In American politics, terms like “voter fraud” and “election fraud” often get thrown around as if they are interchangeable terms — sometimes to deliberately confuse voters. It is crucial to understand the difference between the two and to recognize which actually poses a greater threat to fair elections in the United States.

What’s the Difference?

Voter fraud refers to illegal actions taken by individual voters—like voting multiple times, voting under a false identity, or voting when not eligible. This kind of fraud is extremely rare.

Election fraud, on the other hand, involves deliberate efforts by candidates, parties, officials, or outside actors to manipulate the electoral process itself. This includes tactics like gerrymandering, voter suppression, ballot tampering, and disinformation campaigns.

How Common Is Voter Fraud?

Over the past four decades, extensive investigations have consistently shown that voter fraud is very, very, very rare:

A comprehensive study by the Brennan Center for Justice found voter impersonation rates between 0.0003% and 0.0025%.

From 2000 to 2014, Loyola Law School professor Justin Levitt tracked only 31 credible incidents of voter impersonation out of more than 1 billion ballots cast. The report found that it is more likely an American “will be struck by lightning than that he will impersonate another voter at the polls.”

The Real Threat: Election Fraud by the Powerful

While voter fraud is mostly a myth, election fraud is a real and ongoing threat – and it often hides in plain sight through policies and systems that are legal but deeply undemocratic.

There are three common forms of systemic election manipulation: gerrymandering, voter suppression, and voter ID laws.

1.Gerrymandering: Letting Politicians Choose Their Voters

Gerrymandering is the practice of manipulating electoral district boundaries to give one party an advantage. It’s one of the most enduring forms of election fraud – and it’s legal in most states.

For instance:

North Carolina (2016–2019): Courts ruled that the state’s congressional and legislative maps were unconstitutional due to racial and partisan gerrymandering. In one ruling, the court noted that Republican legislators had drawn maps that gave them 10 of 13 congressional seats despite nearly even statewide vote totals.

Wisconsin (2011–2020): After Republicans redrew legislative maps in 2011, they won 60 out of 99 Assembly seats in 2012 despite receiving less than half the statewide vote. In 2018, they won just 45% of the vote but secured 63 of 99 seats.

2.Voter Suppression: Legal Tactics to Keep People from Voting

Voter suppression includes a range of policies designed to make voting more difficult—particularly for Black, Latino, Indigenous, and low-income Americans.

Shelby County v. Holder (2013): The Supreme Court struck down key parts of the Voting Rights Act, allowing states with histories of racial discrimination to change voting laws without federal oversight. Within weeks, states like Texas and North Carolina implemented restrictive laws that disproportionately affected minority voters.

Georgia (2020–2022): The state closed over 200 polling places (most in Black neighborhoods), purged hundreds of thousands from the voter rolls, and imposed new ID requirements for absentee ballots. According to a report from the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, these changes increased wait times by hours in some precincts and lowered turnout.

Florida (2022): Governor Ron DeSantis created an “election crimes” task force that arrested over 20 formerly incarcerated people for voting – even though they had been told by the state they were eligible.

A 2021 Brennan Center analysis found that more than 400 bills to restrict voting were introduced in 49 states in just one year.

3.Voter ID Laws: A Solution in Search of a Problem

Voter ID laws are often justified as safeguards against voter fraud – but they’re a solution in search of a virtually nonexistent problem. Studies show that these laws disproportionately impact marginalized communities. A 2018 Government Accountability Office (GAO) study found that voter ID laws reduced turnout by 2–3 percentage points, with larger effects on Black, young, and newly registered voters.

In Texas, a 2011 law required voters to show government-issued ID to vote – and excluded student IDs. The law was struck down in 2017 for targeting minority voters “with surgical precision,” according to a federal court.

A Real Case of Election Fraud: North Carolina’s 9th District (2018)

One of the few proven examples of actual election fraud in recent memory came not from voters – but from operatives working for a candidate.

In 2018, Republican Mark Harris’s campaign in North Carolina’s 9th Congressional District was found to have illegally collected and altered absentee ballots. The fraud was so extensive that the state ordered a new election—the only time that’s happened in modern congressional history. Harris still won the GOP primary in 2024, and with the seat gerrymandered for Republicans, he was elected to office.

While voter fraud is vanishingly rare, systemic election fraud – through gerrymandering, suppression, and manipulative laws – has reshaped American democracy over the past 40 years. It doesn’t involve fake voters; it involves real policies with real consequences, often passed under the guise of “security” or “efficiency.”

The challenge for us is to cut through the noise and focus on the real threats to fair elections – the ones built into the system, not the ones fabricated to distract from it.