This post was originally published on this site.
Ballot_in_the_box
You have heard it said — probably hundreds of times by now — that there is zero evidence of election fraud in America. It gets repeated on television, in courtrooms, and in congressional hearings as though it were settled fact. It is not.
The U.S. House of Representatives recently passed the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act — known as the SAVE Act — which would require documentary proof of citizenship when registering to vote in federal elections. A straightforward, commonsense measure. And yet opponents immediately trotted out the familiar claim that voter fraud is virtually nonexistent, and therefore more safeguards are unnecessary.
When lawmakers discussed the bill recently on-air, one opponent told the room that even the right-leaning Heritage Foundation had determined there was ‘less than zero percent’ proof of election fraud anywhere in the country. It was a flat falsehood, and nobody pushed back.
No such finding exists anywhere in Heritage’s work. What the organization actually keeps is an Election Fraud Database — a running record of fraud that has been proven, not alleged: cases that ended in criminal convictions, cases resolved by civil judgments, and races thrown out and rerun because fraud tainted the result. By the close of 2025, it held about sixteen hundred confirmed cases built up over several decades. Heritage is the first to admit the tally is incomplete — it captures only the schemes that were spotted, pursued, and proven. As with any record of crime, the true figure is surely far higher.
Here is the trick being played. Opponents stack those sixteen hundred proven cases against the billions of ballots cast across the same stretch of time, then announce the fraud rate is too tiny to matter. That comparison ignores two facts. One, the database counts only the fraud we caught, never the fraud we missed. Two, in a tight local or state contest settled by a few hundred votes, even a handful of illegal ballots can flip the winner.
Election integrity is not only about prosecuting fraud after it happens. It is about accurate voter rolls, verified citizenship, secure procedures, and consistent standards that give every American confidence their legitimate vote actually counts.
The SAVE Act is a good start, but the Senate has been reluctant to touch it.
Election integrity will be a hot topic at Eagle Council 55 next month in Dallas. Join with us, register today at EagleCouncil.com, that’s EagleCouncil.com, join us again for the Phyllis Schlafly Report.
