US elections 2020: no, mail-in votes are not rigged by Democrats, and other fact checks
US citizens will take part in an extraordinary, pandemic-era election on Tuesday. Indeed, many already have: ballots cast either through mail-in or early voting are equal to more than two-thirds of the total votes cast in 2016, as people around the country opt to avoid the crowds at polling stations.
But beyond changing the way Americans vote, the coronavirus pandemic has also induced a deluge of misinformation that election officials say threatens the integrity of the vote itself.
From accusations of widespread mail-in voter fraud to claims that counting votes after election night is illegal, many of the falsehoods have come from one particularly high-profile source - US President Donald Trump.
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"These falsehoods may well undermine the American people's faith in our democracy," Ellen Weintraub, head of the Federal Elections Commission (FEC), warned in May about Trump's attacks on the election's integrity.
Loss of confidence in the results was in fact the "number one" threat to election security, William Evanina, the director of US counter-intelligence, said during an recent TV interview. That was in part because foreign adversaries are amplifying misinformation from public officials, including Trump, to sow discord, he said.
As US voters brace for a likely increase in inflammatory rhetoric about the election's process and results, the South China Morning Post reviewed a few of the erroneous, misleading or baseless claims Trump has made in the run-up to this race.
Trump has repeatedly claimed that the increase in mail-in voting amid the coronavirus pandemic not only makes this election vulnerable to fraud, but also constitutes a coordinated effort by Democrats to "rig" the result.
"The Democrats are trying to rig this election because that's the only way they're going to win," he told supporters in Nevada in September. During the first presidential debate, Trump said, without citation, that 30 to 40 per cent of mail-in ballots would be lost or otherwise not counted.
FBI Director Christopher Wray says the agency has seen no evidence of a national voter fraud effort. Photo: EPA-EFE alt=FBI Director Christopher Wray says the agency has seen no evidence of a national voter fraud effort. Photo: EPA-EFE
The Trump campaign has offered little evidence to back up the claims, which contradict statements by election officials that mail-in voting is secure. "There's simply no basis for the conspiracy theory that voting by mail causes fraud," the FEC's Weintraub said.
Over the past two decades, there have been 143 criminal convictions related to mail-in voting out of 250 million such ballots cast - a fraud rate of around 0.00006 per cent - according to data compiled by the conservative Heritage Foundation.
The Trump campaign appears to have based its claims of rampant fraud on a handful of anecdotes of ballots being misplaced or mishandled, leaning heavily on one report from September that mailed-in ballots were among several trays of letters found by the side of a road in Wisconsin.
A local election official later debunked the report, confirming that the discarded mail contained no Wisconsin ballots.
Trump's case took a further hit when his own FBI director, Christopher Wray, told senators in late September that the agency had seen no evidence of a coordinated, national voter fraud effort, "whether it's by mail or otherwise".
In keeping with his claim that mail-in voting will undermine election integrity, Trump has argued that votes tallied in the post-election period - when early and mail-in votes are generally processed - should be discounted.
"It would be very, very proper and very nice if a winner were declared on November 3, instead of counting ballots for two weeks, which is totally inappropriate and I don't believe that's by our laws," Trump said outside the White House on Tuesday.
There is no US law that requires the official result of an election be declared on November 3.
Media outlets may "call" election results late on election night or during the early hours of the following day, but those judgments are projections based on state results and do not constitute an official result.
Republican efforts to curtail states' ability to count mail-in voting suffered a setback this week, when the US Supreme Court ruled that extended deadlines for counting absentee ballots in Pennsylvania and North Carolina should stay in place. But the court struck down a move to add a similar extension in Wisconsin, another battleground state.
Amid the hoaxes Trump has blamed his perceived political opponents for, the president has recently argued that critical media coverage of his handling of the coronavirus pandemic is a form of election interference.
"We have made tremendous progress with the China Virus, but the Fake News refuses to talk about it this close to the Election," Trump tweeted on Monday.
Amid a third wave in cases, the US recently experienced a record week of more than 500,000 new confirmed infections. The country continues to average around 800 deaths a day.
Despite those figures, the Trump campaign and administration continue to deflect criticism of the federal pandemic response, with the White House science policy office this week including "ending the Covid-19 pandemic" amid the administration's top accomplishments.
As that narrative has been challenged by news coverage, Trump has claimed without evidence that media organizations are working in concert to support Biden and that all pandemic coverage will end after the election.
"COVID, COVID, COVID is being used by them, in total coordination, in order to change our great early election numbers," Trump said on twitter. "Should be an election law violation!"
It has not yet emerged as a prominent theme this year, but Trump has consistently attributed his loss in the popular vote in 2016 to undocumented immigrants voting illegally.
Trump, who triumphed in the electoral college despite receiving 2.9 million fewer votes than the Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, claimed that upwards of three million "illegals" had cast ballots for her. There was no data to support the claim.
An investigative commission in 2017 that his administration convened failed to uncover any evidence of widespread voter fraud.
Republican members of the panel, which disbanded amid criticism of partisanship and a lack of cooperation from states, did say that partial data had indicated around 8,400 instances of duplicate voting, in which one voter casts two ballots.
The issue of duplicate voting has in fact made a reappearance this year, though not in the way Trump intended.
As he railed against mail-in voting, Trump in September used rallies and his Twitter account to encourage supporters to vote first by mail and again in person to make sure their votes were counted.
Given the illegality of such an act, Trump's comments prompted social media platforms to place warnings on his posts, and state election officials to remind citizens that voting twice is a crime.
This article originally appeared on the South China Morning Post (SCMP).
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