While claims of widespread fraud have emerged, investigations show what allegations in fact stem from misunderstandings or clerical errors, not intentional fraud.
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Despite Donald Trump and his allies' false claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him, voter fraud is extremely rare in the US. While it does occur, it is typically detected thanks to the nation’s robust, decentralised election system.
Voter fraud can include casting multiple ballots, tampering with votes, or using a deceased person’s identity to vote, all of which are criminal offences carrying significant penalties.
According to election administrators from both parties, America’s multilayered voting processes provide safeguards that make large-scale vote-rigging almost impossible, especially in presidential races.
Because the US is made up of thousands of independent voting jurisdictions, it is highly difficult to organise fraud on a scale that could alter an election outcome.
Different laws apply in different states, but across the board, in-person voting is protected by various ID requirements or other verification processes, while absentee voting is secured by measures such as signature matching and ballot tracking.
Additionally, federal law mandates regular updates to voter lists, ensuring the accuracy of voter records.
What allegations are levelled often turn out to be spurious. Others stem from clerical errors and misunderstandings, such as voters mistakenly submitting multiple ballots or signatures not matching due to illness.
The loser cries foul
While Trump embarked on a multi-state effort to demonstrate that voter fraud had cost him the election, investigations in multiple states found vanishingly few verified cases — some of which were the work of Trump supporters — and no evidence of any coordinated attempts to manipulate the vote itself.
An Associated Press investigation into potential fraud in the six battleground states contested by Trump revealed fewer than 475 cases out of millions of ballots cast.
This number was far too small to impact the election result, with Biden securing victory across the swing states by a combined margin of 311,257 votes.
Trump's legal and political crusade to overturn the election came to nothing, with several of his lawyers disbarred and hit with massive defamation claims from voting technology companies and election workers who had been harassed because of their false claims.
The former president himself is facing a criminal indictment in Georgia after pressuring the secretary of state to "find" enough votes to flip the state his way.