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.

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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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Dave Soulia | FYIVT

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