Noncitizens are not permitted to vote in state and federal elections. It’s a federal crime for noncitizens to register or vote in federal elections, and it’s a crime under every state’s laws. So it should come as no surprise that every legitimate study ever done on the question shows that voting by noncitizens in state and federal elections is vanishingly rare.

Brennan Center for Justice

Trump claimed in his speech that some 278,000 non-citizens illegally registered to vote. There is no real evidence to support this, and even he didn’t claim proof there was any significant actual illegal non-citizen voting. Decades of efforts to find such evidence — including by the right-wing Heritage Foundation — have turned up no more than a few dozen cases, over a span of several decades. A search of the Heritage’s election fraud database turns up only 99 supposed cases of non-citizen voting from 1982 to 2025.

Ilya Somin, CATO Institute

My attitude was: It was put-up or shut-up time. If there was evidence of fraud, I had no motive to suppress it. But my suspicion all the way along was that there was nothing there. It was all bullshit.

William Barr, Former US Attorney General

Why, one might ask, is Donald Trump so intent on keeping the Big Lie of a stolen 2020 election alive? Even many MAGA faithful are asking, “Why are we still harping on that now, when Trump’s back in power anyway, and when we’ve got lots of other stuff to worry about?” The answer is somewhat surprising, but nonetheless true: the Voter Fraud Myth is actually the CORE of Trumpism, so it must be kept alive at all costs.

Let’s remember, Trump was also claiming voter fraud after the 2016 election, where he won the Electoral College but lost the popular vote by almost three million. And further back than that, the general conservative narrative of voter fraud traces to 2008, when the Tea Party, Great Replacement theory, and birtherism were all spawned by the unthinkable election of a black man to the highest office in the land. So as is true in many other areas, Trump is not actually an aberration in asserting massive voter fraud, but rather the culmination of the general conservative grievance and denial that has been percolating since the mid-to-late 90s, when Limbaugh, Murdoch, and Gingrich created the new GOP strategy of demonizing all things liberal and Democratic.

The staying power of the voter fraud myth, despite there being virtually zero evidence for it, is fairly simple to understand. It’s an easy sell to the general public, and it consists of those electoral maps that show an ocean of red across the US, dotted with little islands of blue. The visual is a no-brainer. Even though there are as many people, if not more, in those little blue blobs as there are in the crimson backdrop, the eye test tells you that, “Yes, of course, America is obviously white, conservative, rural, and Christian.” Trump himself, not the brightest of bulbs, probably has a sincere belief that those maps show incontrovertibly that all of America loves him, simply due to that red.

But the fraud myth actually does a lot more heavy lifting than one would expect. Election Fraud locks in, catalyzes, and allows for the bundling of many other parts of the MAGA-verse. It gives a procedural backdrop for the conservative view that cities are the main locales of all society’s ills: crime, fraud (of every kind), atheism, elitism, sexual deviancy, illegal immigrant sanctuary, socialism, communism, university Marxism, and love of chardonnay. Conspiracy theories like QAnon, pizza shop cannibalism, secret global cabals, and the obvious fact that all powerful women are actually men — these are all explained, at bottom, by election fraud, which is really the mechanism by which all of these nefarious things are enabled, through attainment of undeserved and fake political power. And indeed, the fact that there is no actual evidence for voter fraud, or the supposed evidence evaporates upon any scrutiny whatsoever, is itself a shadowy conspiracy, showing just how devious and evil libs can be.

Election fraud mythology plays right into the authoritarian impulse and the Unitary Executive ideology now ensconced in SCOTUS . It asserts that states and localities, the spheres purposely designated by the Constitution to run elections, actually can’t be trusted, because all kinds of “mischief” can go on there. So the whole thing should be federalized, which is blatantly unconstitutional; and that then also plays into the asymmetrical nature of authoritarianism, in that Trump and the GOP are relying on Democrats NOT doing similar nefarious shit when they’re in control. This slowly tips the country towards despotism, as there will be mountains more bad stuff for Dems to undo every time they return to power. And of course, it’s much easier to dismantle and destroy things than it is to rebuild them, which is something that plutocrats and autocrats count on, because the things that get dismantled help them and hurt regular people. The parts of government that are drowned in the bathtub are generally those that help those who are already underwater.

Perhaps most centrally, the Voter Fraud Myth allows MAGA to pretend that all the things they hate about America — minorities, independent women, immigrants, urban culture, coastal elitism, intellectual snobbery, atheism, sexual weirdos, gay people, trans people — are not actually legitimate, in that their governmental power and influence, and thus their economic and cultural power, have been illegally stolen from that overwhelming sea of electoral red which represents “real” America. So what liberals and most of the rest of the industrialized world regard as progress, natural social change, and expansion of rights and liberties, conservatives can describe as unjustified and unearned privilege, perversions of real America forced onto the rural salt of the earth via electoral cheating on a grand scale.

Finally, the push for “Election Integrity,” which we actually already have in the current system, is not really about protecting votes or enhancing voter participation (as Paul Weyrich, a father of Christian Nationalism said back in 1980, “I don’t want everybody to vote… as a matter of fact, our leverage in the election quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”) As many have noted, election reform is largely a solution in search of a nonexistent problem. I myself have no theoretical problem with a national Voter ID card, except that it must be free, extremely easy to get and replace, and it must be exorbitantly funded in all communities, to ensure maximum reach and uptake. Now, does anyone actually think that the federal government could and would do that efficiently, keeping it robustly funded and supported through time, and that it would not used as a political football like gerrymandering is used now? As the Brits would say, not bloody likely.

And it is supremely ironic that conservatives, who are so distrusting of the Deep State and of libs coming to get their guns and their straight children, have no fear of the Gubmint coming to steal or suppress their votes. That alone demonstrates that the MAGA crowd, despite constant claims otherwise, generally doesn’t “do its own research” or actually think about things in depth. And also, again, the GOP is counting on asymmetrical application of bad laws. They assume that Dems will not be coming to steal red votes, while they themselves can suppress blue areas with impunity and little fear of retribution.

All of this brings us back to the overall reason why the Voter Fraud Myth is a central pillar of Trumpism, its main purpose: it is the catalyst for all the other strands of the MAGA movement. It takes a whole panoply of grievances and prejudices — anti-elitism, anti-intellectual, anti-feminist, anti-DEI, nativism, transphobia, misogyny, homophobia, anti-globalism — and legitimizes them via an unproven allegation of systemic fraud and cheating. This allows MAGA to pretend that all of their conspiratorial and demonizing beliefs are actually valid, because libs have weaponized elections against honest, hard-working Americans.

Voter fraud takes the actual goal of Trumpism and MAGA – the wholesale erasing of people they don’t like — and turns it into a phony effort to ensure “election integrity.” It’s not just that Trumpism wants to suppress the votes of Democrats and their undeserving client constituents. No, the goal is really to erase these people completely, a ridiculous wish that anyone who is different just gets disappeared. It’s like the monstrous little boy from the old Twilight Zone episode: a petulant child who can just think away and destroy anything unpleasant, anyone who challenges his authority.

If you remove election fraud from Trump-world, everything gets exposed as just straight-up despotism, bigotry, Nazi-style scapegoating of the weak, and bitter cultural resentment. Take away the flimsy veneer of “election integrity,” and you’re left with a more honest expression of Trumpism: “Yeah, we just don’t like city people and minorities, so they just shouldn’t be able to vote at all, even if they’re entitled to.”

The actual problems with election integrity are never discussed by the current GOP:

• The Electoral College has become an anachronistic, anti-democratic burden, and should be scrapped (an unlikely thing)
• Gerrymandering should be outlawed
• Proportional representation should replace winner-take-all races. No change would be needed to the constitution to change electoral college apportionment and congressional races to a proportional system.
• Citizens United should be overturned, and money should be banished from politics. Public funding is the obvious alternative.
• Terms limits should be enacted
• New anti-bribery legislation with actual teeth should be enacted
• Lobbying should be sharply curtailed, and the revolving door between government and corporate boardrooms should be brought under control
• Political campaigns should be time-bound, with a starkly limited election season
• Mail-in voting should be allowed everywhere
• In-person voting should be declared a national holiday, or ideally the expansion of in-person voting to a full weekend

A real increase in election integrity would mean millions more people actually voting, the exact thing that Trumpism and the GOP don’t want. It would also allow for the emergence of multiple political parties, a development that would ratchet down political polarization and acrimony, as other multi-party democracies around the world demonstrate. But this would also upset the full-spectrum dominance of the plutocracy, which already owns both of our major parties now. But we can dream.

CODA

There is one more facet of the Voter Fraud Myth, one that applies more specifically to the election season itself, and is playing out now in preparation for the 2026 midterms. For whoever is in power, if your actual programs, policies, and actions are not fulfilling your promises, pivoting to a manufactured scare over election integrity tries to turn people’s attention away form the failing plan, and towards a fake, dramatic clash between the righteous defenders of democracy and the scheming evildoers.

This is what Trump tried to do in his ridiculous prime-time address from a couple weeks ago, a huge nothing-burger that was ignored or quickly forgotten by most, even his supporters, because it was a stale rehash of things long debunked. (while Fox aired it live, there was little to no commentary on it, as Fox already had to shell out almost a billion bucks for previous election fraud lies)

The contingent nature of these election season ramp-ups of alarmism actually hamper their effectiveness, as even the most die-hard of MAGA folk understand that, (A) it makes no sense to relitigate the past, especially when Trump himself was in charge when the stealing allegedly happened, and (B) it’s clearly just an attempt to misdirect people away from the Iran War, continued inflation, cratering job prospects, the economic fizzling of mass deportation, the Epstein coverup, etc. The boy cannot continue to cry wolf forever.

Of course, these phony election fraud tactics, even if MAGA people themselves don’t quite buy the lie, can still be used by Trump to very concretely perform illegal acts to actually steal the election (as with many other things, what Trump attacks is usually a tell about what he himself is doing). He has zero conscience, so even if his own peeps call bullshit, he’ll still try to strongarm swing districts and key Democratic strongholds, to suppress as much of the blue vote as he can.

The key to resisting this heinous crime against the American people and the Constitution is sunlight. Every news outlet in the country should be treating the 2026 midterms like the fucking SuperBowl. All the gestapo tactics by the Trump regime should be outed in real time and overwhelmed by sheer numbers of democracy defenders. People need to treat their 2026 vote like a faberge egg: protect and cherish it as if your life depends on it.

The Voter Fraud Myth will be used by Trump and his authoritarian heirs and co-conspirators, including most of the SCOTUS, to try and overturn the locus of election control granted by the Constitution. They will use it to justify the militarization of the ballot box, which is the core feature of a banana republic. We can’t let that happen.

EXTRA CODA

Because the election fraud myth carries so much freight, doing oversized work in holding Trumpism together, it is both harder and easier to combat. What makes it difficult to counter is that it is completely impervious to factual disproof. Like religious faith, attacking the merits often makes it even more solidly believed, as the psychology of previous investment kicks in, making people dig in their heels. As Donald Rumsfeld said all those years ago, “Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.” And because so many other parts of the Trumpian delusion are “validated” by election fraud, MAGA folk won’t let go of it easily, unless they are actually ready to question their entire worldview, which is not a common occurrence.

And that brings me to my final point, that the heavy load borne by the Voter Fraud Myth may be the key to taking down Trumpism for good. Firstly, if the Dems achieve a huge victory this fall, even overcoming Trump’s best efforts to steal the election, then a pretty big MAGA bubble could burst. Trump is all about winning: “America is the hottest country [sic] in the world!” “We’re crushing it!” “Everyone is jealous of how awesome we are!” “HUGE, it’s gonna be HUGE!”

Well, if the GOP gets trounced in November, that aura of inevitable invincibility goes away. And if the mandate is large enough, with Dems sweeping into power all over, then even MAGA diehards will have to say to themselves, “Well, crap! Trump had the whole government under his control and direction, and he fucked everything up and lost. And I still can’t afford to fill my gas tank. Not good!“

Alternatively, libs could also exploit the fraud myth in a way that doesn’t depend on sweeping electoral triumphs. And that would be, surprise surprise, starting a UBI-BHB project, with model communities set up around the US, in urban and rural areas, concrete demonstrations that different types of people can actually live together and work towards a common goal.

As envisioned in other posts on this blog, model BHBs (Bigger Home Bases) would thumb the scale a bit, setting up more diverse communities than would likely emerge normally in a society-wide project, to demonstrate that the toxic partisan polarization that exists now is not a natural phenomenon, but has been foisted on us by plutocrats who want us fighting each other instead of looking up at the unjust hyper-concentration of wealth and power at the top.

After all, the Voter Fraud Myth ultimately rests not on evidence and fact, but on the prejudice, paranoia, and hatred of others that is manufactured by our “leaders” to keep us under their control. So to break that polarization trap, we have to be ready to scrap the obsolete social and economic structures that create and perpetuate our powerlessness.