Most of the evidence out there on mail-in voting tend to prove that is is extremely difficult to commit fraud and historically there has been little or no fraud associated with mail in voting.
Instances of mail-in voter fraud are so rare that
one study by researchers at Stanford, the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard, Yale, and Microsoft Research found just 0.02 percent of the total votes cast during the 2012 presidential election were proven to be fraudulent. In Oregon, where more than 100 million votes have been cast by mail since 2000, officials have found
about a dozen cases of proven voter fraud, according to the National Vote From Home Coalition.
Despite these well-regarded studies, finding evidence that widespread voter fraud exists became one of the Trump administration’s top priorities. In May 2017, the administration established the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, also known as the “Voter Fraud Commission.” After less than a year of searching for proof, however, the commission
disbanded and
concluded that evidence of widespread voter fraud was “glaringly empty.”
Just 0.02 percent of the three million total votes cast during the 2012 election were proven to be actual instances of voter fraud.
The group had been led by former Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, a Republican who
claimed (without evidence), just hours after Trump’s comments, that “the opportunities for voter fraud are much greater in mail-in voting.” Other former members of the commission clung to a report by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, that identified
more than 1,200 cases of voter fraud.
But voting experts from New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice
refuted the Heritage Foundation’s report as “grossly exaggerated and devoid of context.” Although there have been some instances of voter fraud in the past, the Brennan Center says the actual number of proven cases is rare —
fewer than 500 mail-in ballots have been fraudulent. “Trump is simply wrong about mail-in balloting raising a ‘tremendous’ potential for fraud,” argued Richard L. Hasen, an election expert and professor at the University of California at Irvine School of Law, in a recent
Washington Post op-ed.