High peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) is the main disadvantage of visible light communication-based orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (VLC-OFDM) systems. To address this problem, a novel precoding method is proposed in this paper. The complex-valued precoding matrix is constructed by a Vandermonde matrix. The researched results show the proposed precoding scheme has better PAPR performance when compared to the conventional real-valued precoding methods. Moreover, a general closed-form expression of bit error rate (BER) for Vandermonde precoded VLC-OFDM is derived for multipath fading channel. The obtained BER formula shows that Vandermonde precoding can improve the BER performance of VLC-OFDM system over multipath fading channel. This is verified by the simulation results. The researched results also show that different precoding schemes have the same BER performance but different PAPR performance.