Trump isn’t really “criticizing” mail-in voting in a responsible and measured way here though, is he? He’s claiming that it is a scam by his enemies that will definitely result in massive voting fraud. Is there any evidence for him to make those claims at all? Is there any other way he could have responded, even if he did genuinely care about empowering citizens to vote?
>>He’s claiming that it is a scam by his enemies that will definitely result in massive voting fraud. Is there any evidence for him to make those claims at all?
I think the rationale is that the existing incidence of local ballot fraud points at a widespread, under-reported problem that doesn't inspire confidence in the process.
Voting by mail is pretty normal to me, being in the military and outside of my home state for most of my adult life, but it's about as secure as WEP encryption for your Wi-Fi.
The Inquirer article is talking about old-fashioned ballot stuffing at a polling place, not mail-in voting.
The Dailybreeze is documenting a case where it looks like someone was trying to do a scam with 80 ballots. That could have an impact on a municipal election but would be lost in the noise in a national election and is hard to replicate in a coordinated and unnoticeable fashion.
It looks like the Heritage group is has been collecting cases of voting fraud for 4 years and have 1200 records. Not a huge number over so much time. It’s not clear that that is related to mail-in voting or other kinds of fraud. Again, this kind of stuff is hard to do in a way that has an impact on a national election.
Elections are never perfect but, based on the experiences in Oregon and Washington, I don’t see mail in voting adding a significant added risk. The virus on the other hand does.