Americans are more likely to be struck by lightning than commit election fraud

• President Trump and his allies have filed multiple unsuccessful lawsuits and are spreading misinformation in an attempt to undermine the results of the 2020 election.
• The campaign has not succeeded in proving the evidence of widespread fraud in court, and election officials in the majority of states confirmed the lack of fraud in their states to The New York Times.
• Historically, voter and election fraud has been incredibly rare and affected a tiny percentage of all votes cast in the 21st century, academic studies and journalistic reviews have found.

President Donald Trump and his allies are refusing to recognize the results of the 2020 presidential election and seeking to undermine confidence in the results with vague, baseless claims of election fraud.

Insider and Decision Desk HQ projected on Friday, November 6, that President-elect Joe Biden had won Pennsylvania's 20 Electoral College votes, and with them, the presidency.

Biden currently leads in the three swing states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin by over 215,000 combined votes compared to the 77,744 votes by which Trump carried those three states combined in 2016. It would be practically impossible for Trump to win those states through legal challenges or recounts.

As Insider's Jacob Shamsian has reported, the Trump campaign itself has failed to produce any credible evidence of serious voter fraud in either courts of law or in the court of public opinion, with judges ruling against the campaign in all 12 of the suits they have filed in states including Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, and Pennsylvania.

A Trump campaign lawyer admitted that the campaign was not claiming the presence of massive fraud in a recent hearing for a lawsuit challenging mail ballot counting procedures in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania. And in another legal challenge, the Trump campaign raised questionable claims of fraud in two counties that Trump had decisively won.

Outside of the courtroom, many of Trump's powerful allies in elected office or in conservative media have failed to substantiate their allegations of sweeping voter fraud or election irregularities, or presented questionable evidence that has since fallen apart under scrutiny, as comprehensive fact-checking claims from journalists at Buzzfeed News from A Plus' Isaac Saul has shown.

Election officials in 45 states also recently confirmed to The New York Times that they are seeing no evidence of fraud in their states, and a group of 28 international election observers who observed voting in multiple states said in a preliminary report that they witnessed a remarkably well-run election with no evidence of fraud or malfeasance.

An American is more likely to be struck by lightning than to commit election fraud

While fraud or attempts at fraud happens on a very small scale in every national election, it's incredibly rare and affects a minuscule percentage of all ballots cast. And partly because election administration in the United States is decentralized down to the local level, it never occurs at a rate that would change the outcome of an election.

A comprehensive but nonexhaustive database of voter and election fraud cases maintained by the conservative Heritage Foundation finds documented cases of fraud with mail ballots are more common than cases of in-person voter impersonation, ballot petition fraud, and registration fraud, but that overall rates of fraud are infinitesimally low.

Heritage's database identified 193 criminal convictions, civil penalties, diversions, or other official findings for fraudulent use of mail ballots between 2000 and 2020, a time period during which approximately 250 million mail ballots were cast.

As MIT elections scholar Charles Stewart and National Vote At Home Institute CEO Amber McReynolds noted in an April op-ed, that puts the rate of mail ballots resulting in criminal convictions at 0.0006% and the rate of mail ballots resulting in any kind of official action at 0.00007%.

Rates of fraud are also extremely low in states that send all voters ballots. Heritage's database reports two documented cases of fraudulent use of mail ballots in Oregon, five in Colorado, six in Washington, and none in Hawaii or Utah over the past fifteen years.

A 2012 News21 journalism investigation identified just 2,068 potential cases of voter and election fraud and 491 potential cases of mail ballot fraud between 2000 and 2012, out of hundreds of millions of cast ballots.

Heritage's database has identified just 13 cases of in-person voter impersonation documented between six states over the past 16 years, and a 2014 study from Loyola University Law School professor and elections scholar Justin Levitt found just 31 credible cases of voter impersonation between 2000 and 2014, a time period during which over one billion votes were cast.

The Brennan Center for Justice concludes that "it is still more likely for an American to be struck by lightning" than to commit voter fraud either through in-person voting or with mail ballots.

Trump's claims that ballots are sent out to millions of people with no oversight or security measures are false.

Every state, and especially those that conduct their elections almost entirely by mail, have multiple checks throughout the system and layers of security to ensure the integrity of each ballot, which reduces the incentive to commit fraud.

These include election officials placing specific barcodes and identifying numbers on every ballot, ballot tracking systems that allow voters to track their ballot every step of the way, required signatures on every ballot and in many states, signature verification, in which a signature on a voter's ballot is cross-matched with a signature on file with their elections office.