Minor Thoughts from me to you

Despite evidence to the contrary, Mr. Trump continues to claim, on an almost daily basis, the mail-in ballots are are an invitation to fraud. He continually assets that 2020 will be the most fraudulent election ever, and that the only way America can trust the election results is to get rid of all of the mail-in ballots. He’s either lying about that or he’s ignorant. This 2-month old Washington Post analysis shows that mail-in ballot fraud is practically non-existent. Thanks to COVID-19, millions of ballots will be cast by mail this year—including my own. And we can be completely confident that the results reported will be accurate.

Analysis of mail-in ballots finds just 0.0025% rate of possible voter fraud

Elise Viebeck, for the Washington Post.

But a Washington Post analysis of data collected by three vote-by-mail states with help from the nonprofit Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC) found that officials identified just 372 possible cases of double voting or voting on behalf of deceased people out of about 14.6 million votes cast by mail in the 2016 and 2018 general elections, or 0.0025 percent.

The figure reflects cases referred to law enforcement agencies in five elections held in Colorado, Oregon and Washington, where all voters proactively receive ballots in the mail for every election.

The minuscule rate of potentially fraudulent ballots in those states adds support to assertions by election officials nationwide that with the right safeguards, mail voting is a secure method for conducting elections this year amid the threat of the novel coronavirus — undercutting the president’s claims.

Until now, the polarized debate about ballot fraud has largely featured individual anecdotes from around the country of attempts to vote illegally. The voting figures from the three states examined by The Post provide a robust data set to measure the prevalence of possible fraud.

Current and former election officials in the three states said allegations that mail voting fosters widespread cheating are not only defied by the data, but also do not acknowledge the sophisticated and tightly controlled ways that voting operates in their jurisdictions, which have layers of security designed specifically to root out fraud and build confidence in the system.

“When I have the opportunity to give a tour of our facility to a skeptic of vote-by-mail or a skeptic of the process — someone concerned about fraud or security — they turn into believers,” said Julie Wise, elections director in King County, Wash., which includes Seattle and has operated a fully vote-by-mail system since 2009.