Voter fraud is rare, but many Americans believe their votes will not be counted correctly.

It was a sweeping announcement of possible voter fraud — exactly what former President Donald Trump and conservative pundits spent years warning Republican voters to be wary of: More than 50 voters registered at one address in Erie, Pennsylvania.

“NO ONE lives there,” said Cliff Maloney, the Republican agitator who discovered the alleged fraud, in a post on X that went viral with more than 2.8 million views. “We will not allow Democrats to count on illegal votes,” he added.

Just one problem: a lot of people live there. The monastery in question is owned by the Benedictine Sisters of Erie, a group of “nearly 70” nuns who have resided in Erie since the 1850s. The names of the nuns living there match many of what Maloney called “illegal voices.” In a statement responding to Maloney’s post, the group called the claim “patently false” and urged everyone to be more careful about what they see and read ahead of the election.

“A free republic depends on free and fair elections,” Sister Stephanie Schmidt said in the statement. “It equally depends on discerning and conscientious citizens who do not accept unquestioningly the words of those with a social media platform.”

Good advice. Actual, proven cases of widespread voter fraud on the scale necessary to change the outcome of an election—even in a hyper-competitive state like Pennsylvania—are virtually non-existent, despite seemingly incessant claims to the contrary.

Voter fraud in elections is a fact of life in any democracy, but it is usually the result of negligence on the part of individual voters or ballot counters, and there are many procedures in place to identify and correct these errors when they occur. Following the 2020 election, The Associated Press found 475 cases of possible voter fraud in six states where a total of 25 million ballots were cast. Loud claims of voter fraud in Arizona, Georgia and elsewhere, in Rudy Giuliani’s view, evaporated upon closer examination.

At some point, the lack of evidence of widespread voter fraud should make Americans more skeptical of these claims. Instead, it looks like the opposite may be happening.

Just 39 percent of respondents to a recent University of Massachusetts Amherst poll said they were “very confident” their voters would be accurately counted in this year’s election. That includes just 26 percent of Republicans and 16 percent of Independents. Even counting those who say they are “somewhat confident” that votes will be counted correctly, only about two-thirds of the country believes the election results will reflect the votes cast.

A similar partisan divide emerged in a recent Pew Research Center poll that asked whether “it will be clear who won the election” after all the votes are counted. Only 58 percent of Trump voters are “very” or “somewhat” confident the final count will be clear, compared with 81 percent of Vice President Kamala Harris voters who are willing to trust the process.

This is a potentially troubling problem, since the legitimacy of any democratic system depends largely on public opinion. perception electoral system. Even if election fraud or other electoral fraud is extremely rare, the belief that it is rampant undermines the essential trust on which the entire edifice of government, “of the people, by the people, for the people,” is built.

A cynic might believe that Republican supporters – from Maloney to Tucker Carlson to Trump himself – are deliberately spreading lies and exaggerating claims of election fraud to sow doubt that could escalate into full-blown chaos later this month.

But, as in those rare instances of actual voter fraud, it is always better to assume incompetence (or at least self-serving willful ignorance) rather than malice. Perhaps more important is Sister Schmidt’s message: Don’t believe everything you see on social media.