speaker Robin Vos and the mayor of Racine without their consent. A jury convicted him in March 2026 on two misdemeanor election fraud charges and one felony identity theft charge.¹²

Crystal Mason, Texas

Not every charged instance holds up. In 2016, Crystal Mason cast a provisional ballot in the presidential election while on supervised release for a federal tax fraud conviction. She said she had not known she was ineligible and had been encouraged to vote by a poll worker. Her provisional ballot was never counted. She was nonetheless convicted in 2018 of illegal voting, a second-degree felony, and sentenced to five years in prison.¹³ In 2022, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals ruled that the prosecution had to prove she had “actual knowledge” she was ineligible, and on March 28, 2024, a Texas appeals court reversed the conviction and formally acquitted her, finding insufficient evidence that she knew the ballot was illegal.¹⁴

The Non-Citizen Voting Question

Claims that large numbers of non-citizens vote in U.S. elections recur in the fraud debate. The proven numbers are vanishingly small. Federal law bars non-citizens from voting in federal or state elections, with penalties of up to five years in prison and potential deportation.¹⁵

A Heritage Foundation review identified 23 instances of non-citizen voting between 2003 and 2022.¹⁵ An Arizona State University review covering 2000 through 2012 found 56 alleged cases nationwide, about 0.00004 percent of ballots cast. A Brennan Center survey of 42 jurisdictions after the 2016 election, covering 23.5 million votes, found that officials referred only 30 incidents of suspected non-citizen voting, or 0.0001 percent.¹⁶ Florida’s 2012 effort to purge non-citizen registrants started with a list of 180,000 names and ultimately produced one conviction out of 12 million registered voters.¹

A 2014 study by Jesse Richman and colleagues estimated that between 32,000 and 2.8 million non-citizens may have voted in the 2008 presidential election, based on a large-scale survey. Stephen Ansolabehere, the principal investigator of the Cooperative Congressional Election Study the paper relied on, demonstrated that the findings were “completely accounted for by very low frequency measurement error”: even a 0.1 percent rate of respondents accidentally checking the wrong box on a citizenship question was enough to generate the apparent non-citizen voters. When the same respondents were tracked across survey waves, the validated voting rate among consistent non-citizens was zero.¹⁷ Richman himself later acknowledged that the study’s “high-end estimates are likely incorrect.”¹⁸ The Cato Institute reached a similar conclusion.¹⁹

Has Fraud Ever Changed an Outcome?

A researcher who reviewed 30 years of elections while writing a book in 2012 could not find a single instance of impersonation fraud that had decided an election.¹ Heritage itself does not make “definitive claims” about the overall scope of fraud, though it asserts that fraud “can alter — and have altered — the outcome of close elections.”⁵

The cases where fraud demonstrably changed a result are small and local. In Brighton, Alabama, a judge ordered the mayor to vacate office in 2016 after finding 46 fraudulent absentee ballots had been cast. In Wetumpka, Alabama, a judge overturned a 2017 city council race after invalidating eight fraudulent absentee ballots that had given the apparent winner a three-vote margin. In Vernon, California, a city council election decided by four votes was overturned when five voters turned out to be non-residents.²⁰ No statewide or federal election outcome in the United States has been shown to have been altered by ballot fraud.³

Allegations Versus Proven Instances After 2020

Many searches for voter fraud trace back to the 2020 presidential election. The claims and the proven cases ran in opposite directions. Donald Trump and his allies filed more than 60 lawsuits alleging widespread fraud, and courts rejected them consistently, describing the allegations as speculative, based on hearsay, or grounded in misunderstandings of normal election procedures.²¹

The Wisconsin Supreme Court called one challenge “meritless on its face” with “no basis in reason or law.” A Nevada court found that plaintiffs failed to provide “credible and relevant evidence to substantiate any” of their allegations, a ruling the Nevada Supreme Court affirmed.²² An Arizona court ordered the state Republican Party to pay the opposing side’s legal fees for a “groundless” lawsuit filed for the “improper purpose” of undermining confidence in election results. A Michigan federal judge sanctioned Sidney Powell and eight other attorneys for submitting lawsuits based on false information.²¹

A peer-reviewed study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences examined the statistical claims behind the fraud allegations and found that each was either based on incorrect facts or misread normal electoral patterns. Claims about Dominion voting machines, bellwether counties, and absentee ballot patterns in Georgia and Pennsylvania did not survive statistical scrutiny. The researchers concluded there was “nothing in these statistical tests that supports Trump’s claim of a stolen election.”²³

The most high-profile post-election review, Arizona’s Senate-commissioned audit of Maricopa County by the firm Cyber Ninjas, spent six months hand-counting ballots and examining equipment. The firm’s own machine recount confirmed that Maricopa County’s official ballot totals were accurate.²⁴ Cyber Ninjas flagged roughly 53,304 ballots as potentially invalid, but Maricopa County’s 93-page rebuttal classified the audit team’s 75 specific claims as inaccurate, misleading, or false, and traced the flagged ballots largely to faulty commercial databases and incorrect matching methods. The county’s own follow-up identified only 37 potential instances of double voting and 50 potential double-counted ballots, with the 37 cases referred to the Arizona Attorney General’s Office.²⁵

How Fraud Gets Caught

The reason proven instances are small is partly that layered checks exist to find them. The Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC), founded in 2012, is an interstate data-sharing program that cross-references voter registration and motor vehicle data from member states against Social Security death records and U.S. Postal Service change-of-address data. As of mid-2026 it had 25 member states plus the District of Columbia.²⁶ After each federal general election, ERIC produces a Voter Participation Report identifying voters who may have cast ballots in more than one state, voted more than once in the same state, or voted on behalf of a deceased person; member states must review and refer credible cases to law enforcement.²⁷

Every state and the District of Columbia now conducts some form of post-election audit. Thirty-six states and D.C. use traditional tabulation audits that check a fixed percentage of precincts or machines, and seven states have adopted risk-limiting audits, which use statistical sampling to confirm a reported outcome.²⁸²⁹³⁰³¹

Put the pieces together and a consistent picture emerges. Instances of voter fraud do happen, they are prosecuted when caught, and they tend to involve absentee ballot handling, ineligible voters, or small-scale schemes in local races. The checks catch most of them, the courts have found no evidence that any major American election has been swung by fraud, and the proven total across decades of elections amounts to a rounding error against the billions of ballots cast.

1
Brennan Center for Justice. Debunking the Voter Fraud Myth
2
Wisconsin Public Radio. Jury Finds Former Milwaukee Election Official Guilty of Election Fraud
3
Brookings Institution. How Widespread Is Election Fraud in the United States? Not Very
4
Heritage Foundation. Election Fraud Cases – Categories
5
Heritage Foundation. About the Heritage Election Fraud Map
6
Brennan Center for Justice. Heritage Fraud Database: An Assessment
7
FBI. Election Crimes
8
Brookings Institution. Understanding the Election Scandal in North Carolina’s 9th District
9
NPR. North Carolina GOP Operative Faces New Felony Charges That Allege Ballot Fraud
10
U.S. Department of Justice. Woman Convicted of Voter Fraud Scheme
11
Courthouse News Service. No Reprieve for Former Wisconsin Election Official Convicted of Voter Fraud
12
NBC News. Activist Who Pushed 2020 Election Fraud Claims Convicted of Election Fraud
13
Texas Tribune. Texas Illegal Voting Conviction Crystal Mason
14
New York Times. Crystal Mason Texas Voting Acquitted
15
Migration Policy Institute. Noncitizen Voting in U.S. Elections
16
Brennan Center for Justice. Noncitizen Voting: Vanishingly Rare
17
Harvard University CCES. Perils of Cherry Picking Low Frequency Events in Large Sample Surveys
18
New York Times. Illegal Voting Claims and Why They Don’t Hold Up
19
Cato Institute. Shedding Light on the Incidence of Illegal Noncitizen Voting
20
U.S. Congress. Heritage Foundation Testimony – Election Fraud Database
21
Campaign Legal Center. Results of Lawsuits Regarding the 2020 Elections
22
State Court Report. What Litigation After the 2020 Election Can Tell Us About 2024
23
PNAS. Are Dead People Voting by Mail?
24
Maricopa County. Correcting the Record
25
Arizona Mirror. Maricopa County Rebuts Audit Findings, Bogus Election Claims
26
ERIC. Electronic Registration Information Center
27
ERIC. How Does ERIC Work
28
National Conference of State Legislatures. Post-Election Audits
29
Brennan Center for Justice. Post-Election Audits
30
Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 52 USC § 20511
31
U.S. Department of Justice. Federal Election Crimes Reference