My column today in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

Bruce Ledewitz: We don’t need voter ID because voter fraud isn’t a problem

Special to the Post-Gazette

Feb 23, 2026

Now that Pennsylvania’s Democratic Sen. John Fetterman has decided to support voter ID, an almost purely Republican cause, it’s time to revisit what we know about illegal voting.

We know that illegal voting did not steal the 2020 presidential election for Joe Biden. We know this because Donald Trump could not believe he lost that election to a man he so little respected and set his campaign to spend millions of dollars looking for the illegal votes that could explain the result.

An insignificant amount

Trump filed dozens of lawsuits in the swing states to overturn the election result, alleging voting fraud of various kinds. This was not a crime. Trump did not ask the Georgia Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger, to manufacture thousands of votes for him. He asked Raffensperger to find votes that he thought the Democrats had illegally erased.

Election fraud is not hard to prove. The voting roles are a public record and it is easy to check names against citizenship records, death certificates and even driver’s licenses. Plus, Trump was alleging a massive conspiracy by Democrats across numerous states. There would be evidence of such a conspiracy and evidence of hacked voting machines.

The result of these lawsuits was humiliation. Trump did not just lose them. In most cases, the campaign did not even try to prove widespread fraud. Its failure proved Biden won the election.

It’s not that illegal voting never happens. But it doesn’t happen, and can’t happen, at the scale needed to change election results. The conservative Heritage Foundation’s own database has only 1,620 cases going back to 1982, out of the well over a billion votes cast in that time.

But why not require voter ID just to be safe? It seems like a harmless security feature. You show your driver’s license to vote — as you do when buying beer or flying. But not everyone has one or can get one easily.

My wife and I assist an elderly gentleman who long ago surrendered his driver’s license. Then he needed an alternative government ID to buy a new phone. Getting him one took weeks of effort, effort he could not have made himself. 

Many people face similar barriers to getting an ID. They can’t get to a DMV office or have to be at work when the office is open or they don’t have the required documents even though they’re citizens, for example. If voter ID becomes the law, tens of thousands of people like our friend will never vote again.

Of course, all voting requirements disadvantage some people. If voter ID were needed to prevent illegal voting, you would still require it.

Not a preventative

But what does voter ID prevent? Many immigrants have lawful driver’s licenses. So do felons. Voter ID does not prevent them from voting illegally.

All a voter ID law prevents is someone showing up on election day claiming to be someone else. You can’t do that if the voter is going to show up and vote. You can’t do it if they’re dead because deaths are now cross-referenced against the voting roles. In both cases, you would be caught after the election. 

You could vote for someone you know will not vote and will not find out. But even then, a local election official might know the voter or know you. It’s not impossible, but how often could this happen? Not enough to affect even a local election.

The other voting issue Republicans claim to worry about is substituting paper ballots for voting machines. I don’t know if voting machines can be programed to change the votes they record. But I do know that after the 2020 election, FOX News paid Dominion Voting Systems $787.5 million in April 2023 in a defamation settlement for allowing guests to make that claim. And rigging the machines would require a sophisticated conspiracy even if it could be done and conspiracies that large tend to be found out.

Besides, paper ballots are the least secure form of voting. They are the most liable to counting errors and they can be stolen and replaced with fraudulently procured ballots. That would be difficult, but it could be done.

So, what kind of illegal voting does happen more often? Really just one — the practice called “harvesting” mail-in ballots, whether absentee votes or in states with mail-in voting.

This practice does not involve illegally applying for someone else’s ballot. That cannot be done because no one can vote twice and ballots are mailed to the voter’s legal residence. Instead, in harvesting, a person gets access to the voter’s ballot, fills it in and then mails it.

This is often technically illegal, but undoubtedly happens a lot. Usually, family members are innocently violating the law by helping an elderly person to vote. One person convicted in Pennsylvania filled in and mailed an absentee ballot for Trump long after his mother had died apparently because she had so wanted to vote for him.

No problem

Years ago, political machines would round up large numbers of absentee voters and practically fill in the ballots for them. That is what led some states to prohibit or restrict the practice. With large scale mail-in voting now the law in several states, there is theoretically more opportunity for harvesting.

There is no evidence that organized harvesting goes on, but it’s hard to see how it could steal an election even if did. If there were any coercion involved, someone would complain and the scheme would be exposed. All that harvesting could do is help people vote exactly the way they want to. That might be illegal, but without it voters would mostly find a way to vote for the same candidates legally.

In 2020, Trump was a sore loser. There was no problem to fix, and there is no problem to fix. Our elections work. Many Republicans demanding voter ID just want fewer Democratic Party voters to vote.

Bruce Ledewitz, a contributing writer for the Post-Gazette, is professor of law emeritus at the Thomas R. Kline School of Law of Duquesne University. He writes every other Monday. The views expressed do not represent those of Duquesne University. His previous article was “

First Published: February 23, 2026, 4:30 a.m.