Trump’s Flimsy Election ‘Fraud’ Case
Making his case that mail-in voting has already resulted in large scale “fraud,” Trump cited two examples that are not evidence of fraud at all.
“There’s fraud,” Trump said. “They found them in creeks. … They sent two in a Democrat area. They sent out a thousand ballots, everybody got two. This is going to be fraud like you’ve never seen.”
In recent days, Trump has referred to ballots found in a ditch or a riverbed or, as he did during the debate, “in creeks.” Law enforcement officials in Wisconsin reported that three trays of mail were found Sept. 21 along the side of a road and in a ditch next to a highway in Greenville. Officials there said the batch of mail included “several” absentee ballots, though a Postal Service spokesman would not comment on whether those were completed ballots, or blank ones being sent to voters, according to the Post Crescent. The paper quoted the county clerk saying election officials started to mail out ballots to voters on Sept. 17.
As for the claim about a thousand people being sent two ballots, that’s true. As NBC4 in Washington reported, election officials in Fairfax County, Virginia, believe up to 1,000 people who requested mail-in ballots may have gotten two by mistake. But it’s not evidence of fraud. Those people who got two ballots won’t be able to vote twice.
Fairfax County Registrar Gary Scott said that when every ballot is returned, “we make an entry into their voter record that they have returned a ballot. So if something else shows up, the ballot has already been returned. We can’t count that ballot.”
And despite Trump’s repeated warning about large-scale fraud with mail-in voting, as we have noted, while the instances of voter fraud via mail-in or absentee ballots are more common than in-person voting fraud, the number of known cases is relatively rare.