– Washington Post: Despite Trump’s intense hunt for voter fraud, officials in key states have so far identified just a small number of possible cases:
"After an intense hunt by President Trump’s allies to surface voting irregularities in this year’s election, law enforcement agencies in six key swing states targeted by the president have found just a modest number of complaints that have merited investigation, according to cases tracked by state officials. So far, only a handful of cases have resulted in actual criminal charges alleging wrongdoing — some of them against Republican voters aiming to help Trump, according to officials, including a man charged Monday with trying to cast a ballot in Pennsylvania for the president in the name of his deceased mother.
The tiny number of incidents further undercut Trump’s barrage of false allegations that there was widespread manipulation of the vote — claims that continue to be echoed by many Republican officials, including some who acknowledge President-elect Joe Biden’s victory, but assert that fraud was prevalent. . . .
In fact, such allegations have been rejected by dozens of judges across the country, a number of whom noted in their decisions that Trump and his allies failed to put forward evidence to support such claims. The minimal number of criminal investigations that have so far come out of the November vote further reinforce the absence of sweeping vote fraud schemes. . . .
Most of those so far charged with illegally voting in the presidential race sought to cast one or two additional ballots and appear to have been driven less by a desire to actually swing the election than to cut corners on behalf of a friend or relative or, even, merely to test the system — an illegal act that had been encouraged before Election Day by Trump himself. In Pennsylvania, where Biden won by more than 80,500 votes, three voters have been charged with voting illegally this year — all Republicans. . . .
'The idea that there’s a whole swath of people on either side of the aisle who are trying to alter the outcome of an election by systematic fraud, is, in my experience, laughable and not accurate . . . .'
Despite claims from Trump allies that the increased use of mail-in balloting due to the coronavirus pandemic would lead to more fraud, a Washington Post analysis of data collected by the consortium, the nonprofit Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC), found that in 2016 and 2018, three states that conduct their elections entirely by mail had small numbers of potential fraud. The analysis found that officials had identified just 372 possible cases [0.0025 percent] of double voting or voting on behalf of deceased people out of about 14.6 million votes cast by mail in the 2016 and 2018 general elections in Colorado, Oregon and Washington, where all voters proactively receive ballots in the mail for every election.
Local officials have complained that they have fielded more false complaints of fraud that must be chased down as a result of the rhetoric from the president and his supporters. Trump’s claims encouraged people to report routine procedures they simply did not understand as possible problems, contributing to an atmosphere of suspicion, they said. . . .
“A lot of people don’t understand the process. They’re looking at things that are perfectly normal,” Gabriel Sterling, Georgia’s voting system implementation manager, said in an interview. . . . There was no evidence of widespread illegal activity, he said.
“We can tell by the nature and volume of what we’re looking at that there is not a systemic, widespread, conspiratorial thing that will flip 12,000 ballots potentially right now,” Sterling said, referring to Biden’s margin in victory in Georgia. “All the procedures were followed."
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