Trump and GOP Claims of Mail Ballot Fraud Lack Supporting Evidence

Decades of election data, independent studies, and more than 60 dismissed post-2020 lawsuits tell a consistent story: widespread mail ballot fraud is not happening. That record has not stopped President Trump and Republican allies from insisting otherwise, and Trump has now converted those claims into federal policy, signing a second executive order in early April 2026 that directed the U.S. Postal Service not to deliver mail ballots to any voter not on a pre-approved list.

Trump has long claimed, without evidence, that mail voting is rife with fraud and has sought to curtail it. The newest order followed a 2025 executive order that required proof of citizenship to register and mandated all ballots be received by Election Day. That earlier order was struck down by the courts.

The evidentiary foundation for those claims is thin by nearly every independent measure. An April 2020 voter fraud study covering 20 years by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found the level of mail-in ballot fraud "exceedingly rare," occurring in only "0.00006 percent" of individual votes nationally. The Brennan Center for Justice's landmark report, "The Truth About Voter Fraud," put the incident rate for voter impersonation fraud between 0.00004 percent and 0.0009 percent, noting it is more likely that an American "will be struck by lightning than that he will impersonate another voter at the polls." A Washington Post analysis of five all-mail elections found just 372 possible cases of fraud out of approximately 14.6 million votes cast.

Even the Heritage Foundation's Election Fraud Database, the most frequently cited resource by conservatives pressing for tighter voting laws, does not make the case for systemic mail-ballot compromise. The database now includes 1,412 proven instances of election fraud and describes itself as a sampling of recent cases. Drawing from that same database, a Brookings Institution analysis found only about 0.00006 percent of total votes cast were fraudulent mail votes over the preceding 20 years. The Heritage Foundation itself acknowledges the database does not claim to be comprehensive.

The courts reached similarly skeptical conclusions after the 2020 election. Trump's campaign filed lawsuits contesting election processes, vote counting, and the certification process in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Wisconsin. Many cases were quickly dismissed, and lawyers and other observers noted the lawsuits were not likely to have an effect on the outcome of the election. An Associated Press fact-check found fewer than 475 instances of voter fraud out of an estimated 25 million votes cast in the six battleground states, involving both Democrats and Republicans, almost always caught before votes were counted.

There is no evidence of a plot by noncitizens to steal elections. Past audits have shown that cases of noncitizens voting are rare, and under current federal law, voters must attest, under penalty of perjury, that they are U.S. citizens when they register to vote.

The political incentives to repeat the fraud narrative remain strong regardless of the evidence. Trump's fraud claims dovetail with the stalled SAVE America Act, a congressional overhaul that would impose sweeping new voter identification requirements. That bill is mired in the U.S. Senate with little chance of passage. The latest executive order on mail voting has already drawn at least four lawsuits. Nineteen states sued over Trump's earlier voting executive order, arguing it was an unconstitutional attempt to seize state election authority.

Election security experts point out that existing law already deters fraud effectively: in states like Oregon, voting with or signing another person's ballot is a Class C felony punishable by up to five years in prison, providing a strong deterrent. Post-election audits have also proven capable of catching actual misconduct when it occurs. A 2018 review of returned absentee ballot records in Bladen County, North Carolina, identified anomalies that enabled election officials to uncover interference by a political operative who stole and tampered with mail ballots. That case resulted in a new election, demonstrating that the system's safeguards can work when given the chance to function.