Is voter fraud a serious risk in the US election?

It’s an election unlike any before, but there’s one major difference that could be the deciding factor in whether Donald Trump is defeated.

An unprecedented number of Americans are voting by mail this year, sparking concerns about the potential for fraud, or lost or rejected ballots.

When entire races can be won or lost by a few hundred votes – and with some key states now set to count ballots for days after November 3 – mail-in voting could prove to be the issue that decides the election.

US President Donald Trump and Republicans have repeatedly claimed Democrats are trying to “steal” the election through mail-in voting.

Democrats, on the other hand, have accused Republicans of attempting to disenfranchise legitimate voters through court challenges to ballot deadlines and cuts to the Postal Service.

They have openly warned that due to amount of time required to count the record number of mail-in ballots, Mr Trump may appear to have won by a “landslide” on election night only for Joe Biden to be eventually declared the winner once every “legitimate” vote is counted.

In 2016 about 139 million Americans voted, 33 million of them by mail.

As of Wednesday, more than 75 million Americans had already voted, including just under 50 million by mail, according to the University of Florida’s US Elections Project.

Some 42 million mail ballots are still outstanding.

Democrats, who polls suggested were far more likely to vote by mail due to greater concerns about COVID-19, have been vastly outpacing Republicans in early mail-in voting.

According to data from the 20 states that provide party registration statistics, more than 14.2 million registered Democrats have returned mail ballots, accounting for 50 per cent, compared with 7.3 million Republicans and 6.5 million with no party affiliation.

A record number of Americans are casting mail-in ballots this year. Picture: Robyn Beck/AFP

‘OPEN TO FRAUD AND COERCION’

All states in the US allow for some form of absentee voting by mail, but the process varies.

The US Election Assistance Commission explains the four main ways – excuse-required absentee voting, no-excuse required absentee voting, permanent absentee voting and vote by mail.

Excuse-required means just that – that the voter must provide a valid reason why the cannot appear to vote on election day – while permanent absentee voting means the voter only has to sign up once to receive an absentee ballot in all future elections.

But it is universal vote by mail, in which all registered voters in the jurisdiction are mailed an “unsolicited” ballot, is largely what has many Republicans worked up this year.

Currently nine states – Nevada, New Jersey, California, Colorado, Oregon, Utah, Washington State, Hawaii, Vermont – plus Washington, D.C. have universal mail-in voting, while Montana has allowed individual counties to opt in.

A further 14 – Minnesota, South Dakota, Wyoming, Illinois, Delaware, Connecticut, Maryland, Ohio, Michigan, Iowa, Wisconsin, Rhode Island, Nebraska and Massachusetts – sent absentee ballot applications to all voters.

While some states such as Colorado and Utah have had universal mail-in elections for a number of years, others including California and Nevada only moved to the system this year due to the pandemic.

The rapid implementation in states that have not built up the adequate infrastructure to process a large number of mail-in ballots has raised fears of inaccurate or delayed results.

The Associated Press reported earlier this year than more than 100,000 mail-in ballots were rejected by California election officials during the March presidential primary.

The 102,428 disqualified ballots represented about 1.5 per cent of the nearly seven million mail-in ballots returned – compared with a national average rejection rate of 1.4 per cent in 2018 and 1 per cent in 2016.

AG Barr drops the hammer on universal mail-in voting.

"You think that's the way to run a vote?!" pic.twitter.com/YaUJ5iRHkM

— Elizabeth Harrington (@LizRNC) September 2, 2020

The most common reason for rejection was missing the deadline for the ballot to be mailed or arrive, followed by signatures not matching.

Mr Trump claimed at a rally on Sunday that in Nevada “they want to have a thing where you don’t have to have any verification of the signature”.

The Trump campaign is suing Nevada’s Clark County for allegedly lowering the “tolerance level” on its automatic signature verification machines, making it “more likely that fraudulent and improper ballots are being tabulated”.

A setting of zero would allow through any ballot while the maximum setting is 100 – Clark County uses a setting of 40, Politifact confirmed.

Separately, concerns have been raised about the Postal Service’s capacity to deliver ballots on time.

In July, CBS News conducted a vote-by-mail experiment, sending out 200 mock ballots from various locations in Philadelphia to a post office box representing a local election office.

After one week, three out of the first batch of 100 had gone missing. Four days after the second batch, 21 out of 100 hadn’t arrived.

“Three simulated persons, or 3 per cent of voters, were effectively disenfranchised by mail by giving their ballots a week to arrive,” CBS noted. “In a close election, 3 per cent could be pivotal.”

There have also been anecdotal stories of ballots being sent to the wrong address, or to people who have died.

In Nevada, for example, a watchdog group warned earlier this year that more than 250,000 ballots for the June primary elections went to the wrong addresses, with nearly one-sixth of ballots in the largest county affected.

“Everyone knows those voter lists are inaccurate,” Attorney-General William Barr said during a testy interview with CNN last month, in which he argued “mass mail-in ballots” were a recipe for “fraud and coercion”.

“People who should get them don’t get them and people who get them are not the right people. Do you think that’s a way to run a vote?”

Appearing before the House Judiciary Committee in July, Mr Barr conceded he did not have any evidence a mail-in election could be rigged. “No, but I have common sense,” he replied.

Meanwhile, several key battleground states are facing a messy fight over late counting of ballots.

On Wednesday, the Supreme Court ruled that North Carolina could continue to count ballots received up to nine days after the election, as long as they were postmarked by November 3.

That came after an earlier Supreme Court blow to Republicans with a ruling allowing Pennsylvania to keep counting ballots that arrive up to three days after the election – even if a postmark is not visible.

“Democrats are trying to steal the election, after the election,” Republican Congressman Jim Jordan tweeted after the ruling last week.

Democrats are vastly outnumbering Republicans in mail-in ballots. Picture: Robyn Beck/AFP

IS THERE EVIDENCE OF FRAUD?

While there have been individual examples of fraud related to mail-in voting, Democrats insist there is no evidence of wide-scale, co-ordinated fraud.

“There are individual cases but as far as widespread fraud, we haven’t seen that,” CNN host Wolf Blitzer said in the interview with Mr Barr last month.

“We haven’t had the kind of widespread use of mail-in ballots that’s being proposed,” Mr Barr replied.

The New York Times has criticised conservative news sites for pushing the “conspiracy theory that voter fraud is rampant and could swing the election to the left, a theory that has been repeatedly debunked by data”.

As it stands, most of the widely cited examples are either anecdotal, or unproven.

Last month, conservative organisation Project Veritas, known for controversial hidden-camera exposes, released a video purporting to show associates of Democratic Congresswoman Ilhan Omar engaging in an illegal ballot harvesting and cash-for-ballots scheme in her Minnesota district.

President Trump seized on the video, describing the alleged activity as “totally illegal” and calling for an investigation.

The Minneapolis Police Department announced on September 29 the allegations were “being evaluated”.

“The MPD is aware of the allegations of vote harvesting. We are in the process of looking into the validity of those statements,” it said.

No update has been provided on the investigation since, and Ms Omar’s spokesman Jeremy Slevin said there was “zero” truth to the story.

“Amplifying a co-ordinated right-wing campaign to delegitimise a free and fair election this fall undermines our democracy,” he said in a statement to the Minneapolis Star Tribune.

In August, the New York Post published an interview with an anonymous whistle-blower described as a “top Democratic operative”, who claimed to be a master at fixing elections using mail-in ballots.

The insider said he had not only helped rig local legislative, mayoral and congressional races, but had mentored at least 20 operatives in New Jersey, New York and Pennsylvania, the Post reported.

“An election that is swayed by 500 votes, 1000 votes – it can make a difference,” he told the paper. “It could be enough to flip states.”

Disturbingly, he claimed that sometimes postal workers were part of the scam.

“You have a postman who is a rabid anti-Trump guy and he’s working in Bedminster or some Republican stronghold, he can take those (filled-out) ballots, and knowing 95 per cent are going to a Republican, he can just throw those in the garbage,” he said.

Several postal workers have recently been charged with throwing out mail – delay or destruction of mail is a federal crime in the US.

Earlier this week a Louisville, Kentucky man was arrested for throwing away more than 100 absentee ballots.

That came after a New Jersey postal worker was charged following the discovery of nearly 100 ballots in a dumpster.

The New York Times noted that the New York Post’s story was repeated by The Blaze, Breitbart, Daily Caller, Fox News and The Washington Examiner and promoted by Donald Trump Jr and his brother Eric, as well as the Trump campaign’s communications team.

A Harvard University study described this as a “propaganda feedback loop” in right-wing media.

Stephen Stedman from Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies told The New York Times right-leaning outlets conflated fraud with statistically insignificant, ordinary mishaps.

“The pandemic is making this a true administrative nightmare, where administrators who have never done this on this scale have just a few months to do it, and they now also have the Trump administration trying to take advantage of every single mistake to say, ‘See, that’s fraud,’” he said. “It can’t end well.”