The claim is usually written in capital letters, the way certainty likes to dress. "Elections can never be honest with mail-in ballots/voting," the president posted, part of a years-long campaign calling mail voting a scam and a guarantee of massive fraud. [1] It is a strong word, "never," and there is a state that has spent twenty-five years testing it.
The state that already does this
Oregon has run its elections by mail since 2000. In that time it has sent out more than one hundred million ballots, an enormous real-world sample of exactly the system the claim says cannot be honest. The number of proven fraud cases across all of it is about a dozen, what the Brennan Center puts at 0.00001 percent of the votes cast. [2] That is not a system riddled with fraud. That is a system in which fraud is about as common as being struck by lightning, which is the comparison the researchers themselves reach for. [2]
What the investigations found
Look wider and the picture holds. An exhaustive review of known cases found 491 instances of absentee-ballot fraud between 2000 and 2012, a stretch in which Americans cast billions of votes. [2] Election-law experts who studied the 2020 results found no reliable evidence that mail-in ballots were used to manipulate the outcome; the fraud rate is real but vanishingly small, and independent analyses land in the same place, low fraud and large benefit. [1][3]
THE BOTTOM LINE
- "Elections can never be honest with mail-in ballots": False [1]
- Oregon: 100 million+ mail ballots, about a dozen proven fraud cases [2]
- Experts found no reliable evidence mail ballots swung 2020 [1]
The honest sentence is narrower and far less satisfying to shout: mail voting has a small, documented, manageable fraud rate, and no election has been shown to turn on it. You can prefer to vote in person. You cannot call a quarter-century of Oregon ballots a fraud when the state went looking and came back with a dozen. [2]
