Trump and Pence: this Pew report proves our voter fraud claims. Actual report: nope.
Trump and Pence have pointed to the report to defend their baseless claims that “millions of people” voted illegally.
In Donald Trump and Mike Pence’s world, the election they won was rigged. Trump has taken to Twitter to claim that “millions of people … voted illegally” on Election Day, costing him the popular vote despite his Electoral College victory. And Pence doubled down on the remarks on Sunday, telling ABC News anchor George Stephanopoulos that a 2012 report from the Pew Center of the States backs up Trump’s claim — pointing to a report that Trump himself has cited at rallies.
Does the report actually support what Trump is saying? Are millions of Americans really voting illegally?
The answer is, simply, no.
Part of that is because the report couldn’t even begin to prove what Trump and Pence allege. The report isn’t even about voter fraud; it’s about the technical aspects of voter registration systems, and how America could save money by upgrading how it registers voters.
But there’s a reason Trump and Pence can only seem to point to this report to back up their claims: When you look at analyses that have focused on voter fraud, they find it’s simply not widespread or even a little common.
What the Pew report actually found
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In 2012, Pew conducted an investigation into how US voters are registered. The report, titled “Inaccurate, Costly, and Inefficient,” found that approximately 24 million — one of eight — voter registrations in the US are no longer valid or significantly inaccurate. And more than 1.8 million registered voters were actually dead, while 2.75 million had registrations in more than one state. This is where Trump and Pence are getting their “millions” figure.
But, contrary to what Trump and Pence have suggested, this does not mean that all of these registered voters actually voted. America has a multi-step system for voting: You register, then vote. The report only shows that people registered and were never taken off the rolls. They didn’t even have to register for the latest election — some of them registered for the 2008 election, died, and states just didn’t take them off their rolls.
Pew’s report also doesn’t cite its figures to argue that there’s widespread voter fraud, but instead to show evidence of America’s outdated voter registration system — one that still heavily relied on old-fashioned paperwork instead of electronic or online technologies.
This can be costly, Pew found: “A study Pew conducted with Oregon found that, in 2008, state and local taxpayers spent $4.11 per active voter to process registrations and maintain a voter list, or $7.67 per transaction (new or updated registrations).” In comparison, “Canada, which uses modern technology to register people as well as data-matching techniques common in the private sector, spends less than 35 cents per voter to process registrations, and 93 percent of its eligible population is registered.”
So this is about the cost of outdated voter registration systems — a fairly banal finding — not voter fraud. The report goes on to make some recommendations to upgrade the system (like moving beyond paper-based systems), with a follow-up in 2016 praising some of the progress that some states made since 2012.
Meanwhile, there are studies that look at voter fraud and how common it is. Only they don’t at all back up what Trump and Pence are alleging.
Studies that have looked at voter fraud haven’t found much of it
There have been multiple investigations into voter fraud. None of them have found serious evidence of anything close to millions of people voting illegally.
One analysis focused just on voter impersonation, the type of fraud that strict voter ID laws (which Trump supports) aim to curtail. Tracking credible allegations of this type of fraud, Loyola Law School professor Justin Levitt found 35 total credible allegations between 2000 and 2014, constituting a few hundred ballots at most, when more than 800 million ballots were cast in national general elections and hundreds of millions more were cast in primary, municipal, special, and other elections.
A 2012 investigation by the News21 journalism project looked at all kinds of voter fraud, including voter impersonation, people voting twice, vote buying, absentee fraud, and voter intimidation. It confirmed that voter impersonation was extremely rare, with just 10 credible cases.
But the other types of fraud weren’t common either: In total, the project uncovered 2,068 alleged election fraud cases since 2000, covering a time span when more than 620 million votes were cast in national general elections alone. That represents about 0.0003 alleged cases of fraud for every vote cast, and 344 fraud cases per national general election, in each of which between 80 and 130 million people voted. That’s a drop in the bucket.
What’s more, not all of these — maybe not even half of these — alleged fraud cases were credible, News21 found: “Of reported election-fraud allegations in the database whose resolution could be determined, 46 percent resulted in acquittals, dropped charges or decisions not to bring charges.”
Putting all of this together, the evidence is clear: Voter fraud is extremely rare. It doesn’t add up to the millions in one election, as Trump claimed. In fact, it doesn’t even add up to the thousands in a single election. So Trump really lost the popular vote fair and square.