The Voter Fraud Fraud

DURING HIS STATE OF THE UNION ADDRESS on February 24, President Donald Trump called on Congress to “prevent illegal aliens and other unauthorized persons from voting in our sacred American elections. Cheating is endemic in our elections. It is endemic.”

The accusation that there is widespread cheating in our elections is dramatic, alarming and oft-repeated. This is also completely false.

After years of audits, recounts, lawsuits, academic studies, and investigations in red states and blue states alike, there is absolutely no evidence – zero – of significant, potentially outcome-changing voter fraud in America’s elections. There is simply no evidence.

It turns out that the real fraud is not at the ballot box; These are claims like the one the president made during a speech to a joint session of Congress.

The president made this fraudulent statement for a reason. He and his Republican allies in Congress are trying to advance the SAVE America Act, which they have breathlessly touted as necessary to protect our elections from “widespread” fraud. But the bill, which would impose excessive new ID requirements for voting – thereby disenfranchising many legitimate voters – is based on the completely fallacious assumption that there is a huge fraud problem to be solved. Every study, every trial, every audit, every recount comes to the same conclusion: You are about 13,000 times more likely to be struck by lightning than to discover a fraudulent vote by an undocumented immigrant.

Last year, for example, the right-wing Heritage Foundation updated its database of voter fraud by state between 1982 and 2025. After hard work, it identified 1,620 cases nationwide over the past forty-four years, out of a total of more than two billion votes cast. And how many of those cases involved undocumented immigrants trying to vote? Ninety-nine. You read that right, ninety-nine out of two billion. (These odds – 99/2,000,000,000 – are three orders of magnitude longer than the National Weather Service’s estimated odds of 1/15,300 of being struck by lightning at some point during an eighty-year lifespan.)

Let’s look at my state of Maine. We have Election Day registration, no voter ID, no-excuse absentee voting, mail-in voting, and drop boxes – in other words, all the bogeymen of voter fraud. The heritage study revealed two cases of voter fraud over the past forty-four years, none of them involving illegal immigrants. Give me a break.

The phrase “widespread voter fraud” suggests something widespread, systemic and decisive. Yet all serious investigations into this claim have ended in failure. Courts have rejected sweeping allegations for lack of evidence. (Trump was 1 of 62 in lawsuits alleging voting irregularities in the 2020 election.) Recounts upheld the results with only minor numerical adjustments. Post-election audits consistently show extremely high accuracy rates. Republican secretaries of state, Democratic governors, and federal judges appointed by presidents of both parties have all acknowledged the same reality: There is no evidence of significant, coordinated voter fraud sufficient to change the election results.

But the drumbeat continues and many people seem to be walking along.

If you convince people that the system is rotten, you don’t need to prove it. Repetition can replace proof. Suspicions can replace facts. The more frequently a complaint is made, the more normal it seems.

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BUT HERE IS THE REAL DANGER: Democracy depends not only on secure systems, but also on public trust in those systems. When leaders and commentators repeatedly assert that elections are “rigged” without basis, they undermine that trust. Citizens begin to believe that their vote does not matter. Election workers – ordinary people who volunteer for long hours – face harassment and threats. Peaceful transitions of power become contested spectacles. The damage is not theoretical. It’s real and measurable. We saw it on January 6, 2021.

Fraud is deception aimed at obtaining gain. What do you call it when the public is constantly told that their elections are corrupt, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary? What do you call it when isolated irregularities turn into sweeping accusations against the entire system? When normal human error is presented as evidence of conspiracy?

We should call this “voter fraud” for what it is: a massive effort to deceive the people in order to justify taking over our elections and manipulating the results.

The SAVE America Act is a solution in search of a problem. Instead of solving the nonexistent problem of “widespread voter fraud,” it would create real obstacles for ordinary Americans trying to exercise one of their most fundamental rights as an American citizen: the right to vote. The bill would require U.S. citizens to present documents such as passports or birth certificates to prove their citizenship in order to register to vote. Other forms of identification, including REAL ID, would not suffice. These same documents will need to be presented every time you update your voter registration, such as when you move and change your address, or even when you do something as simple as changing your party affiliation. More than 21 million eligible voters do not have access to the documents necessary to comply with these requirements. Obtaining these documents costs time – often during work hours – and money, so the SAVE America Act would effectively create a poll tax on tens of millions of Americans.

The bill will also create unnecessary barriers for people who have changed their names. Take for example one American voter in particular: our vice president, JD Vance. Vice President Vance was born James Donald Bowman and later changed his name on his birth certificate to James David Hamel after being adopted by his stepfather. He changed his last name again to honor his grandmother, who raised him, in 2013. If JD Vance were one of millions of ordinary American citizens without access to a passport, the SAVE America Act would make it harder for him to prove his citizenship with documents whose names don’t match, and make it even harder for him to register to vote.

Equally problematic, the SAVE America Act would impose an enormous burden on state and local election officials – many of whom are volunteers trying to serve their communities – and impose complex legal risks. For example, the bill would establish criminal penalties against any election official who registers a candidate who fails to provide the necessary documents proving their citizenship. These criminal penalties apply even if the individual is actually a U.S. citizen and the official simply makes a material error in his or her documents. I fear that this will discourage civic-minded citizens from volunteering to vote and that it will result in citizens being denied voter registration and, ultimately, their right to vote, because local officials would live in fear of not complying with these burdensome provisions.

As if all of this wasn’t reason enough to oppose the bill, the SAVE America Act would also severely restrict mail-in voting, which would have an outsized impact on rural voters. It also requires states to turn over their voter rolls to the Department of Homeland Security to enforce the Systematic Alien Verification Program, a program that was rebuilt by DOGE and has already falsely identified U.S. citizens as ineligible to vote. I fear that DHS will use this opportunity to purge state voter rolls, further limiting the number of people allowed to vote.

In short, the SAVE America Act would not only be a disaster but a direct attack on one of America’s most sacred principles.

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FOR MORE THAN TWO CENTURIES, the United States has held elections during wars, depressions, social upheaval, pandemics, and periods of intense partisan division. Power changed hands peacefully between bitter rivals. Paper-thin margins have been identified, argued for and resolved within constitutional limits. This assessment does not reflect a fragile imposture. It reflects a resilient framework that has endured precisely because it is structured with guardrails. And one of the main guarantees is the decentralization of the system itself, its management at the local level. The president’s plan to “nationalize” our elections would sweep all that away.

Declaring elections illegitimate without compelling evidence is not a defense of democracy – it is an attack on it.

Confidence in elections must be based on facts, not fueled by fear. Citizens deserve to be honest about the strengths and limitations of the system. They deserve to know that while no system is perfect, there is no evidence to support the claim that ours is filled with widespread fraud.

The health of a democracy depends on a shared commitment to reality. And the reality here couldn’t be clearer. Substantial voter fraud is not a significant feature of American elections. The far more dangerous threat today is the repeated assertion that this is the case.

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Angus S. King Jr. represents Maine as an independent in the United States Senate.