Here, too, Mr. Trump’s claims of fraud are unsupported by the evidence. Absentee ballot fraud is rare; one study found fewer than 500 prosecutions nationwide during a 12 year period in which voters cast over a billion ballots; most of those cases were not aimed at changing election outcomes, and the ones that were tended to involve small elections when there wasn’t an active press looking for chicanery. The relative rarity of cases is no surprise because states have all kinds of security measures in place, such as signature matching, ballot tracking and statements signed under penalty of perjury.
The idea that Trump and Attorney General Bill Barr have raised of foreign governments sending in ballots is particularly ludicrous because it would require quickly copying the paper stock, color and ballot information specific to each voter’s ballot, getting ahold of and forging voter signatures, matching the ballot tracking information that election officials include on ballot envelopes, and doing so on a large enough scale to swing a state’s presidential election contest — all without the voters in the state whose ballots have been tampered with noticing when they go to vote and election officials tell them they have already turned in a ballot.
Indeed, coordinated mail-in ballot tampering tends to get caught quickly. An operative helping a Republican candidate in the 2018 race for North Carolina’s 9th congressional district has been charged with stealing and altering absentee ballots; the scheme led the bipartisan state election board to call a new election. The current scandal in Paterson, N.J., which the president has specifically called out, followed a similar pattern; a postal worker noticed an attempt to mail a stack of absentee ballots, and the ongoing investigation into the ham-handed conspiracy may well lead to criminal charges and an election do-over.
If Mr. Trump is not really concerned about fraud, what’s the real end game? His unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud may be aimed at sowing chaos during the election and depressing turnout to help his side win election. Worse, it could be calculated to delegitimize the election results, which could allow Mr. Trump to contest a close election or weaken a Biden presidency.
It is all too possible that in Michigan and Pennsylvania — two states that recently changed their laws to allow anyone who wishes to vote by mail to do so — Mr. Trump will be ahead in the counting on election night, only to see his lead evaporate days later as Philadelphia, Detroit, and other Democratic-leaning cities process a flood of absentee ballots.
A “blue shift” toward Democrats as later votes are counted is now a well-established phenomenon; as Democrats vote later, their ballots are counted later, leading to a good number of elections where Republican leads on election night turn into Democratic victories when the full and fair count ends.
Trump could claim, as he did in a 2018 U.S. Senate race in Florida, that later-counted ballots are fraudulent (a claim he abandoned when Rick Scott, a Republican, won the race). It could lead millions of his supporters to believe that Democrats stole the election, when in fact all that happened was that battleground states engaged in a close and careful count of ballots to ensure the election’s integrity.