In 2021, over 2,000 people stormed the US Capitol  Building.

They destroyed property, pepper sprayed   police, and terrified the congresspeople inside. Why?

They thought the presidential election   had been stolen through widespread voter fraud. So, what’s the deal with voter fraud, really? And   could it actually sway a presidential election?

Hi! I'm Kousha Navidar, this is Crash Course, and   we’re answering Big Questions on U. S.

Government. [THEME MUSIC]  We have to get one thing out of the way:  the 2020 election wasn’t stolen. Both our   court system and bipartisan organizations all  across the country have looked deep into things   and confirmed that everything went exactly as  it was supposed to—at least, until, you know,   rioters stormed the Capitol. But in a democracy like ours,   free and fair elections are a big deal.

So  if the integrity of an election ever were   in jeopardy, it would make sense to defend it. Which does raise a big question. How concerned   should we actually be over mass voter fraud?

Basically, voter fraud happens when people   manage to manipulate the vote count  in ways they shouldn’t be able to.  Like, voting in a jurisdiction where you don’t  actually live, or voting multiple times in   different jurisdictions, or impersonating someone  else and voting in their name, or somehow altering   the vote count after the election, or even  intimidating other voters to change their vote.  Tons and tons of voter fraud would be  a huge problem for elections. But is it   actually happening? To find out, we need  to look at how our elections really work.  The US is a huge country, and its voting system  is so complicated that people literally go to   graduate school to study how it works.

Trust  me, I had the student loans to prove it.  In 2020, over 150 million people  voted in the presidential election,   in over a hundred thousand different precincts  and polling places. So really, even our biggest   elections are made up of tons of smaller ones. Those elections are usually controlled by county   or municipal officials, like a county clerk,  or a board of election commissioners.

Those are   the folks in charge of registering the voters,  operating the polling places, and verifying the   vote count – it’s not the federal government. That’s why we say the system is   decentralized – there’s no one national agency  or official that’s in charge of our presidential   elections. Congress can make nationwide laws about  how federal elections have to operate generally,   but the nuts and bolts of how election day goes  down in your area …that’s up to local officials.  The whole thing can feel a little sprawling  and scattered– and frankly, that might   make it natural to worry about voter fraud.

And the system definitely does have flaws. Having   different rules and guidelines at the state,  county, or even local level can make counting   the votes slow, which is why it can take a little  while for big elections to get officially called.  Decentralization can also make things pretty  confusing for voters who have recently moved   and are trying to navigate a totally  different process than they’re used to,   not to mention different policies when it comes to  things like your registration date, what kind of   ID you need, and how to cast an absentee ballot. But decentralized voting also has a huge benefit.   Even if some voter fraud were to occur…there’s  not actually a single election to steal.

Instead   of having all our eggs (or votes) in one basket  (or government agency), we’ve spread them out in   their own teeny tiny nests (or precincts) all  over the country. So anybody trying to snatch   enough of them to manage to steal a national  election would have a lot of work to do.  And frankly, in this economy, who’s got the time? So decentralization is our first huge safeguard   against anyone stealing an election via voter  fraud.

But it’s not the only one. In fact,   there are a ton of other safeguards to make  our elections safe and reliable. But are they   really enough to stop voter fraud?

Let’s check  in with a real-life voter about his experience.  [CITIZEN] Hi, I’m a really enthusiastic US   citizen who is definitely not Kousha Navidar in a  hat, although, wow, I am so flattered you think I   look like him! That man is a national treasure! One thing you should know about me is:   I love to vote.

It’s, like, my favorite  thing! I’d vote all the time if I could!  But, thanks to our government’s protections  against voter fraud, I can only vote once per   election– and only in my locality. So each  election, I know I have to make it count.  In the lead-up to my very favorite day, Election  Day, duh, I prepared by registering.

To do that,   I needed to provide tons of documents to verify  my identity and where I live, like a government ID   plus a piece of very official mail, like a utility  bill or a bank statement with my address on it.  If I wanted to cast my vote using a mail-in  ballot, I’d have to provide a bunch of stuff   that perfectly matches the information  I already provided when registering,   like my verified address, birthday, ID,  and my signature. But if I voted by mail,   I knew I’d get turned away if I tried to vote  again in person, so I decided to hold off.  When Election Day finally came around, I  was happier than a kid on Christmas morning.   It was tempting to try to show up to a  bunch of different polling places, but,   just like with mail-in voting, I knew I’d still  have to provide information that matched my   official registration. Even if I tried to cast a  bunch of votes on provisional ballots, which can   be provided if a voter’s name doesn’t appear on  a registry, I know they check those things really   carefully against the voter rolls afterward, too,  and if they don’t match up, they toss your ballot.  I didn’t want to waste anyone’s time, and  I definitely didn’t want to waste all those   paper ballots!

So after getting my red, white,  and blue yogurt parfait for patriotic breakfast,   I headed straight over to where I’m  actually registered, the middle school   gym that doubles as my local polling place. After saying hello to the local congressional   election observer, who was put in charge by the  state to make sure nobody was doing anything   shady, I high-fived all the local election  officials, followed the security protocol,   and savored the bittersweet high of casting  my one singular vote. Ah, Democracy!  I, of course, would never jeopardize the integrity  of our beautiful electoral system by trying to   vote multiple times, as much as I’d love to.  But if I hadn’t been able to control myself,   my extra votes definitely would have been caught  after the fact in a risk-limiting audit, where   state-level election officials look back over an  election to make sure nothing seems out of place.  Risk-limiting audits check the election  equipment, the procedures, and the data   to make sure every vote matched a record on  the voter rolls, all the votes got counted,   and nobody casts multiple votes for the love  of the sticker…those little clicky pens…ah, the   smell of the middle school gym…the gentle smile  of the poll worker….the siren song of democracy…   ahhhh!

Back to you, Kousha. [KOUSHA]  Thanks, enthusiastic citizen! So, it turns out  election fraud is actually pretty hard. At least,   according to that guy, who I’ve never seen  before in my life.

He was handsome though,   right? Like a…Persian Michael B. Jordan.

Anyway, all those safeguards we have in   place make it really difficult for people like  that to cast votes they’re not allowed to cast.   A lot of these measures are thanks to the  Help America Vote Act of 2002. It tried   to standardize some of the voting process  between individual localities in order to   make sure voting is secure, reliable, and easy. HAVA addressed a lot of security concerns that   came in the wake of the 2000 election  by tightening some of the rules around   mail-in ballots and requiring accommodations so  people with disabilities could vote privately.   It also required states to make centralized  voter registries and standardize their counting   policies, and made precincts without same-day  voter registration offer people provisional   ballots so their vote would be counted once  their registration was formally verified.

It   also tried to just make life easier for everyone  by doing stuff like standardizing the information   that appears on ballots. HAVA also encouraged  polling places to update their voting machines.  You know, because of the chads. Not  those Chads, these chads.

The SEXY chads!  Instead of the punch-card systems that had  everyone ripping their feathers out, most   precincts today use optical scan paper ballots.  Voters fill in a bubble to mark their choice and   then a machine scans them to tally up the votes. On top of all that, if you take a step back and   really think about it, voter fraud just isn’t  that effective. A few, or even a few hundred extra   votes isn’t super likely to change the outcome of  an election, even in an individual region.

And,   when races are close, many states have mandatory  recounts that would put a magnifying glass on the   voting process, help uncover election  fraud and set the record straight.  So knowing all that, maybe you won’t  be surprised to find out that voter   fraud in the US is incredibly rare. An independent report by the Brennan   Center for Justice screened tons of US  elections for incidents of voter fraud,   and found that it only happened between  0.0003 and 0.0025% of the time. That’s   somewhere between 3 and 25 in every million votes.

That’s true for the 2020 election too. Researchers   looked into it hard. And what they found  lines up with everything we just learned:   no evidence of systemic voter fraud.

Which is why a lot of political scientists   think all this talk about voter fraud is kind  of just fearmongering, and that further efforts   to prevent voter fraud, like stricter voter ID  laws or higher barriers to voter registration,   might actually do more harm than good. It’s like if I told you that a pack of wild   boars was coming to ransack the neighborhood,  you’d probably want to see at least a couple   boars as proof before I lined the sidewalk  with spring traps that could just as easily   catch your dog or your 3 year old neighbor. And when we look for fraudsters coming to   ransack our elections, we simply do not find them.

But that’s where professional and public opinion   differ. It can be hard for the average citizen to  decipher all the ins and outs of decentralization,   leaving room for people to start to get  kind of anxious about the whole thing.  And all across the country, voters have lost  trust in our elections – in a big part because   political leaders have cast so much doubt  on the whole process. In 2020, Donald Trump   claimed without evidence that the presidential  election had been stolen through voter fraud. [DONALD TRUMP] “And above all,   it was about fraud.

This election  was rigged. Everybody knows it.” [KOUSHA] And a Congressional committee assigned   to investigate the January 6th insurrection  linked it directly to claims like this.  And here in 2026, Trump is president again,  and he’s doubling down on his mission against   voter fraud and continuing to stoke false  ideas about the security of our election   systems. He’s even talked of “nationalizing” our  election process, which, while not constitutional,   has the potential to give the federal government  unprecedented power over the election outcome.  So far, measures that require big changes,  like requiring prospective voters to provide   passports or birth certificates in addition to  those other forms of ID, haven’t made it into   law.

But the fight over who gets to vote,  and who gets to decide, is far from over.  Our election system is complicated.  We’ve got hundreds of millions of voters,   hundreds of thousands of precincts,  and hyper-specific rules that vary   from place to place. But that’s by design.  Distributing the responsibility for election   security in presidential elections keeps  any one department or agency from having   too much power. And, at least in terms  of limiting voter fraud: it’s working.  But, in order for free and fair elections to  truly work, the results have to be trustworthy   and people have to be able to trust them.  And if there’s one thing more complicated   than the government?

It’s people. Next time, we’ll talk about something   that influences election outcomes way more than  fraud does – gerrymandering. I’ll see you then.  This episode of Crash Course Big Questions on  U.

S. Government was produced in partnership   with USAFacts, a non-partisan civic tech  project that makes government data easier   to understand. For more resources that go along  with these videos, go to usafacts.org/crashcourse.  Thanks for watching this episode of Crash Course  Big Questions on U.

S. Government, which was   filmed in Indianapolis, Indiana, and was made  with the help of all these nice people. If you   want to help keep Crash Course free for everyone,  forever, you can join our community on Patreon.