Donald Trump was right that voter fraud took place in the 2020 election. It just wasn’t Democrats who participated in it.
The stories in this article also acknowledge that the system works — and it does catch voter fraud. You can’t learn about these cases and still believe there was “massive voter fraud on an unprecedented scale” without detection.
There are two parts to this article. First, the cases of Trump supporters actually committing voter fraud. Second, the case of Pamela Moses, a Black woman in Memphis who made an honest mistake — and was punished for it more harshly than every single Trump voter on this list combined.
Fraud and Consequences
We’ll explore 5 cases of intentional illegal voting, and one case of a mistake. A mistake that resulted in a 5-year prison sentence.
The difference between what happened to those who deliberately broke the law and what happened to the woman who didn’t is unbelievable — and it’s exactly what you’d expect from a criminal justice system that was built to favor a certain segment of the population.
It’s yet another example of the systemic racism that still exists in this country.
Voter Fraud Case #1: Brian Pritchard, Georgia
Brian Pritchard, the first vice chairman of the Georgia GOP, voted illegally nine times.
Pritchard was a vocal election denier who spent years claiming the 2020 Presidential election was “rigged” by massive Democratic voter fraud. Turns out the only fraud he had personal knowledge of was his own — he cast those nine votes while serving probation for forgery and other felonies, which made him ineligible to vote.
Administrative Law Judge Lisa Boggs ruled in March 2024 that Pritchard had violated state election laws and that his explanations for doing so were neither credible nor convincing.
His punishment? A $5,000 fine, $375.14 in court costs, and a public reprimand from the State Election Board. No prison time. No probation. Nothing.
Voter Fraud Case #2: James Saunders, Ohio
In August 2023, a Shaker Heights, Ohio attorney named James Saunders was convicted of voting illegally for Trump twice in 2020, and then doing it again in the 2022 midterms. His public defender tried to argue it was an accident.
The judge didn’t buy it — particularly because investigators also found Saunders had double-voted in 2014 and 2016. Those earlier crimes couldn’t be charged because the statute of limitations had run out.
Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Michael O’Malley called Saunders “the poster child for voter fraud” and noted that he was the only person in the county known to have voted twice in any of those years.
Saunders sentence: He got the maximum: 3 years in prison and a $10,000 fine.
He’s the outlier on this list. The only Trump supporter on it who actually went to prison. And the only reason for that — based on the prosecutor’s own statements — is that he kept doing it, election after election, for nearly a decade.
Voter Fraud Case #3: Audrey Cook, Illinois
Audrey Cook, an 88-year-old election judge in Madison County, Illinois, was charged with two felony counts of election fraud after submitting a Trump ballot for her dead husband.
Both of them had applied for absentee ballots before he died. The ballots arrived a few days too late for him. So she filled out his anyway. “I was just so distraught when this came and I just voted because I knew he wanted to live so badly to see Trump straighten out this stinking mess,” she said.
Cook was removed as an election judge. Then, the Saturday after she was charged, a reporter spotted her in line at an early voting station. When asked why she was there after already voting absentee, she said she was “testing the system.”
There’s no public record of any prison sentence. Given that she was an 88-year-old former election judge, it’s unlikely she did any time at all.
Voter Fraud Case 4: Terri Lynn Rote, Iowa
Terri Lynn Rote cast two votes for Donald Trump — one at a satellite voting location and one at the county election office.
Rote told police she did it because she believed Trump’s false claims that the 2016 election was rigged, and that her first vote would be secretly switched to Hillary Clinton. So she figured she’d just vote twice to be safe. She was arrested on October 21 trying to cast her second ballot.
Her sentence: 2 years of probation and a $750 fine.
Voter Fraud Case #5: Philip Cook, Texas
In Richmond, Texas, 62-year-old Philip Cook walked into Great Oaks Baptist Church on election day, impersonated an employee of the Trump campaign, and claimed he needed to “test the security of the voting machines.”
He’d already voted early the week before. He voted again. Then he was arrested.
The reporting from CBS Austin at the time confirmed the double-voting. No sentencing details ever made the news.
Voter Fraud Case #6: Pamela Moses, Tennessee
UPDATE 7/2025: The fraud charges against her were ultimately dropped and Pamela Moses is running for U.S. Senate. Her story is unbelievable, though, so continue reading.
Now let’s look at the case of Pamela Moses, a Black woman in Memphis, Tennessee. She was charged with election fraud and originally sentenced to 6 years in prison — for a mistake she didn’t even know she was making.
The Guardian covered her story in depth. Here’s what happened.
In 2019, Moses tried to get her name on the ballot for the Memphis mayoral race. Officials told her she couldn’t run because of a prior felony conviction — a conviction she had taken a plea deal on, years earlier, to avoid a long prison sentence for something she said she didn’t do. She’d plead guilty to harassment and stalking charges involving a judge.
What nobody told her at the time of that plea — not her lawyer, not the judge — was that one of the charges she pleaded guilty to (tampering with evidence) carried a permanent loss of voting rights in Tennessee.
She didn’t know. So she kept voting in elections from 2015 to 2019, like a normal citizen who believed she had the right to.
In 2019, she got a letter saying her voter registration was about to be cancelled. She immediately called the elections office to ask what to do. They told her to go through the process of having her voting rights restored — which meant getting her probation officer to sign a form confirming she’d completed probation.
Moses brought the form to her probation office. The manager on duty, Kristoffer Billington, checked the system, saw she was technically still on unsupervised probation but assumed it was an administrative oversight (her case had been bouncing around the courts), and signed the form stating she’d completed probation in 2018.
About 30 minutes after she left, Billington got a call from the Attorney General’s office telling him he’d made a mistake.
Here’s the thing, though: it didn’t matter. Moses had pleaded guilty in 2015 to a charge that permanently barred her from voting. Whether her probation ended in 2018 or 2020 was irrelevant. She was never going to be eligible to vote again under Tennessee law — and nobody had ever told her.
A staffer at the elections office, learning Moses was permanently barred, emailed a colleague in delight: “LOOK AT HER STATUS!!! PERMANENTLY INELIGIBLE.” She included a smiley face.
Moses was arrested at O’Hare Airport when she returned from a trip abroad. She was charged for voting illegally in every election since 2015 — for honestly believing she still had the right to vote.
She was sentenced to 6 years and 1 day in prison.
Her story got national attention. The New York Times, The Guardian, and Rachel Maddow all covered it. A public records request by The Guardian eventually uncovered an internal investigation from the Tennessee Department of Corrections that placed the blame for the signature error squarely on Billington — not on Moses. The prosecution had been arguing she’d somehow deceived him into signing. The internal report said she hadn’t.
A judge threw out the conviction in February 2022. Shelby County District Attorney Amy Weirich dropped all charges later that year, saying the 82 days Moses had already spent in custody were “sufficient.” Moses remains permanently barred from voting in Tennessee.
Voting rights advocates argue these laws are deliberately confusing — that the bureaucratic maze is the point. People make mistakes navigating it, and those mistakes send them right back into the system, back into probation, back into a status that strips them of their rights all over again. The cycle is the feature, not the bug.
Hypocrisy
The Right loves projection. Whatever they accuse Democrats of doing, they’ve already done it — or want to do it — themselves. There were very few cases of actual voter fraud in 2020, and the overwhelming majority of those illegal votes were cast for Donald Trump.
Fraud Stats
Voter fraud is rare. Texas — a state with aggressive election prosecution and a Republican attorney general who has made hunting fraud a personal project — found 103 cases between 2005 and 2022, out of 107 million total votes cast.
That works out to 0.000096% of all ballots.
Even The Heritage Foundation — the conservative think tank behind Project 2025, the same people who would dearly love to prove the 2020 election was stolen — keeps a national database of every fraud case they can find.
Their own numbers don’t come anywhere close to what would be needed to flip a presidential election.
The cases above aren’t the exception that proves the rule. They are the rule. Voter fraud exists. It gets caught. It gets prosecuted.
And in 2020, the people doing it were overwhelmingly Trump voters who believed his lies so completely that they were willing to break the law to “fix” an election that wasn’t broken.
