By Claire Savage. AFP
The president of the United States, Donald Trump, affirmed in the first debate with the democratic candidate Joe Biden that voting by mail will lead to a “fraud like never seen before”, putting in doubt the integrity of the next elections.
Biden responded:
"there is no evidence that there is fraud related to mail ballots."
Millions of American voters will vote by mail in the November 3 elections as an alternative to voting in person, due to concerns about the coronavirus, which has killed more than 205,000 people in the United States, the highest number of any country in the United States. world.
[Follow our coverage of the 2020 presidential elections]
We review how true Trump's claim is.
Will voting by mail lead to widespread fraud?
Trump has said many times that voting by mail carries a great risk of voter fraud and has posted messages such as "THERE IS NO WAY (ZERO) that voting by mail is anything less than substantially fraudulent."
Screenshot of a false accusation Trump made on Twitter, warning of fraud in the presidential election.
Telemundo News
But officials and experts say the president is wrong.
"The conspiracy theory that voting by mail causes fraud simply has no basis," said Ellen Weintraub of the Federal Election Commission (FEC), as part of a 66-tweet thread posted in May, denying that the voting by mail would lead to widespread fraud.
Christopher Wray, the director of the FBI, testified at a hearing on national security in the Senate on September 24, saying: “We take all electoral threats seriously… we have not seen, historically,
any kind of coordinated national electoral fraud attempt in an important election, not by mail or in any other way. "
Election expert Max Feldman, an advisor to the Voting Rights and Elections Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, told AFP by phone: "Voting by mail has been, for many years, a safe part of our electoral system."
In addition, an analysis by the Brennan Center and the Voting Rights Project, a 2012 investigation into electoral security across the country, found that although postal votes are more prone to fraud than in-person votes, fraud rates are negligible. .
"An American is more likely to be struck by lightning than to commit electoral fraud by mail," says the Brennan Center analysis.
Vote by mail
Five states - Oregon, Washington, Utah, Hawaii and Colorado - have already sent all registered voters a ballot to vote by mail, and compared to the number of votes cast, the problems have been negligible, says the Brennan Center analysis.
Oregon, for example, has used vote-by-mail for almost 20 years.
In 2016, only 22 people in Oregon were found guilty of voting in two states, which is 0.001 percent of the votes cast, said Andrea Chiapella, the communications director for the Oregon Secretary of State.
[How to vote by mail: what you need to know to make your voice count this November]
Registered voters in the other 45 states usually have to apply to vote remotely, but
COVID-19 has convinced several of these states to facilitate voting by mail.
According to another report from the Brennan Center, at least 22 states and the District of Columbia have confirmed that they will send mail-in ballots or ballot request forms to most or all registered voters for the November election.
Voting by mail methods vary from state to state, but all have tools to secure votes.
Bar codes, secure mailboxes, tracking systems and post-election audits have strengthened the security of voting by mail, says the Brennan Center analysis.
Donald Trump would have paid federal taxes only five times in 15 years, according to The New York Times
Sept.
28, 202007: 18
Problems in previous elections
Yes there have been problems.
During the 2000 presidential election between George Bush and Al Gore, a long and agonizing vote recount in Florida revealed flaws in the electoral system.
The recount was triggered by problems such as "hanging papers" (pieces of paper partially detached from poorly punched voting cards, which required people to count and determine voters' intent), which was eventually stopped by the Supreme Court .
In 2019, a Justice Department report by Special Counsel
Robert Mueller concluded that Russian government hackers interfered with the 2016 election between Trump and
former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
Twelve Russian people from the GRU military intelligence agency were charged with stealing and posting Democratic party documents and another 13 people from the Internet Investigation Agency were charged with coordinating a massive social media disinformation campaign, targeting American voters and that started in 2014.
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