Imagine this: it’s eleven o’clock on election night and the results show President Trump in the lead, causing him to declare victory on Twitter. But in the following days, as states begin to count mail-in ballots, Biden takes the lead, and Trump says that voter fraud caused Biden to win the additional votes. 

According to a poll taken by Emerson College, 65% of people who are planning to vote in person say they are voting for Trump, while 76% of people voting by mail say they plan to vote for Biden. Paul Gronke, a political science professor at Reed College, predicts that Trump will take an early lead while Biden will even it up as the mail-in ballots are counted.

Since the COVID 19 pandemic struck the United States, President Trump has repeatedly attacked mail-in ballots, calling them fraudulent and “an attempt by the radical left to steal the election.” He has even gone as far as to say he will cut funding to states who conduct the election with absentee. This is not the first time Trump has claimed voter fraud interfered with the election. In 2016, Trump claimed that he lost the popular vote due to voter fraud, despite zero evidence to back up this claim. In fact, evidence shows that an American is more likely to be struck by lightning than to commit voter fraud through mail-in voting.

An investigation from the New York Times revealed that from 2000 to 2012, there have only been 491 cases of voter fraud, and this is out of billions of ballots sent. Oregon for example has had 100 million people vote by mail since 2000. However, only a dozen cases of voter fraud were recorded, which means the probability of voter fraud is 0.0000001%. A senior FBI agent even told reporters that “it would be extraordinarily difficult to change a federal election outcome through this type of fraud alone.”

But still, President Trump has repeatedly claimed that voting by mail is an attempt by Democrats to rig the election. “With Universal Mail-In Voting (not Absentee Voting, which is good), 2020 will be the most INACCURATE & FRAUDULENT Election in history. It will be a great embarrassment to the USA. Delay the Election until people can properly, securely, and safely vote.”