'This lacks evidence': NYT fact-check debunks Trump’s new election claims

More than five years and five months after losing the United States' 2020 presidential race to Democrat Joe Biden, President Donald Trump continues to claim, without evidence, that the election was stolen from him. That claim that was repeatedly debunked by one vote recount after another, yet Trump maintains that voter fraud is rampant in the United States — including voting by undocumented immigrants. And Trump is using that claim to push the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act (the SAVE Act or SAVE American Act), which, critics of the bill say, would make voting unnecessarily difficult.

Under the SAVE Act, Americans would have to prove that they are U.S. citizens in order to vote. A regular state-issued driver's license would not be enough; an additional form of identification such as a U.S. passport or a birth certificate would be needed.

In a fact-check published on April 7, the New York Times' Linda Qiu examines and debunks Trump's claims about voting.

Trump, in March, claimed, "The cheating on mail-in voting is legendary." But according to Qiu, "This lacks evidence.Documented cases of fraud in mail-in voting are extremely rare, according to election officials, data and a body of research."

"A 2025 analysis by the Brookings Institution found that cases of fraud accounted for four out of 10 million mailed ballots," Qiu explains. "The analysis noted that universal mail-in systems, in which all voters are mailed ballots, are actually less susceptible to fraud than absentee ballot systems, in which voters must request a ballot…. A 2020 report by researchers at the American Statistical Association found 'no evidence that voting by mail increases the risk of voter fraud overall.'"

On March 29, Trump told reporters, "We're the only country in the world that has mail-in ballots." But according to Qiu, that claim is blatantly "false."

"More than 30 other countries allow for postal voting, including 10 that allow all voters to vote by mail, according to the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, a pro-democracy group," the New York Times reporter observes. "The 10 countries are Canada, Germany, Iceland, South Korea, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, New Zealand, Poland, Switzerland and Britain. In the United States, 28 states allow all voters to vote by mail, with no excuses required, and eight others and the District of Columbia conduct elections entirely by mail."

Trump claimed that the U.S. "now fails to enforce basic and necessary election protections employed by modern, developed nations."

But according to Qiu, that is "misleading."

"A number of American officials under the Trump and Biden Administrations have deemed recent elections the most secure to date," Qiu notes. "It is true that other countries rank higher for election integrity than the United States, according to multiple independent analyses. But none of these analyses raised a lack of election protections as an issue with American elections. The United States scored 0.9 out of 1 — 1 being a perfect score — for free and fair elections in an index developed by V-Dem Institute, a nonprofit based in Sweden that monitors democracy. Thirty-four other countries, out of more than 200 measured, received higher scores."