With the SAVE America Act facing Senate consideration this week, it is perhaps a good time to talk about what election fraud really is.
Most people have a vision in their heads of corrupt city pollworkers, waiting for lulls on election day when there are no witnesses, and sneakily casting ballots on behalf of names on the voting rolls whom they know to have died or moved away, or have never existed at all.
This does still occur. The method is tried and true, and we know it happens, because virtually every cycle, there are a few prosecutions for this crime, somewhere in the country.
But in a country this large – some 340 million people, spread out over 50 states – there are a lot of different ways to vote, so there are bound to be different ways to commit vote fraud.
Before we go on, we should dismiss the claim that there is no statistically significant vote fraud in America. According to federal statistics, there are at least 11 million crimes reported every year – that's an array of homicides, robberies, auto theft, muggings, kidnappings, forgeries, embezzlements, arsons, rapes, assaults, and more. And that’s just the number that are reported.
Virtually every activity in America, either commercial or non-commercial, is plagued with crime, often enough that businesses have whole subsets of their organizations devoted to combatting it.
Warehouses have security cameras; stores add anti-theft devices to merchandise, banks lock up currency in safes, and most of the above employ security guards. Shoplifters steal ingredients from grocery stores, purses from dress shops, power tools from hardware stores.
And every level of government employs policemen and sheriffs, prosecutors and judges, courtrooms and prisons, to process the multitude of criminals committing these crimes.
Eleven million reported crimes per year – many of them over a leather jacket, a wallet, a car or truck, or the contents of a convenience store’s cash register. And people will risk years of prison over such things.
Now look at government -- just a few examples:
The City of Chicago has a $16.6 billion budget. There are tens of thousands of cities in the U.S., most of them smaller than that, but all of them containing an array of sub-accounts, from road funds to office space rental, to staff and foodservice and maintenance contracts.
The State of Illinois has a $132 billion budget. There are fifty states, many of them smaller than that, but all of them containing such contracting opportunities as fleet leases and building maintenance, pension funds to invest and grants to spread across the states, roads to pave and bridges to rebuild, employees to hire and outside services to contract with.
And the federal government has a $7 trillion budget.
The people who win elections – local, state, and federal, not to mention all the other offices such as school boards, park boards, county boards and more – control that money. They control grants and contracts, hiring and purchasing, and allocations of all kinds, some of them public, most of them so far under the radar that reporters don’t even know that the opportunity to study them exists.
So what are people really saying, when they maintain that there’s no
They are claiming that a nation in which people commit 11 million crimes a year for far less valuable things would never dream of stealing access to these countless trillions of dollars’ worth of government bounty.
It’s ludicrous.
If we were such an honest society that there were no shoplifting, no carjackings, no embezzlement or bank robberies, then it might indeed be reasonable to believe that vote fraud was a nonexistent risk.
But if people are willing to find ways to hotwire cars, smash store windows, crack bank safes or even shoot people to steal a hundred in cash, of course they’d be willing to forge a ballot, sign up an assumed name, or run paper through a photocopier to get access to infinitely more cash than any store, bank, or auto lot ever held.
The ways to steal votes in America are as varied as there are states, perhaps as varied as there are cities. As soon as people build in a defense against one method, they come up with another.
There are cities where pollworkers load up the machine with votes before the polls open, or where busloads of patronage workers drive around the city on election day, casting ballots under assumed names, in every polling place they can reach in the hours alotted.
There are cities where pollworkers bribe voters with a bottle of booze or a box lunch, to fill out their ballots under the watchful eye of the precinct captain, or even to let the captain fill them out himself.
There are places where green-card holders or outright illegals are brought to the polls to vote, having been automatically registered by the motor-voter program, often unaware that they aren’t actually allowed to vote. And more often, those noncitizens aren’t trying to vote at all, but their names on the rolls enable a precinct worker to cast ballots on their behalf, without their knowledge.
There are college towns where students change addresses every year, or even every semester, resulting in dozens of unpurged registrations, per apartment or per dorm, that were once valid, but are no longer, for a current occupant or R.A. or building manager to utilize.
There are nursing homes all over the country, full of senile, comatose, or heavily medicated patients who could never cast an intentional vote themselves, so their nurses or nursing home managers do it for them.
We could go on for days. The list of methods is long, and we’ve barely scratched the surface.
But again, it’s a matter of simple logic: In a nation of 340 million people, with 11 million reported (and who knows how many unreported) crimes per year, with government budgets in the tens of trillions to disperse, it’s ludicrous to think that there wouldn’t be people willing to cheat to get their hands on a share of those funds.
And in a nation in which so many of the important races, both in the primaries and in the generals, are decided by less than a few percentage points, it’s equally ludicrous to claim that this vote fraud doesn’t at least occasionally make the difference.
Here’s a chilling statistic: between September 2023 and September 2024, at least 66 elections in the U.S. were decided by fewer than ten votes.
A percent here, a percent there -- one method at a nursing home and another method at a college campus – it doesn’t take a lot of vote fraud to make the difference.
The good government wing of American politics – that's most conservatives, most independents, and even most liberals, cutting across all demographic groups, according to recent polling – supports the SAVE America Act, a requirement that proper identification, proving identity, citizenship, and address, must be presented to exercise the right to vote.
This wouldn’t stop every form of vote fraud, but it would stop many. It wouldn’t guarantee perfectly clean elections, but at least it would make them a good deal cleaner than they are now.
When the goal is preserving our republic, and ensuring that the people in charge are indeed the people whom the public wants to be in charge, is that really too much to ask?
John F. Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based international transportation manager, trade compliance trainer, consultant and public speaker. Read his book on the surprisingly numerous varieties of vote fraud (The Tales of Little Pavel), his biting political satires on the Biden-Harris years (Evening Soup with Basement Joe, Volumes I, II, and III), and his collection of essays on public policy in the 2020s, Current Events and the Issues of Our Age, all available in eBook or paperback, exclusively on Amazon.
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