"As myths about widespread voter fraud become central to political campaigns and discourse, we're seeing more of the high-profile attempts to make examples of individuals," said Wendy Weiser, vice president for democracy at the Brennan Center.

It's nearly impossible to assess whether the talk of getting tough on voter crime is resulting in an increase in prosecutions. There is no nationwide data on how many people were charged with voter fraud in 2020 or in previous elections, and state data is often incomplete. The state numbers that are available show there were very few examples of potential cases in 2020 and few prosecutions.

Florida election officials made just 75 referrals to law enforcement agencies regarding potential fraud during the 2020 election, out of more than 11 million votes cast, according to data from the Florida secretary of state's office. Of those investigations, only four cases have been prosecuted as voter fraud in the state from the 2020 election.

In Texas, where Attorney General Ken Paxton announced his new "election integrity unit" in October to investigate election crimes, The Houston Chronicle reported that the six-prosecutor unit had spent $2.2 million and had closed three cases.

And in Wisconsin, where a swath of Republicans, including one candidate for governor, are seeking to decertify the state's 2020 presidential election results on the basis of false claims of fraud, a report released last week by the Wisconsin Election Commission said that the state had referred to local prosecutors 95 instances of felons voting in 2020 when they were not allowed to. From among those cases, district attorneys have filed charges against 16 people.

"The underlying level of actual criminality, I don't think that's changed at all," said Lorraine Minnite, a Rutgers University political science professor who has collected years of data on election fraud in America. "In an election of 130 million or 140 million people, it's close to zero.