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After the 2020 US presidential election Donald Trump refused to concede, alleging widespread and unparalleled voter fraud. Trump’s supporters deployed several statistical arguments in an attempt to cast doubt on the result. Reviewing the most prominent of these statistical claims, we conclude that none of them is even remotely convincing. The common logic behind these claims is that, if the election were fairly conducted, some feature of the observed 2020 election result would be unlikely or impossible. In each case, we find that the purportedly anomalous fact is either not a fact or not anomalous.

This paper analyzes how the belief and fear by mostly older, white voters, politicians, and poll workers that “illegal” Latino immigrants were seeking to vote in local elections led to stigmatization of and discrimination against some Latino citizen voters in Port Chester, New York. Stoked by and closely echoing national voter ID law rhetoric, this fear fueled an “illegal Latino voter threat” narrative. This article documents how Port Chester's leaders and citizens repeated this narrative in public life, sometimes enacting it in politics, including in voting. The resultant stigma denies Latino voters the presumed legitimacy other citizens enjoy, discrediting them in one word: illegal. Such processes harm democracy in Port Chester and America, and were on display in the 2016 presidential election.

Political elites sometimes seek to delegitimize election results using unsubstantiated claims of fraud. Most recently, Donald Trump sought to overturn his loss in the 2020 US presidential election by falsely alleging widespread fraud. Our study provides new evidence demonstrating the corrosive effect of fraud claims like these on trust in the election system. Using a nationwide survey experiment conducted after the 2018 midterm elections – a time when many prominent Republicans also made unsubstantiated fraud claims – we show that exposure to claims of voter fraud reduces confidence in electoral integrity, though not support for democracy itself. The effects are concentrated among Republicans and Trump approvers. Worryingly, corrective messages from mainstream sources do not measurably reduce the damage these accusations inflict. These results suggest that unsubstantiated voter-fraud claims undermine confidence in elections, particularly when the claims are politically congenial, and that their effects cannot easily be mitigated by fact-checking.

The 2020 US election was accompanied by an effort to spread a false meta-narrative of widespread voter fraud. This meta-narrative took hold among a substantial portion of the US population, undermining trust in election procedures and results, and eventually motivating the events of 6 January 2021. We examine this effort as a domestic and participatory disinformation campaign in which a variety of influencers—including hyperpartisan media and political operatives—worked alongside ordinary people to produce and amplify misleading claims, often unwittingly. To better understand the nature of participatory disinformation, we examine three cases of misleading claims of voter fraud, applying an interpretive, mixed method approach to the analysis of social media data. Contrary to a prevailing view of such campaigns as coordinated and/or elite-driven efforts, this work reveals a more hybrid form, demonstrating both top-down and bottom-up dynamics that are more akin to cultivation and improvisation.

Scholars have identified many ways that politicians use carrots, such as vote buying, to mobilize voters, but have paid far less attention to how they use sticks, such as voter intimidation. This article develops a simple argument which suggests that voter intimidation should be especially likely where vote buying is expensive and employers have greater leverage over employees. Using survey experiments and crowd-sourced electoral violation reports from the 2011–12 election cycle in Russia, the study finds evidence consistent with these claims. Moreover, it finds that where employers have less leverage over employees, active forms of monitoring may supplement intimidation in order to encourage compliance. These results suggest that employers can be reliable vote brokers; that voter intimidation can persist in a middle-income country; and that, under some conditions, intimidation may be employed without the need for active monitoring.

Though the persistence of voter suppression and disenfranchisement in the US is well-documented, we still know little about their contemporary ideological underpinnings beyond partisanship and racial resentment. Highlighting the Christian Right’s influence in driving anti-democratic sentiment in the post-Civil Rights era, we propose contemporary ideological support for restricting the vote generally, and specifically, to those who prove “worthy,” is undergirded by a pervasive ideology that cloaks authoritarian ethno-traditionalism with the ultimacy and polysemic utility of religious language—Christian nationalism. Nationally representative data collected weeks before the November 2020 elections reveal Christian nationalism is a leading predictor that Americans deny that voter suppression is a problem, believe that the US makes it “too easy to vote,” believe that voter fraud is rampant, and support measures to disenfranchise individuals who could not pass a basic civics test or who committed certain crimes. Interactions show Christian nationalism’s influence is particularly strong among men across most outcomes and, regarding voter suppression, whites compared to Blacks. We argue Christian nationalism seeks to institutionalize founding ideals in which civic participation is rooted in hierarchies, being restricted to a “worthy” few. Appeals to America’s religious heritage thus facilitate stratifying America’s citizenry and justifying restricting participation to preserve dominance.

Does electoral fraud stabilize authoritarian rule or undermine it? The answer to this question rests in part on how voters evaluate regime candidates who engage in fraud. Using a survey experiment conducted after the 2016 elections in Russia, the authors find that voters withdraw their support from ruling party candidates who commit electoral fraud. This effect is especially large among strong supporters of the regime. Core regime supporters are more likely to have ex ante beliefs that elections are free and fair. Revealing that fraud has occurred significantly reduces their propensity to support the regime. The authors’ findings illustrate that fraud is costly for autocrats not just because it may ignite protest, but also because it can undermine the regime’s core base of electoral support. Because many of its strongest supporters expect free and fair elections, the regime has strong incentives to conceal or otherwise limit its use of electoral fraud.

Belief in electoral fraud has received heightened attention due to elite rhetoric and controversial voter identification (ID) laws. Using a two-wave national survey administered before and after the 2012 election, we examine the individual-level correlates of belief in a range of election-related conspiracy theories. Our data show that partisanship affects the timing and content of belief in election-related conspiracy theories, but a general disposition toward conspiratorial thinking strongly influences those beliefs. Support for voter ID laws, in contrast, appears to be driven largely by party identification through elite-mass linkages. Our analysis suggests that belief in election fraud is a common and predictable consequence of both underlying conspiratorial thinking and motivated partisan reasoning.

Beliefs about the incidence of voter fraud inform how people view the trade-off between electoral integrity and voter accessibility. To better inform such beliefs about the rate of double voting, we develop and apply a method to estimate how many people voted twice in the 2012 presidential election. We estimate that about one in 4,000 voters cast two ballots, although an audit suggests that the true rate may be lower due to small errors in electronic vote records. We corroborate our estimates and extend our analysis using data from a subset of states that share social security numbers, making it easier to quantify who may have voted twice. For this subset of states, we find that one suggested strategy to reduce double voting—removing the registration with an earlier registration date when two share the same name and birthdate—could impede approximately 300 legitimate votes for each double vote prevented.

False narratives challenging electoral integrity often cite ineligible voting as a prime example of so-called widespread voter fraud. This Article demonstrates that ineligible voting often consists of mistakes that are problematically treated like fraud. Some jurisdictions criminalize ineligible voting on a strict liability basis, imposing punishment even when the ineligible voter is unaware of her ineligibility. When jurisdictions impose this strict criminal liability, mistakes are often misunderstood or misrepresented as fraud. This harsh and confused treatment of voter mistake undermines the criminal justice system by severing criminality from culpability, punishing good faith democratic participation, targeting marginalized populations, and amplifying systemic bias. It also undermines American democracy by chilling eligible voting, needlessly undermining electoral confidence, justifying unnecessary electoral burdens, and allocating the burdens and risks of eligibility determinations away from the election officials best positioned to assume them. Courts should address the strict criminalization of voter mistake by applying the presumption of scienter and recognizing a constitutional mens rea requirement. States should amend their laws to condition criminal liability on knowledge of ineligibility. Congress should similarly amend federal criminal and immigration laws and pre-empt state laws that impose strict criminal liability. The Help America Vote Act should be clarified (through judicial elaboration or legislative amendment) to make a provisional ballot a true safe harbor for people unsure of their eligibility to vote. Prosecutors should refuse to pursue voter mistake cases. And all of us-including media, scholars, advocates, lawyers, judges, and politicians-must replace the current conflation of voter mistake and voter fraud with a more accurate public discourse that carefully distinguishes between fraud and mistake.