In her garden just outside Washington DC, Kim Wehle calls the problem of ballot box fraud in America “negligible”. The constitutional law professor is clearly from the part of America concerned about democracy. “Both George Bush and Donald Trump, the last two Republican presidents, set up committees to investigate voter fraud. Both were quickly stranded because there was simply no evidence.
According to Wehle, Trump is the first presidential candidate to say aloud that he does not want to participate in the rules of the game, and the constitution cannot withstand that. “The American system is built on respect for the law and respect for a peaceful transfer of power. It assumes that the loser is acting in the interests of democracy.”
Vote by mail
Although Trump also said that fraud was involved in the run-up to the 2016 elections, he mainly depends his claim this year on the many votes by mail. The president calls the postal votes a source of theft.
And that while voting by mail is not new in the United States. Almost a quarter of the votes in 2016 were cast by mail, including that of the president himself. But this year, due to the corona pandemic, the rules for postal voting have been relaxed in many states. What makes it complicated is that those rules differ from state to state.
In some states, a voter still needs to have an identifiable reason, such as illness or residence abroad, to vote by mail. Voters must actively apply for their postal vote there. In other states, the pandemic is reason enough to vote by mail. In those parts of America, all registered voters were sent an application form to apply for the postal vote.
It seems that Trump, knowingly or unknowingly, mistakenly sees the latter as a conspiracy. “The ballots requested by voters are in order,” he repeated in the first televised debate with opponent Joe Biden.
“But the unsolicited ballots are a disaster. They send millions of ballots across the country.” Trump everywhere suggests that the postal vote sign-up forms are a license for anyone who gets their hands on one to vote illegally.
‘Red Mirage’
The counting of postal votes is also not the same in all states, and can thus become a source of uncertainty. In the important swing state Florida, for example, can open the envelopes before election day November 3 and count the votes. But in Pennsylvania, another polling state, electoral committees are not allowed to open the letters until the evening of November 3.
This means that there is a good chance that the results in Florida will already be clear on the election night of 3 to 4 November. But in Pennsylvania, it can take days or even weeks for all the names and signatures of the postal votes to be checked and the results to take off.
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