\n\n“Imagine this election night scenario: With a decisive number of mail ballots yet to be tallied, President Donald Trump enjoys a narrow lead over Joe Biden. But before all the votes can be counted \u2014 a process that could take days \u2014 Trump declares victory, citing purported irregularities with mail-in votes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
You can even picture Trump insisting that the preliminary election night tally must stand as final with a tweet that reads similarly to this one he posted in November 2018, when Florida\u2019s US Senate and gubernatorial elections were still undecided: “The Florida Election should be called in favor of Rick Scott and Ron DeSantis in that large numbers of new ballots showed up out of nowhere, and many ballots are missing or forged. An honest vote count is no longer possible-ballots massively infected. Must go with Election Night!””<\/p>\n\n\n\n
…<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“\u201cYou know, you could have a case where this election won\u2019t be decided on the evening of November 3,\u201d Trump told Axios\u2019s Jonathan Swan in an interview<\/a> that aired on HBO last week. Asked why that\u2019s a problem \u2014 after all, there\u2019s no rule that elections have to be decided on election night \u2014 Trump said, \u201clots of things will happen during that period of time; especially when you have tight margins, lots of things going to happen.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Then, during a media availability on Sunday, Trump claimed that Democrats are using mail ballots to try and \u201csteal an election.\u201d”<\/p>\n\n\n\n …<\/p>\n\n\n\n “”None of the five states that hold their elections primarily by mail has had any voter fraud scandals since making that change. As the New York Times<\/em> editorial board notes<\/strong><\/a>, \u201cstates that use vote-by-mail have encountered essentially zero fraud: Oregon, the pioneer in this area, has sent out more than 100 million mail-in ballots since 2000, and has documented only about a dozen cases of proven fraud.\u201d Rounded to the seventh decimal point, that\u2019s 0.0000001 percent of all votes cast. An exhaustive investigative journalism analysis<\/strong><\/a> of all known voter fraud cases identified only 491 cases of absentee ballot fraud from 2000 to 2012. As election law professor Richard L. Hasen notes<\/strong><\/a>, during that period \u201cliterally billions of votes were cast.\u201d While mail ballots are more susceptible to fraud than in-person voting, it is still more likely for an American to be struck by lightning than to commit mail voting fraud.””<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n …<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n “<\/strong>Trump has repeatedly cited episodes of attempted fraud on behalf of Republican Mark Harris in a North Carolina congressional race in 2018<\/a> and more recently in New Jersey<\/a> as evidence there\u2019s good reason to be worried. But as Berman explained to me, there\u2019s an irony in Trump citing instances where attempted fraud was detected and ultimately unsuccessful.” <\/p>\n\n\n\n …<\/p>\n\n\n\n