State and local officials are working hard to assure Americans that the country will see free and fair elections safe from fraud.

Fraud fears have been raised in multiple states, including the battleground states of Michigan and Pennsylvania.

A noncitizen was charged after allegedly casting a vote last weekend in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson and Washtenaw County Prosecutor Eli Savit said in a joint statement that, “Noncitizen voting is an extremely isolated and rare event.”

But, they continued, “When it does happen, we take it extremely seriously. Our elections are secure and Michigan’s state and local election officials carefully follow the law.”

York County, Pennsylvania, elections officials are sifting through several thousand voter registration applications to ensure they’re legitimate.

Former President Donald Trump has voiced concerns over the York County voter registration forms.

“Wow! York County, Pennsylvania, received THOUSANDS of potentially FRAUDULENT Voter Registration Forms and Mail-In Ballot Applications from a third party group,” reads a social media post from Trump. “This is on top of Lancaster County being caught with 2600 Fake Ballots and Forms, all written by the same person. Really bad ‘stuff.’ WHAT IS GOING ON IN PENNSYLVANIA??? Law Enforcement must do their job, immediately!!! WOW!!!”

York County elections officials said they got a batch of 3,087 voter registration applications last week.

Staff have verified about half of the applications as legitimate and have approved those, county officials said Wednesday.

About 30% of the applications were found to have incomplete information. Approval of those applications is pending additional information from the applicants.

About a quarter of the applications were declined and are undergoing further review by the local district attorney. Of the declined applications, 85% are duplicate registration requests.

Virginia purged about 1,600 voters from its rolls, which it believes are noncitizens.

Noncitizens, including permanent legal residents, aren’t allowed to vote in federal, state, and most local elections.

Two states, Connecticut and Delaware, allow nonresident voting in municipal or town elections, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Ten states allow nonresident voting in certain special-district elections: Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Delaware, Nebraska, New Mexico, Oregon, Tennessee, and Wyoming.

Illegal voting by noncitizens rarely happens, and a Cato Institute expert wrote in 2020 that the evidence doesn’t support the fear that noncitizens vote enough to actually shift the outcome of elections.

Voter fraud of any kind is extremely rare.

Elaine Kamarck, a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution, analyzed an election fraud database from the conservative Heritage Foundation. She said her analysis found a “minuscule” amount of voter fraud in the U.S.

For example, she wrote that Heritage’s tracker for the swing state of Pennsylvania goes back 30 years, covers 32 elections with over 100 million votes cast, and found only 39 cases of voter fraud.

The percentage of fraudulent votes over the three decades in Pennsylvania was 0.0000388%.

The presidential race will come down to what happens in seven swing states: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. And the Brookings breakdown shows tiny percentages of fraudulent votes in years of tracking for all seven swing states.

Georgia audited its 2022 election and found that over the last 25 years, fewer than 1,700 people believed to be noncitizens tried to register to vote, and none were able to cast ballots.

Most Americans trust that this election will be administered well, but there’s a sizable partisan gap in the trust level, according to the Pew Research Center.

A survey showed that 73% of voters overall and 90% of Vice President Kamala Harris’ supporters expect the election will be administered well. But just 57% of Trump’s supporters feel the same.

The survey also found Harris supporters are more confident than Trump supporters that it will be clear who won after all the votes are counted (85% vs. 58%), are more confident that mail-in ballots will be counted as voters intend (85% vs. 38%), are more confident that the elections are secure from hacking (73% vs. 32%), and that ineligible voters will be prevented from casting ballots (87% vs. 30%).

Are Trump supporters too distrustful, or are Harris supporters too trusting?

“Trump supporters are too distrustful,” Todd Belt, the political management program director at George Washington University, said last week. “And the reason I say that is there is incredibly little actual electoral malfeasance that occurs. It’s only a few votes here and there, and usually they find the person who did it. There are no real big problems with the counting processes. These are done with oversight from both parties, and you can be very confident in the electoral counting process.”

Belt said Trump’s rhetoric of a stolen election has affected Republican attitudes.

Election laws, of course, vary by state.

Thirty-six states have laws requiring voters to show some form of identification at the polls, according to the NCSL. The remaining 14 states and Washington, D.C., use other methods to verify the identity of voters, the NCSL says.

States have other laws in place to prevent voter fraud. At least 35 states have statutes that prohibit tampering with voting systems, according to the NCSL.

Double voting is often listed as a felony, and 19 states explicitly prohibit voting in more than one state. Eight states prohibit voting twice in the state or for the same office, the NCSL says. And 35 states and Washington, D.C., prohibit voting twice in the same election.

Have a news tip? Contact Cory Smith at corysmith@sbgtv.com or at x.com/Cory_L_Smith.