An Associated Press review of every potential case of voter fraud in the six battleground states disputed by former President Donald Trump has found fewer than 475 — a number that would have made no difference in the 2020 presidential election.
Democrat Joe Biden won Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and their 79 Electoral College votes by a combined 311,257 votes out of 25.5 million ballots cast for president. The disputed ballots represent just 0.15% of his victory margin in those states.
The cases could not throw the outcome into question even if all those votes were for Biden, which they were not, and even if those ballots were actually counted, which in most cases they were not.
The review also showed no collusion intended to rig the voting. Virtually every case was based on an individual acting alone to cast additional ballots….
The findings build on a mountain of other evidence that the election wasn’t rigged, including verification of the results by Republican governors….
Contacted for comment, Trump repeated a litany of unfounded claims of fraud he had made previously, but offered no new evidence that specifically contradicted the AP’s reporting. He said a soon-to-come report from a source he would not disclose would support his case, and insisted increased mail voting alone had opened the door to cheating that involved “hundreds of thousands of votes.”
“I just don’t think you should make a fool out of yourself by saying 400 votes,” he said.
These are some of the culprits in the “massive election fraud” Trump falsely says deprived him of a second term:
A Wisconsin man who mistakenly thought he could vote while on parole.
A woman in Arizona suspected of sending in a ballot for her dead mother.
A Pennsylvania man who went twice to the polls, voting once on his own behalf and once for his son.
The cases were isolated. There was no widespread, coordinated deceit.
The cases also underscore that suspected fraud is both generally detected and exceptionally rare.
“Voter fraud is virtually non-existent,” said George Christenson, election clerk for Milwaukee County in Wisconsin, where five people statewide have been charged with fraud out of nearly 3.3 million ballots cast for president. “I would have to venture a guess that’s about the same odds as getting hit by lightning.”
Even in the state with the highest number of potential fraud cases — Arizona, with 198 — they comprised less than 2% of the margin by which Biden won….
A state-by-state accounting:
—ARIZONA: Authorities have been investigating 198 possible fraud cases out of nearly 3.4 million votes cast, representing 1.9% of Biden’s margin of victory in the state. Virtually all the cases were in Pima County, home to Tucson, and involved allegations of double voting. The county has a practice of referring every effort to cast a second ballot to prosecutors, something other offices don’t do. In the Pima cases, only one ballot for each voter was counted. So far, nine people have been charged in the state with voting fraud crimes following the 2020 election. Six of those were filed by the state attorney general’s office, which has an election integrity unit that is reviewing an undisclosed number of additional cases.
—GEORGIA: Election officials in 124 of the state’s 159 counties reported no suspicious activity after conducting their post-election checks. Officials in 24 counties identified 64 potential voter fraud cases, representing 0.54% of Biden’s margin of victory in Georgia. Of those, 31 were determined to be the result of an administrative error or some other mistake. Eleven counties, most of them rural, either declined to say or did not respond. The state attorney general’s office is reviewing about 20 cases referred so far by the state election board related to all elections in 2020, including the primary, but it was not known if any of those overlapped with cases already identified by local election officials.
—MICHIGAN: Officials have identified 56 potential instances of voter fraud in five counties, representing 0.04% of Biden’s margin of victory in the state. Most of the cases involved two people suspected of submitting about 50 fraudulent requests for absentee ballots in Macomb, Wayne and Oakland counties. All the suspicious applications were flagged by election officials and no ballots were cast improperly.
—NEVADA: Local officials identified between 93 and 98 potential fraud cases out of 1.4 million ballots cast, representing less than one-third of 1% of Biden’s margin of victory. More than half the total — 58 — were in Washoe County, which includes Reno, and the vast majority involved allegations of possible double voting. The statewide total does not include thousands of fraud allegations submitted to the state by local Republicans. Republican Secretary of State Barbara Cegavske has said many of those were based “largely upon an incomplete assessment of voter registration records and lack of information concerning the processes by which these records are compiled and maintained.” It’s not known how many remain under investigation.
—PENNSYLVANIA: Election officials in 11 of the state’s 67 counties identified 26 possible cases of voter fraud, representing 0.03% of Biden’s margin of victory. The elections office in Philadelphia refused to discuss potential cases with the AP, but the prosecutor’s office in Philadelphia said it has not received any fraud-related referrals.
—WISCONSIN: Election officials have referred 31 cases of potential fraud to prosecutors in 12 of the state’s 72 counties, representing about 0.15% of Biden’s margin of victory. After reviewing them, prosecutors declined to bring charges in 26 of those cases. Meagan Wolfe, administrator of the Wisconsin Elections Commission, said the number of cases in 2020 was “fairly run of the mill.”
AP’s review found the potential cases of fraud ran the gamut: Some were attributed to administrative error or voter confusion while others were being examined as intentional attempts to commit fraud. In those cases, many involved people who sought to vote twice — by casting both an absentee and an in-person ballots — or those who cast a ballot for a dead relative such as the woman in Maricopa County, Arizona. Authorities there say she signed her mother’s name on a ballot envelope. The woman’s mother had died a month before the election.
The cases are bipartisan. Some of those charged with fraud are registered Republicans or told investigators they were supporters of Trump.