About one in five voters who used mail-in or absentee ballots to vote in the 2020 election admitted to engaging in at least one form of voter fraud, a poll released Tuesday found.
Thirty percent of 1,085 likely voters who responded to a poll from Rasmussen Reports said they voted by mail. Of those who voted by mail, 21 percent admitted to filling out a ballot on behalf of another person, such as a friend or family member, which is illegal. The poll had a margin of error of 3 percent and a 95 percent confidence level.
Nineteen percent admitted that a friend or family member filled out a ballot on their behalf.
Twenty-six percent of respondents to the poll who voted by mail for former president Donald Trump said a friend or family member filled out their ballot for them, while 14 percent of President Joe Biden's voters who voted by mail said the same. Additionally, 30 percent of Trump mail-in voters said they filled out a ballot for someone they knew, compared with 13 percent of Biden mail-in voters.
The survey results indicated significant rates of other forms of fraud in the 2020 election. Ten percent of likely voters said they knew of someone who cast a mail-in ballot in a "state other than his or her state of permanent residence." Eight percent of likely voters said they were offered payment or a reward for voting by "a friend, family member, or organization, such as a political party."
In response to suspicions of voter fraud in the 2020 election, Republicans pushed to pass election integrity laws. One state where they were successful was Georgia, which the Biden administration sued in 2021 to overturn the state's Election Integrity Act, with the president calling the law "Jim Crow on steroids." A federal court in October rejected the Biden administration's attempt to overturn the provisions of the Georgia law.