President Donald Trump and his Republican followers publicly campaign against mail-in voting, claiming it leads to massive fraud. In August 2020, Trump called mail-in voting “fraudulent” in a speech before the Council for National Policy. But he openly admitted his motivation when he posted on X in March 2020 that, because of expanded voting, “They [Democrats who won elections] had levels of voting, that if you ever agreed to it, you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.”

Before we dive into why his obsession with eliminating mail-in balloting could cause Republicans to lose more votes than Democrats, let’s first look at how baseless his claims of voter fraud are.

Trump’s claims of voter fraud run into a wall of facts.

Trump has never revealed any reliable source, other than conspiracy-focused podcasters who also do not provide any supporting data. He has repeatedly claimed that millions of people illegally cast ballots in the 2016 presidential election, often accusing illegal immigrants of doing so.

The problem he and others face is that there is no single, comprehensive national database that records how many fraudulent mail ballots were cast in every U.S. election. However, studies and election investigations provide useful estimates of how often documented fraud occurs, yet news sources like Fox News rarely cite them.

According to MIT Election Lab reports, approximately 29% of voters cast ballots by mail in 2024. Consequently, the data below indicate that the number of fraudulent ballot cases is negligible.

A November 2025 Brookings Institution analysis estimated about 4 cases per 10 million mail ballots across the 2016, 2018, 2020, and 2022 general elections.

The conservative Heritage Foundation maintains a database of documented election-fraud cases but acknowledges that it is not comprehensive and does not include all cases or final convictions. However, Brookings used that database, along with multiple data sources, to calculate the national rate in its analysis.

A Washington Post analysis, cited by the Brennan Center, identified 372 possible cases of double voting or voting on behalf of deceased people among about 14.6 million voters in three vote-at-home states—about 25 cases per million voters. These were possible cases, not 372 proven instances of mail-ballot fraud.

In other words, the President of the United States is spreading a conspiracy theory based on a handful of isolated instances; collectively, they have not even approached 1% of the total votes cast being illegal. Using the power of the presidency, Trump has undermined our citizens’ faith in a democracy grounded in fair........

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