How many dead people voted in the 2020 presidential election?
Executive summary
Independent reviews and exhaustive fact-checking found that votes cast in the names of deceased people in the 2020 U.S. presidential election were vanishingly rare and amounted to a tiny fraction of total ballots, with comprehensive reporting finding fewer than 475 potential cases of any kind of voter fraud across six battleground states and targeted analyses finding only single- or low-double-digit counts of deceased-voter ballots in specific counties [1] [2] [3].
1. The claim versus what investigators actually found
Broad claims that “thousands” of dead people voted in 2020 were widely circulated after the election, but major empirical reviews and fact-checks did not substantiate that scale: the Associated Press’s multipronged review of six disputed battleground states identified fewer than 475 potential instances of voter fraud overall — a number the AP said would not have affected the election outcome — and did not validate widespread dead-voter voting at scale [1] [2].
2. Local audits and campaign-funded research that undercut the big figures
Analyses commissioned by partisan actors also failed to corroborate large numbers of deceased voters; the Trump campaign’s own research, for example, reportedly found high confidence in only single-digit deceased-voter counts in key counties — nine in Fulton County, Georgia, and a dozen possible deceased ballots in Clark County, Nevada — undermining the narrative of mass dead-voter fraud [3].
3. Why lists of “dead voters” often mislead
Counting “dead voters” is prone to error because raw lists mix mismatched records, nonresidents, administrative mistakes and duplicate entries; the BBC’s investigation into a Michigan list of 10,000 alleged dead voters found the list “fundamentally flawed,” with individual examples of living people appearing on the list and other classification errors [4]. FactCheck.org and PolitiFact similarly documented that many viral lists overcounted or misattributed records and that genuine cases of votes cast in deceased names have historically been rare [5] [6].
4. Academic, legal and policy consensus: rare, not systemic
Scholars and policy groups reviewing statistical claims about 2020 concluded that prominent allegations — including votes cast by dead people — lacked convincing evidence; a PNAS paper assessing multiple statistical assertions about the election found none remotely convincing, and research synthesized by organizations like the Brennan Center and Brookings frames voter fraud as exceedingly uncommon in U.S. elections [7] [8] [9] [10].
5. What the reporting cannot precisely quantify and why that matters
No single source provides a definitive national tally of every deceased-person ballot in 2020 — reporting is concentrated on battleground states and on verified investigations — but the best available comprehensive reviews show that any confirmed or credible deceased-voter incidents were tiny in number relative to the roughly 158 million votes cast and the millions examined in state-level reviews, meaning they could not plausibly have changed the election result [11] [1] [9].
6. Bottom line and competing narratives
The evidence-based bottom line across independent journalism, court records, academic review and even some campaign-commissioned work is consistent: isolated incidents of ballots cast in the names of deceased people occurred but were extremely rare and far short of the “thousands” sometimes alleged; alternative viewpoints — principally those asserting massive dead-voter turnout — have not produced verifiable data and in multiple cases have been shown to rely on flawed lists or misunderstandings of election records [2] [4] [3] [6].