States hit back at claims by Donald Trump voter fraud is widespread
Trump has warned votes are being rigged in Biden’s favour and court cases are swirling – but some of the claims, from ballot dumping to election observers, don’t add up.
After a tense election day, counting is continuing in the United States where wafer thin majorities could decide who becomes president.
Claims of voter fraud are coming in as fast as ballots can be counted, some of them stoked by US President Donald Trump.
Trouble is, the ones that have come to light just aren’t stacking up.
On election night, amid an inconclusive result, Mr Trump claimed voter fraud was happening or about to happen.
“Millions and millions of people voted for us today and a very sad group of people is trying to disenfranchise that group of people, and we won’t stand for it,” he said early on Wednesday morning US time.
“We will be going to the Supreme Court. We want all voting to stop. We don’t want them to find any ballots at 4am in the morning.”
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Then, at around 4am, more than 100,000 votes did appear in Democrat Joe Biden’s column in the crucial swing state of Wisconsin pushing him ahead of his Republican rival. Some commentators called it a “ballot dump” designed to rob Mr Trump of victory.
However, state officials have hit back at the claims.
“We are not finding ballots,” Julietta Henry, director of elections for Milwaukee County, told website PolitiFact National.
“Ballots are being counted.”
Elections are organised county-by-county in the US, and in many of the major cities a decision was taken to count mail-in and absentee ballots after those that were cast on polling day.
It had always been expected that in some places these votes would favour Mr Biden. In Milwaukee, between 3.30am and 3.45am, his vote jumped by 150,000 votes. But Mr Trump’s vote also went up – by 32,000 votes.
Those votes were reported in a short period of time because the mail-in and absentee count for Milwaukee County and a slew of other communities took place in one location and the large volume of ballots were counted in bulk.
Green Bay, another large city, also counted its absentee ballots in one centre. So, just like Milwaukee, it also had a big drop of votes overnight.
But there’s been no evidence presented that those votes are anything but legitimate.
Similarly, a claim more Wisconsinites voted than there are actual registered voters in the state was debunked. In actual fact, around 400,000 residents didn’t bother to vote at all – or at least those votes have not yet been counted.
On Wednesday, Mr Trump’s lawyer and former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani said he would file a law suit and claimed there had been “anti-democratic” actions in Philadelphia and “all over the country”.
He said that election observers were not allowed close to the counting taking place and therefore they could miss “50,000 fraudulent ballots being dumped”.
He said the Philadelphia count was an “illegitimate count”.
A Philadelphia court has thrown out the challenge but team Trump are taking the case further.
Pennsylvania Attorney-General Josh Shapiro said in a CNN interview the lawsuit was “more a political document than a legal document”.
“There is transparency in this process. The counting has been going on. There are observers observing this counting, and the counting will continue,” he said.
There has also been wrangling about Philadelphia counting mail-in ballots that arrive after Election Day, postmarked on the day or before, or have no postmark. Election officials have said those ballots, likely just a few hundred, will be counted but will be set aside pending any court cases.
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VOTER FRAUD ‘EXTREMELY RARE’
There have been many voter fraud claims. But are any of them true? In a nutshell, no. While there have been mistakes made with mail-in ballots such as ballot papers being sent to the wrong addresses, experts agree widespread voter fraud is extremely rare.
The US-based Brennan Centre for Justice, a nonpartisan policy institute states despite extensive claims about it taking place, voter fraud is “very rare”.
“Voter impersonation is virtually non-existent, and many instances of alleged fraud are, in fact, mistakes by voters or administrators. The same is true for mail ballots, which are secure and essential to holding a safe election amid the coronavirus pandemic,” it said.
The centre cites a collection of studies from 2004 to 2017 that found voter fraud incredibly rare. One 2017 study found the overall rate at less than 0.0009 per cent across the country.
“The verdict is in from every corner that voter fraud is sufficiently rare that it simply could not and does not happen at the rate even approaching that which would be required to “rig” an election,” the centre notes.
“Electoral integrity is key to our democracy, and politicians who genuinely care about protecting our elections should focus not on phantom fraud concerns, but on those abuses that actually threaten election security,” it said.
The BBC’s reality check team also investigated claims of voter fraud and found instances highlighted by Mr Trump were simply mistakes.
For example he claimed in mid-October 500,000 false applications were made in Virginia, when in fact it was applications sent out with the wrong return address.
The Virginia Center for Voter Information (CVI) said: “We worked for weeks to make sure that no Virginia voter was inconvenienced as a result of our printing error.”
In another case cited by the President in Ohio, he claimed 50,000 ballots were “fraudulent”, however again this was a mistake where voters got the wrong ballot paper in the post and the “serious mistake” was corrected.
Federal Election Commission head Ellen Weintraub has also said: “There’s simply no basis for the conspiracy theory that voting by mail causes fraud.”
The Annenberg Public Policy Centre‘s Fact Check service also states there is “nothing untoward about counting ballots after election day”.
“Counting doesn’t ‘often’ go on past Election Day. It *always* does,” tweeted Rick Hasen, a professor of law and political science at the University of California, Irvine ahead of the vote.
“Results on election night are preliminary, even in states that do relatively quick counts. Electoral college votes are not even cast until mid December, and the Congress counts the votes in January.”
Key states this year included Pennsylvania and Michigan, where officials cannot start counting mail-in ballots until Election Day.
Mr Trump narrowly won both states in 2016, but has trailed Joe Biden in polls this year.
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