Voter Confidence in U.S. Elections: How Votes Are Counted

Stolen elections and voter fraud

Earlier in our history, some elections were considered ‘stolen’. The 1876 presidential election between Republican Rutherford B. Hayes and Democrat Samuel J. Tilden, and Lyndon Johnson’s 1948 Senate election are probably the most famous examples. Political machines in New York, Chicago, Kansas City, Philadelphia, and other cities from the late 1800s through the early 1900s were infamous for graft, corruption, and election theft.

Although isolated incidents of voter fraud have been documented recently, it’s much more difficult today to conduct broad-scale election theft. First, with greater media scrutiny and bipartisan poll watchers, stuffing the ballot box (or an electronic version) isn’t easily accomplished. Second, because the Constitution delegates to the states the power to determine the “times, places and manner of holding elections for Senators and Representatives,” election administration is highly decentralized. Elections today are administered at the county or local level, so given the number of people who would have to be involved to ‘steal’ an election, it would be very difficult to cover such actions up.

If stealing elections isn’t likely possible at the wholesale level, what about the retail level – voter fraud? In an earlier policy brief, we examined mechanisms to prevent voter fraud. The takeaway is that voter fraud is extremely rare, and very few documented cases in the last 75 years show enough fraud in a major election (Congress, Presidency, state legislature, or Governor) to change the outcome.

Several notable incidents involving ballot harvesting, where an individual or individuals collect absentee ballots from others and deliver them to election authorities, have also been documented. In many states, this practice is legal. However, in the 2018 election in North Carolina's 9^th congressional district, a Republican campaign operative went door-to-door collecting absentee ballots, only to discard many votes for the Democratic candidate. After this fraud was discovered, criminal charges were filed, and the local Board of Elections invalidated the results and ordered a new election. Although illegal activity similar to this has been documented on both sides of the political aisle, the occurrence has not been documented on a wide scale.

A more typical but still rare issue occurred in 2026, when election authorities in New Jersey announced that over the last decade, a software error had resulted in over 4000 noncitizens being registered to vote when renewing their driver's licenses. About 400 of these individuals had voted in one or more elections.

While broader claims of widespread election fraud persist, no credible evidence has emerged to support them. One documentary, 2000 Mules, alleged that in the 2020 presidential election, more than 400,000 illegal votes were submitted by ballot harvesters who had (a) illegally collected ballots in states where the practice is banned or (b) submitted ballots from citizens who had moved, died, or were unaware a mail-in ballot had been sent. Fact-checkers and election researchers have discredited these claims.

The Tradeoff: Turnout vs. Security

It is easy to say Americans should work to ensure that vote fraud never happens. However, election rules reflect a tradeoff between two contradictory goals. One is to make voting as easy as possible to increase turnout. The second is to reduce the number of fraudulent votes to zero (or as close as possible). However, the same policies that increase turnout (such as expanding mail-in voting, allowing ballot harvesting, registering people to vote when they renew their driver’s license, and not requiring photo IDs at polling sites) also create the potential for voter fraud. At the same time, even in communities that make great efforts to increase turnout, cases of voter fraud are very rare, perhaps because the penalties for casting even one or two fraudulent votes are high (years in prison).  

Explaining levels of trust in election procedures

One of the most important factors in whether Americans are confident in election procedures is whether their favored candidate won or lost. The biggest reason is whether the candidates you favor won. In the poll cited earlier, before the 2024 election, only 54% of Republicans believed vote counts would be accurate; after Republican Donald Trump won the presidency, it rose to 89%. For Democrats, 89% believed in a fair count before the election, and that dropped to 77% after the election. Data from the MIT Election Data Science Lab shows that this pattern holds in recent elections.

There is also some variation by method of voting. As the figure below shows, voters have the greatest confidence in paper ballots counted by an optical scanner and the lowest confidence in hand counts, with electronic/touch screen voting machines in between.

Why some votes aren’t counted

There are typically two ways that a person will not have their vote counted: a problem with the voter’s registration or the voter making an error while marking their ballot. If there is an error on their voter registration, their ID doesn’t match the voter roll, the records show that the person already voted, or the person forgot their ID, 47 states allow the voter to cast a provisional ballot and give them a set amount of time to fix the problem (for example, to run home and get their ID). In the 2024 general election, 0.9% of voters (almost two million) used a provisional ballot. Of these ballots, 73.8% were eventually counted.

Voters who cast their ballots by mail sometimes make mistakes in filling out their information (the most common error is leaving off a signature). Forty-three states allow voters to “cure” their ballots and fix the errors (if there is enough time before Election Day). In 2024, 1.5% (nearly 600 thousand) of mail ballots entered the cure process, and about half were eventually counted.

Finally, voter mistakes in marking ballots can make them invalid: overvotes (voting for more than one candidate for one office), voting for candidates of more than one party in a primary, failing to fill in a bubble with a clear enough mark so the scanner can read the ballot, and many other ways. When some of those mistakes (such as overvotes) are made in-person, the ballot will be kicked out by the scanner and the voter can fix it. However, with mailed ballots, there is limited time to contact the voter to fix the error when the ballot is counted so the practice of reaching out to voters does not occur. Estimates are that as many as 4% of mailed ballots end up not being counted for one reason or another.

In a future brief, we will discuss the impact of Super PACs (Super Political Action Committees - a type of U.S. political organization that can raise and spend unlimited amounts of money from individuals, corporations, unions, and other groups to influence federal elections) as well as other practices that can impact political campaigns and election outcomes.

The Takeaway

Elections may have been stolen in the past, but such large-scale election theft would be very difficult to conduct today.

A significant percentage of Americans do not believe that the votes are being accurately counted, especially when their favored party loses.

Voters also have slightly less confidence in hand-counting votes than scanned counts.

Voter error, both in voter registration and in marking ballots, has statistically been the most common reason someone’s vote is not counted.