Voter fraud is a lie

Well, I may be Mr. Beat, but I don't know who the heck you are. How can I trust you if I don't know who you are, huh? Well, I know you, but not you. I don't know you, how can I trust you? Hey, speaking of which, how can we trust that elections are legit? Well, lately here in the United States, it seems like there's a growing number of folks freaking out about voter fraud. He's been reading stories about irregularities, massive vote fraud, millions of people who are dead who are still on the rolls. Dead people are on the rolls who shouldn't be on the rolls. And, you know, the left says, well, they don't vote. Balderdash. They do vote. One of the issues is that election officials don't really do very much to verify the accuracy of voter registration information. One of the things they don't do is check to make sure that people really are U.S. citizens. President Trump is blasting Nevada for having a mail-in primary, threatening to withhold federal funding. U.S. President Donald Trump suggested the November presidential election should be postponed. Alleging potential fraud associated with mail-in voting, Trump tweeted, He's discrediting the election so that if he loses, he can claim it was stolen. And we're leading in all the polls we should get elected, but remember this, they cheat like hell. Hundreds of thousands of non-citizens and dead people are listed and active on the voter rolls, and yet we still have elections with no voter ID, no proof of citizenship, and tens of millions of ballots floating aimlessly through the mail. Voter fraud is interfering with an election in order to cheat. This can happen by trying to increase or decrease a candidate's vote share, by getting people to vote who are ineligible under the law, or by straight-up forging ballots. Different types of voter fraud go down at different stages of the election process, from when voters first register all the way to when ballots are counted. Look, Samantha, voter fraud has existed for as long as there's been voters. In Ancient Greece, people bribed others to vote a certain way, and folks who weren't citizens found ways to vote. In Ancient Rome, mobs blocked rivals from entering voting areas, and sometimes completely took over voting locations. In 1600s England, political candidates regularly threw parties with lots of good food and adult beverages to influence voters. But what about the United States? Surely Americans, who are obviously the most moral people on the planet, have never cheated in elections. Nah man, America has a long history of voter fraud. Will you just go through that history, punk? Squirrel, I thought you got ran over by a car. It's been so long. Yeah, yeah, I survived and I'm back to terrorize you. Now tell them about how voter fraud was common throughout American history, flimwad. Oh ok little buddy. Now, it's important to recognize that voting in the early days of the United States was nothing like it is today. For starters, only rich, property-owning white dudes could vote. Second, back then, voting was far from secret. You had voice voting, in which people just verbally stated who they voted for and everybody in the room heard it. Often, people would just write down who they wanted elected on some random piece of paper. Back then, local governments didn't print official, standardized ballots. Fraud during this period in American history relied heavily on public influence, bribery, and straight-up force for reels. Candidates often did something called treating, or providing lots of alcohol, food, and gifts to voters near the polling sites right before they cast their public votes. George Washington famously, or infamously, did this. In 1758, he bought 144 gallons of alcohol for nearly 400 voters to get them to vote for him in the Virginia House of Burgesses. Not only that, there are accounts of polling sites being kept open later so that certain voters could vote. By the 1820s, now poor, non-property-owning white dudes could vote, but as the number of voters dramatically increased, so did the number of dudes committing voter fraud, yo. Because local governments still hadn't printed standardized voter ballots, political parties stepped in to print their own. As people often have strong connections to a political party, this made it super convenient for the voter. They literally just had a ticket, which was usually a distinct color, with all the political party's candidates that they just handed in at polling sites. But this convenience also led to shenanigans. Urban political machines like New York City's Tammany Hall sent the same people to vote at different polling sites. Often, these fraudsters would disguise their appearance by shaving or changing clothes between stops. Another tactic was cooping. No, not pooping. Cooping. In which gangs would kidnap random people, force them to consume a lot of alcohol or other types of drugs, and drag them from precinct to precinct to vote the party line. Many historians argue that voter fraud reached its peak in the United States during the Gilded Age. In the national elections of 1888, a letter circulated that suggested that Republican Party leaders were paying money to folks in Indiana to vote for Republican Party candidates. Of course, once word got out about this, there was somewhat of a backlash, and this led to a movement to adopt secret ballots, or a way to vote in which a voter's identity is anonymous at the polling site. Local governments also began finally printing uniform official ballots that were, yes, marked inside a private booth. The secret ballot made it nearly impossible for folks to be bribed or pressured to vote a certain way. Hey, another Progressive Era reform to be proud of. Still, voter fraud persisted. By the 1900s, voter fraud shifted from street-level bribery and intimidation to administrative manipulation. Oh good gravy. Enter graveyard votes, or votes cast in the name of a person who had died but was still listed on the voter rolls. Perhaps the most infamous election where this supposedly happened? The Presidential Election of 1960, in which Chicago Mayor Richard Daley's powerful Democratic Party machine got a narrow victory for John F. Kennedy over Richard Nixon in the city. Some journalists claimed foul play, but historians generally say the number of graveyard votes in that area for that election were minimal. Nope, the truth was that voter fraud by this time was actually quite difficult to get away with. Instead, voter suppression, or trying to prevent legal citizens from voting, became the preferred way to rig elections. And, ironically, those calling for voter suppression often did so in the name of supposedly fighting voter fraud. Despite little evidence of actual voter fraud in the American South, white politicians there enacted poll taxes, passed grandfather clauses, and mandated literacy tests. Now, what was the real reason why they added these voting restrictions? To disenfranchise black citizens, of course. It wasn't until Congress passed both the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the 24th Amendment that much of these shenanigans finally stopped. I hate to break it to you, but every time you go online, giant corporations are stealing your personal data. And then data brokers are turning around and selling your personal data to ANYONE. Stuff like your address, your phone number, even your political beliefs and income level. I hate this crap, but you wanna know how I fight back? By using Delete Me. Delete Me proactively removes our home address, phone numbers, and family details from the Internet. What I like about Delete Me is that it sends you these personalized privacy reports showing what they found, where they found it, and what they deleted. I've been using it for several years now at this point, and it's done a really good job scrubbing my personal information from all kinds of messed up sites out there. And get 20% off Delete Me Consumer Plans when you go to joindeleteme.com and use promo code MRBEAT at checkout. There is the QR code and there's also a link in the description. So again, that's joindeleteme.com code MRBEAT for 20% off Delete Me Consumer Plans. Thanks to Delete Me for sponsoring this video. In recent decades, election administrative controls have tightened. Now we have paper trails, super secure digital tabulators, voter roll databases, and nonpartisan post-election audits. And indeed, the physical opportunity to execute systematic voter fraud is virtually impossible, man. Today, before casting a ballot, voters- in every state except North Dakota, randomly- have to register through systems that verify their Social Security number, driver's license, or address. States constantly cross-reference voter rolls with death certificates, DMV updates, and multi-state databases. There are mandatory audits. Severe legal consequences for voter fraud, like in most states we're talking years in prison and five-figure dollar fines. Polling sites, vote counting facilities, and ballot drop boxes tend to be under very strict public surveillance. Election workers from competing political parties jointly supervise every step of the process, from tracking the ballot boxes to signature verification to canvassing in front of polling sites. One of the biggest reasons why voter fraud is so rare? It's highly decentralized, baby. In the United States, elections are not nationalized. Counties and municipalities run elections, so it's bottom-up, not top-down. There are more than 10,000 different election jurisdictions in the country. 10,000? 10,000. Every locality uses its own registration systems and ballot designs. They even have different types of voting machines. Any attempt launching any kind of widespread voter fraud effort would literally require compromising thousands of independent systems simultaneously and without detection. That all said, voter fraud in the United States may be really rare, but voter suppression is unfortunately more common than you probably think. I briefly go over this trend in this video, but I think I'm going to have to revisit this trend in another video because it's really gotten out of hand, especially after the Supreme Court has been dismantling the Voting Rights Act. But anyway, in conclusion, voter fraud is real, but today is really rare. Like, really, really, really, really rare. How rare? According to research by the Brennan Center for Justice, overall rates of voter fraud are around .0003%. Yeah, this dude named Justin Levitt conducted a massive study in which he tracked all credible allegations of in-person voter impersonation from 2000 to 2014. What did he find? Well, only 31 instances of voter impersonation out of 1 billion votes cast. Even the Heritage Foundation, the highly influential and very conservative think tank, did a study that found voter fraud to be very rare. Between 1989 and 2025, it tracked just 1,619 instances of voter fraud in the country. According to my calculations, around 2 billion votes were cast in the United States during that time period. Well shoot, that's an even lower voter fraud rate than what the Brennan Center found. Based on the Heritage Foundation's data, the voter fraud rate is .00008095%. Holy moly. And there have been countless other studies looking at voter fraud in the USA. Every single freaking time, it's found to be rare. Statistically speaking, an American is MUCH more likely to be struck by lightning than come across voter fraud. They're much more likely to be hit by a meteor falling from space or be injured by a toilet. They're more likely to wake up from a stroke speaking a totally different accent. I hope you get my point by now. Voter fraud just ain't likely to happen, man. And yet, look at Google Trends since Google began tracking the phrase voter fraud. Based on internet search traffic, around the time of every American presidential election, you saw a bunch of people searching up voter fraud. And then BOOM! Look at 2020, man. Well jeez, Bertha, there must have been lots of voter fraud during the presidential election of 2020 if so many people were looking it up then, right? Right? Well, as it turns out, there was absolutely NO evidence of widespread voter fraud in the presidential election of 2020. The only reason why so many people were looking up voter fraud right after this particular election was because the most influential man in the world yep, arguably the most successful influencer of all time was just saying there was widespread voter fraud in the election. No evidence. Just vibes. Just because so many of his supporters believed him doesn't mean he was right. This dude was just a sore loser. And with a long history of lying, I might add. And flash forward to today, and a recent survey found that just 60% of Americans are confident there won't be voter fraud in the upcoming midterm elections. Which is why I made this video, frankly. I made this video for the 40% of Americans who still don't trust our elections. And if you're in that 40% Huh? How can I put this? You're wrong. Elections in the United States at this moment in history are generally very secure. You're more likely to get drunk from eating too much bread than finding voter fraud in the United States. In fact, in my opinion, your vote has never been more secure in all of human history than it is right now. So what do you think? How are you feeling about the upcoming midterm elections in the United States? Let me know down below. Also, in case you haven't heard the news, we've just launched a new podcast called Let the Record Show about important court cases in U.S. history. It's with the ACLU, and I'm really excited about it. It's available anywhere you get your podcasts, including Florida. Don't forget to stay curious!