With the 3 November US midterm elections drawing near, President Donald Trump has announced a $1 million reward fund for any member of the public who submits evidence of voter fraud that leads to a formal criminal conviction. The announcement comes as Trump has spent months publicly sowing doubt about the security of US electoral systems, repeatedly claiming there is rampant, widespread cheating through unregulated postal voting and ineligible non-citizen participation in elections. Yet a large body of independent, cross-partisan research confirms that documented cases of such electoral misconduct are extraordinarily rare across recent US election cycles.
For years, Trump has circulated uncorroborated assertions that universal no-excuse mail-in voting creates massive opportunities for fraud, even as he has simultaneously encouraged Republican supporters to cast ballots by mail in the upcoming midterms and acknowledged that he himself has used postal voting to submit his ballot in past elections. His legislative push to pass the SAVE America Act in Congress has so far failed to gain traction: the proposed law would restrict no-excuse mail-in voting exclusively to disabled, ill, active-duty military, or voters traveling outside their home districts, mandate government-issued photo ID for all in-person voting, require proof of citizenship during voter registration, and enforce ongoing citizenship verification for all registered voters.
Currently, a majority of US states permit all eligible voters to request a mail-in ballot without providing a formal justification, with roughly 48 million voters casting postal ballots in the 2024 presidential election. Trump signed an executive order in the previous year that directed the US Postal Service to only deliver completed mail-in ballots to voters on pre-vetted government-compiled citizen registration lists, and sought to impose uniform national envelope design requirements for all postal votes. The US Supreme Court struck down the order shortly after it was issued, ruling that implementing such sweeping changes in close proximity to scheduled elections was “arbitrary and capricious”, though the court noted it would be open to revisiting comparable policy proposals in a post-election timeframe.
Every US state already has established verification protocols for mail-in ballots, including cross-referencing voter details against official state registration records, and most jurisdictions also run mandatory signature matching checks on all submitted postal ballots. Data from nonpartisan and even traditionally conservative think tanks confirms fraud rates are negligible: a Brookings Institution analysis of 2016, 2018, 2020, and 2022 election data, drawing on the Heritage Foundation’s public database of convicted election fraud cases, found an average of just four proven fraud incidents for every 10 million postal ballots cast. Over the 20-year tracking period of the Heritage database, only 325 total convictions related to fraudulent mail-in ballot use were recorded. A separate 2020 study from the American Statistical Association examining eight states that automatically mail ballots to all registered voters found no evidence that widespread mail-in voting elevated overall fraud risk, noting that Oregon, a state that has run universal mail-in elections for decades, recorded only 40 confirmed fraud cases out of more than 100 million postal ballots sent out between 2000 and 2020.
Trump’s parallel claims that millions of non-citizens are being allowed to register and vote in US elections, purportedly orchestrated by Democratic officials to sway electoral outcomes, are also unsupported by broad empirical evidence. Voting in US federal elections as a non-citizen is a criminal offense carrying penalties that can include prison time, substantial fines, and permanent deportation, a deterrent that election experts note discourages almost all non-citizen residents from attempting to cast a ballot. The Heritage Foundation’s fraud database records only 24 non-citizen voting convictions between 2005 and 2025, while a 2026 Reuters analysis of 30 years of federal court cases related to non-citizen voting found just 129 total criminal charges filed, resulting in 73 total convictions. Darrell West, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, emphasized that the personal risk of jeopardizing immigration status makes mass non-citizen voting a highly implausible scenario, with no documented cases large enough to alter the outcome of any major US election.
Trump’s administration has pushed to expand use of the federal Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) database, a tool launched in the 1980s originally designed to help government agencies confirm eligibility for public benefits by cross-checking immigration status records, to allow states to identify and remove suspected non-citizens from voter rolls. The Supreme Court recently lifted prior restrictions on the federal government permitting states to use the SAVE system for voter roll verification, even as voting rights advocates warn that the database often contains outdated records that incorrectly flag naturalized US citizens as non-citizens, creating a high risk of wrongful disenfranchisement. Use of the SAVE database for voter roll maintenance remains voluntary for individual states, and pilot programs to date have uncovered extremely small numbers of ineligible voters: a 30-year audit in Georgia identified just 432 possible non-citizens on the state’s voter rolls, while a list of 185 suspected non-citizens provided to Nevada by the Department of Homeland Security was later found to consist entirely of fully eligible naturalized citizens. A 2023 Brennan Center for Justice survey estimated that roughly 21.3 million voting-age US citizens, or 9% of the total eligible voting population, do not have immediate access to official documentation proving their citizenship, raising concerns that strict new ID and citizenship verification rules could suppress turnout for marginalized groups. Even conservative election experts like Walter Olson of the Cato Institute note that existing research has failed to find significant evidence that either voter ID laws lead to widespread disenfranchisement or that lax voting rules enable large-scale fraud. Since the 2024 presidential election, 21 Republican-led states have enacted new restrictive voting laws tightening voter ID requirements. While a widely publicized 2023-2024 software glitch in New Jersey’s driver licensing system accidentally registered roughly 6,600 non-citizens to vote, state officials confirmed fewer than 400 of those individuals cast ballots, and all affected registrations have since been purged from voter rolls. A recent Department of Justice request that California exclude 20,000 ballots from suspected non-citizen registrants ahead of the midterms was rejected by a federal appeals court, with prosecutors filing formal charges against only 28 individuals from that group for illegal voter registration.