Trump Claims 'Rampant' US Voter Fraud, Evidence Suggests It Is Extremely Rare

President Donald Trump has offered a $1 million reward, about £750,000, to people who report cases of voter fraud in the United States that lead to a conviction. Ahead of the midterm elections on November 3, he has been casting doubt on the security of the vote, alleging 'rampant' cheating in postal voting and voting by non-citizens. BBC Verify has examined the evidence behind his claims and his proposed changes to the voting system.

Studies suggest actual cases are extremely rare. For years, Trump has made repeated unsubstantiated claims that postal voting leads to widespread fraud. He has also encouraged Republicans to vote by mail in the midterms and has said he has cast his ballot by post in the past.

The president has been unsuccessful in his push for Congress to pass an act that would allow people to vote by mail only if they are disabled, ill, serving in the military, or travelling. The majority of states allow people to vote by mail without providing a reason, and in the 2024 presidential election about 48 million people cast postal ballots.

Trump signed an executive order last year directing the US Postal Service to deliver ballots only to voters on lists of citizens compiled by government agencies. The order also sought to require states to use the same envelope style for postal votes.

That order was rejected by the US Supreme Court, which called such changes so close to the midterm elections 'arbitrary and capricious,' but said it could revisit the issue afterwards.

US states have different rules for verifying postal ballots, but every state matches voter information on the ballots against what it has on file to check eligibility, and most also conduct signature checks.

Studies of multiple US elections suggest postal vote fraud has been extremely rare. The Brookings Institute looked at the 2016, 2018, 2020 and 2022 elections and found an average of about four cases of fraud out of every 10 million postal votes. The report used a database kept by the Heritage Foundation, which records electoral fraud cases that ended in a conviction. A review of that database over the last 20 years found 325 convictions resulting from the fraudulent use of postal ballots.

A 2020 study by the American Statistical Association looked at voter fraud cases in eight states that send postal ballots to all eligible voters and found no evidence that voting by mail increased the risk of fraud overall. Oregon, for example, recorded 40 fraud cases between 2000 and 2020, having sent out more than 100 million postal ballots over that period.

Trump has claimed non-citizen voting is widespread. It is illegal for non-citizens to vote in US federal elections, with punishments that can include a prison sentence, a fine and deportation. The voting act the president has pushed Congress to pass would require voters to show government-issued photo identification before casting their ballots, as well as proof of citizenship when registering and ongoing citizenship verification.

Critics have raised concerns that stricter voter ID requirements could harm turnout, as people may not have a passport or the required photo ID. Jonathan Diaz, a voting rights expert at the Campaign Legal Center, said the United States has no government-issued national ID card, that a driver's licence is most common but does not identify immigration status, and that the ID most Americans carry would not be enough to vote. A 2023 survey by the Brennan Center for Justice suggested about 21.3 million voting-age American citizens, about 9 percent, do not have documents proving citizenship readily available.

Walter Olson, an election expert at the Cato Institute, said that when scholars look at the effect of voter ID laws, there does not seem to be much proof that either the fraud claimed by conservatives or the suppression warned of by progressive groups has happened. A Brennan Center study said 21 restrictive voting laws have been enacted since the 2024 election, largely in Republican-run states, to establish stricter ID requirements.

Multiple studies show proven instances of non-citizens voting in past US elections have been very small. The Heritage Foundation database identified 24 cases of non-citizens convicted for voting between 2005 and 2025. A 2026 Reuters analysis of non-citizen voting cases in federal courts found that over the last 30 years 129 people were criminally charged and 73 of those cases resulted in a conviction. Darrell West, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute, said the fact that it is illegal is itself a strong deterrent, and that there has never been evidence that many people have done it, certainly not enough to influence an election.

Trump has also pushed states to use the federal Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or Save, database to identify voters suspected of being non-citizens and remove them from voter rolls. Critics have questioned the reliability of using the data, saying it could be outdated and include people who have since become citizens, but the Supreme Court has lifted restrictions on the Trump administration using it this way. Olson said federal databases can be invaluable to states updating their rolls so long as their limitations are understood, but requiring states to treat the contents as reliable despite continuing gaps and inaccuracies is bad.

Use of the programme by individual states is voluntary, and among those that have used it recently the number of non-citizens detected has been small. In Georgia, an audit identified 432 possible non-citizens on its voter rolls over 30 years. The Department of Homeland Security gave Nevada a list of 185 names it claimed identified non-citizens improperly allowed to register, but state officials found they were all in fact citizens. The White House has pointed to New Jersey, where this summer a software glitch in the state's drivers licensing department registered about 6,600 non-citizens to vote between June 2023 and June 2024; state officials said fewer than 400 cast ballots and all have now been removed. The Justice Department's request that California not count 20,000 postal ballots ahead of the midterms, from people it claims are likely non-citizen registrants, was rejected by an appeals court; out of that 20,000, it has charged 28 people it says are non-citizens who illegally registered.