Mail-In Voting Fraud: Data, Cases, and the 2026 Ruling

Mail-in voting fraud is exceedingly rare. Across the 2016, 2018, 2020, and 2022 general elections, researchers found an average fraud rate of 0.000043% of all mail ballots cast, or roughly four cases for every ten million ballots mailed in.¹ Even so, claims of widespread fraud have driven a presidential executive order, a wave of new state laws, and a Supreme Court decision issued in June 2026.

How Often Does Mail Ballot Fraud Actually Happen?

Independent analyses using different methods and covering different time periods reach the same basic conclusion: proven fraud accounts for a vanishingly small share of mail ballots cast.

A 2025 Brookings Institution study cross-referenced state mail voting laws with the Heritage Foundation’s own election fraud database. It found between six and 46 cases of mail voting fraud identified in each general election year from 2016 through 2022. Even under generous assumptions about underreporting, the researchers put the frequency at roughly 2.5 cases per million mail votes.¹ A peer-reviewed study in Statistics and Public Policy found “no evidence that voting by mail increases the risk of voter fraud overall,” and reported that fraud rates in universal vote-by-mail states were “statistically indistinguishable” from states without it.²

Oregon offers the longest track record. Between 2000 and 2019, the state cast about 61 million ballots and recorded 38 criminal convictions for voter fraud of any kind — a rate of 0.00006%.³ A Stanford analysis of Washington State found about 20 ballots cast in the names of deceased individuals out of roughly 4.5 million voters, and noted that even those could reflect clerical errors or name-and-birthdate coincidences rather than intent to defraud.⁴

The Heritage Foundation’s election fraud database, as of December 2025, catalogues 1,620 proven instances of voter fraud of all types spanning decades and all 50 states.⁵ A New York Times review of that database identified 289 cases of absentee ballot fraud between 1982 and 2025.⁶ The Brennan Center for Justice has argued the Heritage total represents a “molecular fraction” of the billions of votes cast nationwide over the same period.⁷

Is Mail Voting More Vulnerable Than In-Person Voting?

Scholars generally agree on a nuance that gets lost in political debate. Overall fraud is rare regardless of how someone votes, but mail ballots carry a somewhat different risk profile than ballots cast at a polling place. The MIT Election Lab notes that “many scholars who argue that fraud is generally rare agree that fraud with VBM voting seems to be more frequent than with in-person voting.”⁸ The reasons are structural: mail ballots are filled out away from election officials, which creates a theoretical opening for coercion, and the postal path is less controlled than a polling place.

The data shows those theoretical vulnerabilities have not translated into meaningful exploitation. The peer-reviewed comparison of state systems found that fraud rates actually declined more steeply in states that adopted universal mail voting, dropping 57% between 2000 and 2019 versus a 36% decline in states without it.² The authors also noted that most voters in vote-by-mail states return their ballots in person at drop-off locations rather than through the postal system.

What Keeps the Fraud Rate So Low

The low rate is the product of layered verification designed to catch illegitimate ballots before they are counted.

Signature verification. Thirty-two states and Puerto Rico compare the signature on a returned ballot envelope against the signature in voter registration records. The U.S. Election Assistance Commission recommends a three-tier review: automated software screening, human review of flagged ballots, and a bipartisan team check of remaining discrepancies.⁹¹⁰
Witness and ID requirements. Eight states require a witness signature on the ballot envelope, and three require notarization. Several others require a driver’s license number, state ID number, or partial Social Security number.⁹
Ballot tracking. Envelopes typically carry unique serial numbers or barcodes. At least 47 states and Washington, D.C., provide online tracking tools so voters can follow their ballot from mailing through counting.¹¹
Duplicate-vote detection. Voter registration systems flag anyone recorded as voting more than once and refer those cases for investigation.¹²
Ballot curing. Thirty-four states and D.C. allow voters to fix problems such as a missing or mismatched signature after submitting a ballot, preventing legitimate votes from being discarded over minor errors.¹¹
Criminal penalties. Federal law imposes up to five years in prison and $10,000 in fines per act of election fraud.¹³

Washington State data from 2020 through 2024 shows how the system works in practice. About 1.6% of returned ballots were challenged for a missing or mismatched signature, and roughly 60% of those were successfully cured. The ultimate rejection rate for signature issues was about 0.7% of all ballots cast, and late arrival, not fraud, accounted for about half of all rejections.¹⁴

What Real Fraud Cases Look Like

When mail ballot fraud does occur, it tends to be localized, and it generally gets caught and prosecuted.

The most prominent recent case involved the 2018 race for North Carolina’s 9th Congressional District. A political operative named McCrae Dowless ran an illegal ballot-harvesting scheme, collecting and in some cases filling in absentee ballots. The North Carolina State Board of Elections refused to certify the results and ordered a new election, which a different candidate won. Dowless pleaded guilty to federal charges of Social Security fraud and theft of government property related to concealing campaign income while collecting disability benefits, and was sentenced to six months in federal prison.¹⁵ State-level ballot fraud charges were also filed against Dowless and others.¹⁶

In Milwaukee, Kimberly Zapata, the former deputy director of the city’s Election Commission, was convicted in March 2024 of one felony count of misconduct in public office and three misdemeanor counts of election fraud for requesting military absentee ballots under fabricated names during the 2022 election. She claimed she was trying to expose a loophole. The judge rejected that characterization and sentenced her to one year of probation, 120 hours of community service, and $3,000 in fines; jail time was stayed.¹⁷¹⁸

In Bridgeport, Connecticut, seven defendants face charges tied to absentee ballot fraud in the 2019 and 2023 mayoral elections. In July 2025, Josephine Edmonds pleaded guilty and was scheduled for sentencing to a three-year suspended sentence and probation. Another defendant, Wanda Geter-Pataky, faces 92 criminal charges including conspiracy to take possession of multiple voters’ absentee ballots.¹⁹

In Pennsylvania, three Millbourne Borough council members pleaded guilty in 2025 to a federal conspiracy to steal the 2021 mayoral election. They had fraudulently registered nearly three dozen non-residents, requested mail-in ballots on their behalf, and cast those ballots for one of the defendants. Their preferred candidate still lost. Sentences ranged from 12 months to 36 months in federal prison.²⁰

Ballot Harvesting

Ballot harvesting is the practice of a third party collecting and returning completed absentee ballots on a voter’s behalf. It is legal in some form in 35 states, though many impose restrictions such as caps on how many ballots one person can return or requirements that collectors be family members.²¹ The North Carolina 9th District case is the most prominent example of harvesting turning criminal, and it ended in a wholly new election.

Regardless of state collection laws, filling out someone else’s ballot, intimidating a voter, or influencing their choices is universally illegal. In 2026, a federal court upheld Texas’s ban on paid ballot harvesting as constitutional.²¹

Political Claims Versus the Audits

The gap between the data and the rhetoric has been stark. President Donald Trump has called mail-in ballot cheating “legendary” and in March 2026 claimed the United States is “the only country in the world that has mail-in ballots.” That is incorrect. According to the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, more than 30 countries allow postal voting, and 10 — including Canada, Germany, South Korea, and the United Kingdom — allow all voters to vote by mail.⁶

A related claim is that noncitizens vote “en masse.” State audits have repeatedly found otherwise. A 2026 Pennsylvania audit of more than 210,000 voter registration forms found exactly one noncitizen improperly registered; that person never voted. A Utah audit of 2.1 million voters likewise found one. Louisiana’s investigation identified 79 noncitizens who had voted since the 1980s.²² The Heritage Foundation’s own database identified 23 instances of noncitizen voting between 2003 and 2022.²³

In May 2026, Trump claimed that Maryland had distributed “500,000 Illegal Mail In Ballots” and called for a Justice Department investigation. A vendor printing error had sent about 500,000 voters primary ballots for the wrong political party. Maryland’s top election official stated that “no fake OR illegal mail-in ballots were distributed,” that the flawed ballots were being sequestered and voided, and that unique identifiers on return envelopes prevented duplicate voting.²⁴

Executive Order and New State Laws

On March 25, 2025, President Trump signed Executive Order 14248, “Preserving and Protecting the Integrity of American Elections.” It directed the Election Assistance Commission to condition federal election funding on states adopting an Election Day receipt deadline for all mail ballots, with limited exceptions for military and overseas voters.²⁵ The order also sought to require proof-of-citizenship documentation for voter registration and to grant the Department of Homeland Security and Elon Musk’s “DOGE” access to state voter files. A federal court permanently blocked the proof-of-citizenship provision, ruling the president lacks authority to unilaterally alter election procedures.²⁶

At the state level, since the 2020 election at least 19 states have implemented new mail voting restrictions, and at least nine have enacted laws limiting third-party ballot collection.²⁷ The Voting Rights Lab described the 2025 session as producing the “most significant mail voting rollback” since it began tracking in 2021.²⁸

Utah’s H.B. 300 repealed the state’s universal vote-by-mail system. Starting in 2029, voters must opt in every eight years to receive a mail ballot; those who do not must vote in person. Beginning in 2026, voters must provide the last four digits of a valid ID with their ballot.²⁹³⁰
Kansas and North Dakota both eliminated grace periods, requiring mail ballots to arrive by Election Day rather than simply be postmarked by then.³¹
Arkansas now requires mail voters to complete an additional affidavit in the presence of a witness.³¹

Not every proposal passed. Arizona Governor Katie Hobbs vetoed seven bills that would have shortened mail ballot receipt deadlines.³¹ In Maine, a November 2025 ballot initiative that would have imposed photo ID requirements, eliminated absentee voting days, and restricted drop boxes was rejected roughly 64% to 36%.³²

The Supreme Court’s 2026 Ruling on Late-Arriving Ballots

The most consequential legal battle over mail voting reached the Supreme Court in the 2025–2026 term. In Watson v. Republican National Committee, the RNC and Mississippi Republicans challenged a state law allowing absentee ballots postmarked by Election Day to be counted if received within five business days. They argued that federal election-day statutes require ballots to be not just cast but also received by Election Day.³³

On June 29, 2026, the Court ruled 5–4 against the challengers. Justice Amy Coney Barrett, writing for the majority joined by Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson, held that the federal term “election” refers to the act of casting a ballot, not its receipt. The opinion noted that the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act presupposes that state law governs receipt deadlines, and that the Court would not “trap in amber” 19th-century election practices. Barrett wrote that concerns about “election integrity and voter confidence are properly directed to legislatures, not courts.”³³ Justice Samuel Alito dissented, joined by Justices Thomas and Gorsuch, with Kavanaugh joining in part.³⁴

The ruling preserved existing procedures in roughly 30 states that count at least some mail ballots received after Election Day.³⁵ In about half of those states, the extended deadlines apply only to military and overseas voters.³⁴

1
Brookings Institution. Mail Voting in the US: Data Points to Very Low Fraud and Significant Benefits to Voters
2
Taylor & Francis Online. Voting by Mail and Voter Fraud
3
OPB. Ban Oregon Mail-In Voting Momentum
4
Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research. How Does Vote-by-Mail Change American Elections
5
Heritage Foundation. Election Fraud Cases – Categories
6
The New York Times. Trump Mail Voting Elections Fact Check
7
Brennan Center for Justice. Heritage Fraud Database Assessment
8
MIT Election Lab. Voting by Mail and Absentee Voting
9
National Conference of State Legislatures. How States Verify Voted Absentee/Mail Ballots
10
U.S. Election Assistance Commission. Signature Verification and Cure Process
11
Bipartisan Policy Center. Mail Voting Is Safe and Secure
12
Minnesota Secretary of State. Election Security Measures
13
Brennan Center for Justice. Mail Voting Accuracy
14
University of Washington Election Data. Washington State Ballot Rejection Report
15
Carolina Journal. Key Figure in 9th District Election Scandal Gets Six Months in Prison
16
KPLC. Key Figure in NC Ballot Probe Gets Prison for Benefit Fraud
17
FOX6 Now. Kimberly Zapata Ballot Fraud Case Sentence
18
Courthouse News Service. Former Milwaukee Elections Official Gets Suspended Sentence, Fines for Committing Election Fraud
19
CT Mirror. Bridgeport Ballot Fraud Guilty Plea
20
U.S. Attorney’s Office, Eastern District of Pennsylvania. Final Millbourne Borough Official Sentenced to Nearly Two Years in Prison for Election Fraud
21
FindLaw. Ballot Harvesting: What Is It, How Does It Work
22
Cato Institute. Another Data Point Against the Theory Non-Citizens Are Voting En Masse
23
Migration Policy Institute. Noncitizen Voting in US Elections
24
NBC News. Trump Calls for DOJ Investigation of Mail Ballot Error in Maryland
25
Federal Register. Preserving and Protecting the Integrity of American Elections
26
Brennan Center for Justice. The President’s Executive Order on Elections, Explained
27
Brennan Center for Justice. State-by-State Guide to Restrictive Changes to Voter ID, Mail Voting, and Ballot Collection
28
Voting Rights Lab. 2025 Legislative Sessions to Date: Key Election Policy Trends
29
KUER. Utah Lawmakers Push Their Contested Vote-by-Mail Changes Over the Finish Line
30
The Salt Lake Tribune. Utah Gov. Cox Signs Bill to End Universal Vote-by-Mail
31
Brennan Center for Justice. State Voting Laws Roundup: October 2025
32
Maine Public. Mainers Reject Voter ID, Absentee Ballot Restrictions as Question 1 Fails
33
U.S. Supreme Court. Watson v. Republican National Committee, No. 24-1260
34
WTTW News. Supreme Court Rules States Can Count Late-Arriving Mailed Ballots, Rejecting Trump-Led Challenge
35
Washington Post. Supreme Court Rules Mail-In Ballots Arriving After Election Day Can Be Counted