Fox News anchor Chris Wallace debunked President Donald Trump’s false claims that fraud is rampant in mail-in voting, noting on Friday morning that there is simply no evidence to support the president’s assertions.
With Trump threatening to withhold federal funds from Nevada and Michigan if they went forward with sending absentee ballots and applications to voters, Wallace—who has been a favorite target of Trump’s— pointed out that the president’s repeated complaints about mail-in voting are largely baseless.
“I’ve done some deep dive into it, there really is no record of massive fraud or even serious fraud from mail-in voting,” the Fox News anchor said on America’s Newsroom. “It’s being carried out in Republican states, it’s being carried out in Democratic states, there is no indication that mail-in voting as opposed to in person voting tends to favor one party over another.”
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After explaining that the practice of mailing in votes may even tend to favor Republicans since elderly voters have historically voted most often by mail, Wallace also mentioned that the most famous case of fraudulent “ballot harvesting” involved a Republican in North Carolina.
“But when people get their ballots and mail them in themselves, no history of fraud at all,” Wallace added.
America’s Newsroom anchor Ed Henry, meanwhile, brought up Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick’s concerns about mail-in voting, bringing up the Republican official’s hypothetical situation about mail and “Amazon packages” being swiped from front porches.
“If I am in the election office in Washington, D.C., and I am mailing a voting ballot, how do we know that you’ve actually received that and someone else didn’t swipe it and then send it in?” Henry wondered aloud.
“What he saying is you can’t trust the U.S. mail,” Wallace reacted. “I don’t know, that strikes me as kind of a reach here, and the history is that mail-in ballots are honest, and there was very little indication of fraud.”
Noting that there have been less than a thousand cases of mail fraud cases among the billions of ballots cast since 2000, the Fox News Sunday host then questioned why we wouldn’t try to make voting more convenient amid a pandemic.
“Again, we don’t know what the situation with the virus is going to be in October and November, but don’t we want to make it as easy for people to vote as possible especially since there is no indication of fraud?” Wallace concluded.
