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by Dave Soulia, for FYIVT.com
When Sen. Peter Welch (D-Vt.) defended voting access on social media, he leaned on a familiar line: “More Americans are struck by lightning every year than commit voter fraud.” It’s a catchy sound bite. It suggests fraud is so rare that worrying about it is like worrying about unicorns. But what happens if we pull the numbers apart and look not just at perpetrators, but at victims?
Lightning Versus Fraud: The Surface Comparison
On the surface, Welch’s claim checks out. According to the National Weather Service, about 270–300 Americans are struck by lightning each year, with 20–30 fatalities. Meanwhile, documented voter-fraud prosecutions across the United States typically number in the dozens annually. On a one-to-one basis — individual struck versus individual charged — the lightning figure looks larger.
But this framing hides more than it reveals. It counts perpetrators but ignores impact. One lightning strike generally affects one person, maybe a handful. One fraud case can taint an entire election and dilute the votes of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of people.
Percentages Tell a Different Story
If we measure risk per person, lightning looks vanishingly rare: about 0.00009% of Americans are struck each year, or 0.9 per million. But when we look at fraud prosecutions per election, the math shifts. Ballotpedia documented roughly 76,900 elections in 2024. With about 30–50 proven fraud cases nationwide each year, that works out to 0.03–0.07% of elections tainted enough to produce charges — or hundreds per million elections. Fraud events per election are orders of magnitude more common than lightning strikes per person. On a per-unit basis, fraud cases appear 400 to 700 times more frequently than lightning strikes — a gap big enough to flip the analogy on its head.
And those numbers only capture cases that end in prosecution. Once a fraudulent mail ballot passes signature verification and is separated from its envelope, it becomes indistinguishable from legitimate ballots. That means many questionable ballots, if they existed, would never show up in court data.
Counting Victims, Not Just Perpetrators
The deeper flaw in Welch’s analogy is that it counts perpetrators, not victims. If we flip the denominator, the scale of impact changes dramatically.
- Paterson, N.J. (2020): Investigators invalidated roughly 3,200 ballots out of 16,747 cast in a city council race, nearly 20%. Every one of the 16,747 participants was a victim, because the contest itself was tainted.
- North Carolina’s 9th District (2018): Absentee ballot harvesting forced the state to toss out the results of a congressional race. Roughly 280,000 voters in the district had their ballots effectively nullified.
- Miami, Fla. (1997): A mayoral race was voided after a court found absentee-ballot fraud. Tens of thousands of participants had their votes rendered meaningless.
- Bridgeport, Conn. (2019 and 2023): Two mayoral primaries were overturned due to absentee manipulation, each involving 10,000+ ballots.
From just a handful of cases, the victim count exceeds 350,000 voters. Compare that with the 270–300 people struck by lightning annually. The scale is not even close.
The Real Analogy
If lightning killed or injured a quarter of a million people in one strike, we’d call it a national emergency. We’d change building codes, expand weather warning systems, and pour money into prevention. But when an election is tainted — as in North Carolina in 2018 or Paterson in 2020 — it effectively strikes tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands of voters at once. Their votes are diluted, their confidence undermined, and in some cases the election must be rerun.
That is the heart of the analogy’s failure. Lightning is random, scattered, and individually tragic. Fraud, when it occurs, is organized, targeted, and disenfranchises entire electorates at once. Even if perpetrators are few, the victims can number in the thousands.
Bottom Line
Peter Welch’s lightning line works as a slogan, not as an honest measure. On a per-person basis, lightning strikes do exceed fraud prosecutions. But on a per-election basis, fraud shows up more often. And when we count victims instead of perpetrators, even a few proven fraud cases produce victim counts that dwarf lightning by orders of magnitude.
Fraud is not a unicorn. It’s a lightning strike that, when it lands, doesn’t just hit one person in a field — it hits an entire town square packed with voters. And that’s why serious safeguards, including voter ID and rigorous ballot verification, matter. The victims of a tainted election number in the thousands, and their disenfranchisement deserves more than a dismissive analogy.
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Categories: Commentary, Elections
One comparison that is not made here is that lightning is an act of God. Voter fraud is an act of a criminal .
Yes Patrick, I agree.
Welch’s analogy is very weak and absent of the honesty and critical thinking that are needed to truly address this important subject. Coming from Welch this is especially troubling as he is supposed to advocate for the collective best interests of the People of Vermont. Like many other Democrats/Progressives, Welch won’t acknowledge the reality that Vermont has one of the worst election systems in the United States.
The Democrats/Progressives in Vermont’s Government betrayed Vermont Voters in May of 2021 as they drastically remade Vermont’s Election System. They made the Covid Emergency, All-Mailed Ballot System permanent with no security measures, safeguards or Voter IDs, along with the continued mandate to have our Votes counted by machines.
Vermont’s Election System now allows Ballots to be mailed to all persons on the statewide voter checklist, approximately 40 days prior to Election Day. Mailing All Ballots erased the ability to have a Ballot Chain of Custody to know who is actually voting on the Ballots.
Democrats/Progressives express their assurance that the remade system is secure, but how is it possible for them to know? With no Voter ID or Ballot Chain of Custody, there is no way any Vermont Election can be audited to have the evidence necessary to confirm the system’s security or trust.
Vermont’s Elections and Ballots belong to The Voters of Vermont. We need a verifiable and trustworthy system.
This factual, nuanced discussion of the topic resonated with me. Good article.
Senator,
GBI Strategies, Michigan-based (now closed) and operated in several states, is back under federal investigation. The Michigan coven will come to light. Tick tock.
Without establishing mechanisms and using appropriate tools to detect voter fraud in Vermont and across the country, specific instances to point at will be fewer. Based on information and belief, the sense is that voter fraud may be pervasive and a much more common occurrence than has been recognized. Further, as Dave points out, the impact of voter fraud on the people of the State of Vermont and of the United States is way greater than the individual instances.
It’s high time to require government photo ID to vote just as its required to purchase alcohol, fly on airplanes and obtain a driver’s license. The sanctity of legitimate voting is critical to trust in our elections. There are no legitimate excuses for allowing any vote to be cast without certification its cast by a PERSON Authorized to vote their ONE vote per election.
Just saw this, but 5 years later what do we do about it, damage already done!
Costa Mesa woman registered her dog to vote and submitted ballots twice, DA says!! Would dog have ID?
Thanks for asking Ron!
We should ALL spread the truth about Vermont’s untrustworthy Election System and flood the mail boxes of Vermont Elected Officials to demand changes.
They say”Show us the Election Fraud.” We should be saying “Show us how you KNOW the System does not have fraud.”
With NO BALLOT CHAIN OF CUSTODY, they cannot audit any Vermont Election to be able to show us the System is trustworthy and without corruption.
That is why conscious and malicious intent to vote more than once, or doctoring the votes, must be met with very severe and long prison time and the loss of campaigning and voting privileges.
A Senator who is a fraud talking about voter fraud. I wonder how many fraudulent mail in ballots were cast for him?
Mail-in voting violates the principles of democratic elections: All parties concerned must be able to validate the fact that the ballot came from a qualified voter and that the voter cast only one ballot.
“A December 2023 survey by Rasmussen Reports and The Heartland Institute claimed that 21% of mail-in voters in the 2020 election admitted to filling out a ballot on behalf of someone else, 19% had someone else fill out their ballot, and 17% admitted to voting in a state where they were no longer a permanent resident. The survey also reported that 17% admitted to signing a ballot for a friend or family member.”
It is not surprising that “multiple studies have found no evidence that voting by mail increases fraud.” There is no evidence because we can not observe who is filling out the ballots that are put into the mail system. Instead, we should be asking for evidence that there is NO fraud and each voter filled out their own ballot and cast only one. There is no evidence of THAT, either.
Link to referenced study: https://heartland.org/opinion/heartland-rasmussen-poll-one-in-five-mail-in-voters-admit-to-committing-at-least-one-kind-of-voter-fraud-during-2020-election/