As nearly every state expands its capacity for absentee voting this year, President Donald Trump and his GOP allies have attacked the process as prone to rampant fraud.
But a Washington Post analysis of data collected by three vote-by-mail states with help from the nonprofit Electronic Registration Information Center found that officials identified 372 possible cases of double voting or voting on behalf of deceased people out of about 14.6 million votes cast by mail in the 2016 and 2018 general elections, or 0.0025%.
The figure reflects cases referred to law enforcement agencies in five elections held in Colorado, Oregon and Washington state, where all voters receive ballots in the mail for every election.
The minuscule rate of potentially fraudulent ballots in those states adds support to assertions by election officials nationwide that with the right safeguards, mail voting is a secure method for conducting elections this year amid the threat of the coronavirus -- undercutting the president's claims.
Until now, the polarized debate about ballot fraud has largely featured individual anecdotes from across the country of attempts to vote illegally. The voting figures from the three states examined by The Post provide a robust data set to measure the prevalence of possible fraud.
Current and former election officials in the three states said allegations that mail voting fosters widespread cheating are not only defied by the data but also do not acknowledge the sophisticated and tightly controlled ways that voting operates in their jurisdictions, which have layers of security designed specifically to root out fraud and build confidence in the system.
"When I have the opportunity to give a tour of our facility to a skeptic of vote-by-mail or a skeptic of the process -- someone concerned about fraud or security -- they turn into believers," said Julie Wise, elections director in King County, Wash., which comprises Seattle and has operated a fully vote-by-mail system since 2009.
[CORONAVIRUS: Click here for our complete coverage » arkansasonline.com/coronavirus]
Questions about the security of mail ballots have taken on new urgency in recent months as the voting landscape nationwide is transformed by the coronavirus pandemic. All voters in every state but two -- Mississippi and Texas -- now have the right to cast mail or absentee ballots for the midyear primaries after the pandemic led 14 states to relax their rules. Many states are now considering extending those changes for the general election in November.
In the past two decades, Republicans and Democrats have embraced absentee and mail ballots as a way to make voting easier, expand participation and lower election costs. But Trump has attempted to sow doubts about the system's security, repeatedly describing mail voting as a threat to the integrity of American elections.
Large-scale voting by mail "would be a free for all on cheating, forgery and the theft of Ballots," the president wrote in defiance of experts. "Whoever cheated the most would win."
Bill Bradbury, a Democrat who oversaw Oregon's implementation of all-mail elections starting in 1999 as secretary of state, said the president is misleading the public.
"It's very discouraging to me to have him labeling the way we vote as totally fraudulent, which is just BS," Bradbury said.
"People go to jail if they try to cheat on elections in Oregon," he added. "I just find that comment just not very smart and not based on the facts."
Election officials and security experts said certain measures are important for preventing fraud in mail voting, such as accurate voter rolls and a method of authenticating ballots such as signature matching. Such safeguards have been put in place in the five states that currently run universal mail elections: Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Utah and Washington.
As states move quickly to expand mail voting in response to health concerns, not all have implemented the full range of security measures.
"We've had so much time to really fine-tune those processes," said Washington Secretary of State Kim Wyman, a leading Republican advocate for mail voting. "That's probably my biggest concern with this rapid ramp-up to expand absentee voting or move to a vote-by-mail model is: Do they have the time to build up that capacity?"
The most recent high-profile case of potential ballot fraud took place in North Carolina, where the results of a 2018 congressional race were overturned amid an investigation of alleged absentee ballot tampering by a Republican operative, who was charged with felonies in an operation that is still under investigation.
But election officials from Colorado, Oregon and Washington said they have rarely, if ever, seen attempts to cheat their systems.
"There are so many steps to this process that I can't say it's impossible, but to me, it's nearly impossible," said Joan Lopez, clerk and recorder of Arapahoe County, Colo., in the suburbs of Denver. "The process -- it's a lockdown."