The Voter Fraud Fraud
There just isn’t evidence of significant election cheating—but that won’t stop the GOP from pushing its dangerous SAVE America Act.
DURING HIS STATE OF THE UNION ADDRESS on February 24, President Donald Trump asked Congress to “stop illegal aliens and others who are unpermitted persons from voting in our sacred American elections. The cheating is rampant in our elections. It’s rampant.”
The accusation that there is rampant cheating in our election is dramatic, alarming, and oft-repeated. It is also totally false.
After years of audits, recounts, lawsuits, academic studies, and investigations across red states and blue states alike, there is absolutely no evidence—zero—that substantial, outcome-changing voter fraud is present in American elections. There simply isn’t proof.
It turns out that the real fraud is not at the ballot box; it’s claims like the one the president made as he addressed a joint session of Congress.
The president made this fraudulent statement for a reason. Both 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 “rampant” fraud. But the bill, which would place excessive new ID requirements for voting—in the process effectively disenfranchising many lawful voters—is based upon the entirely phony premise that there is a massive fraud problem to be fixed. Every study, every lawsuit, every audit, every recount has reached the same conclusion: You are about 13,000 times more likely to be struck by lightning than to find a fraudulent vote by an undocumented immigrant.
Last year, for example, the right-leaning Heritage Foundation updated its database of voter fraud by state between 1982 and 2025. After laboring mightily, they pinpointed 1,620 cases in the entire country during the last 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. (Those odds—99/2,000,000,000—are three orders of magnitude longer than the National Weather Service’s estimated 1/15,300 odds 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, voting by mail, and dropboxes—in other words, all the voter fraud bogeymen. The Heritage study found two cases of voter fraud there in the past forty-four years, neither of which involved illegal immigrants. Give me a break.
The phrase “rampant voter fraud” suggests something widespread, systemic, decisive. Yet every serious investigation into this claim has come up empty. Courts have dismissed sweeping allegations for lack of evidence. (Trump was 1 for 62 in lawsuits alleging voting irregularities in the 2020 election.) Recounts have confirmed 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 alter election outcomes.
But the drumbeat continues and plenty of people seem to be marching to it.
If you convince people that the system is rotten, you do not need to prove it. Repetition can substitute for evidence. Suspicion can substitute for fact. The more frequently a claim is made, the more normal it sounds.
BUT HERE IS THE REAL DANGER: Democracy depends not only on secure systems, but on public trust in those systems. When leaders and commentators repeatedly claim elections are “rigged” without substantiation, they chip away at that trust. Citizens begin to believe their votes do not matter. Election workers—ordinary people volunteering long hours—face harassment and threats. Peaceful transitions of power become contested spectacles. The damage is not theoretical. It is real and measurable. We saw it on January 6, 2021.
Fraud is deception for gain. What do we call it when the public is told, again and again, that their elections are corrupt, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary? What do we call it when isolated irregularities are inflated into sweeping indictments of the entire system? When normal human error is presented as proof of conspiracy?
We should call this “voter fraud fraud” what it is: a massive effort to mislead 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 fixing the nonexistent problem of “rampant voter fraud,” it would create real-life barriers to everyday Americans trying to exercise one of their most fundamental rights as an American citizen: the right to vote. The bill would require American citizens to show documents like passports or birth certificates to prove their citizenship to register to vote. Other forms of identification, including the REAL ID, wouldn’t be good enough. These same documents would need to be shown anytime 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. Over 21 million eligible voters lack access to the necessary documents to comply with these requirements. Obtaining these documents costs time—often during working hours—and money, so the SAVE America Act would effectively create a poll tax for tens of millions of Americans.
The bill will also create unnecessary barriers for people who have changed their name. Let’s take one particular American voter, for example: 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 he was adopted by his stepfather. He again changed his last name to honor his grandmother, who raised him, in 2013. If JD Vance were one of millions of regular American citizens without access to a passport, the SAVE America Act would make it harder for him to prove his citizenship with documents with mismatched names, and make it that much harder for him to register to vote.
Equally problematic, the SAVE America Act would place a massive burden on state and local election officials—many of whom are volunteers trying to serve their community—and impose complicated legal risks. For example, the bill would establish criminal penalties against any election official who registers an applicant who fails to provide the right documentation to prove citizenship. These criminal penalties apply even if the individual is actually an American citizen and the official just makes a clerical error on their paperwork. I worry that this will discourage public-spirited citizens from volunteering to serve at the polls 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 running afoul of these burdensome provisions.
As if all of that weren’t reason enough to oppose the bill, the SAVE America Act would also severely restrict vote by mail, 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 run through the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements Program, a program that was rebuilt by DOGE and has already misidentified American citizens as being ineligible to vote. I am worried that DHS will use this opportunity to purge state voter rolls, even further limiting who is able to vote.
The SAVE America Act would be, in short, not just a disaster but a direct assault on one of America’s most sacred principles.
FOR MORE THAN TWO CENTURIES, the United States has conducted elections during wars, depressions, social upheavals, pandemics, and times of intense partisan division. Power has changed hands peacefully between bitter rivals. Razor-thin margins have been recounted, litigated, and resolved within constitutional boundaries. That record does not reflect a fragile sham. It reflects a resilient framework that has endured precisely because it is structured with safeguards. And one of the primary safeguards is the decentralization of the system itself, its management at the local level. The president’s plan to “nationalize” our elections would sweep this all away.
To declare elections illegitimate without compelling evidence is not a defense of democracy—it is an assault on it.
Confidence in elections should be built on facts, not fueled by fear. Citizens deserve honesty about both the strengths and limits of the system. They deserve to know that while no system is flawless, there is no evidence to support the claim that ours is filled with rampant fraud.
The health of a democracy rests on a shared commitment to reality. And the reality here could not be clearer. Substantial voter fraud is not a significant feature of American elections. The far more dangerous threat today is the repeated assertion that it is.
Angus S. King Jr. represents Maine as an independent in the United States Senate.