To explain President Trump’s baseless crusade against vote-by-mail, Attorney General Bill Barr floated an unsubstantiated theory that foreign governments could hijack vote-by-mail elections by counterfeiting ballots.
“We’ve been talking about how, in terms of foreign influence, there are a number of foreign countries that could easily make counterfeit ballots, put names on them, send them in. And it’d be very hard to sort out what’s happening,” Barr said in a New York Times profile that was published Monday morning. Barr had been asked about President Trump’s tweets railing against Michigan’s plans to send voters absentee ballot applications and threatening to withhold federal funding to the state.
Before making the comments, he cautioned that he hadn’t “looked into” the theory.
The theory ignores the numerous safeguards election officials have put in place to secure the integrity of ballots submitted absentee. Among them are the bar codes many states put on absentee ballots that allow voters to track the progress of their individual ballot through the mail system.
Additionally, a hypothetical foreign government would have to counterfeit not just the ballot itself — which reflects the specific precinct to which a voter belongs and the specific contests in which she is eligible to participate — but the sophisticated envelope the voter uses to send her ballot back, as well as the envelope that keeps her completed ballot secret.
Once the ballot is received by elections officials, they also compare the signature on file for a voter to the one she signed on her ballot, providing another layer of security.
Election experts gawked at Barr’s theory on Twitter.
Also, in most states, your signature on the mail-ballot envelope is compared to the signature on file before a ballot is counted. Here’s ?how it works in Arizona. 3/ pic.twitter.com/jx6lQsW9fC
— Michael Li 李之樸 (@mcpli) June 1, 2020
Let’s start with the ballot. You can’t just print out a single ballot for the entire U.S. No two localities have the same ballot because local offices appearing on it are different
— Michael McDonald (@ElectProject) June 1, 2020
Suppose that you perfectly recreate the 3 pieces of paper, including barcoding on the exterior unique to each voter? Next, you have to know who hasn’t requested and returned a ballot yet. It is going to be strange when two ballots from the same person show up at election offices
— Michael McDonald (@ElectProject) June 1, 2020
All the while, the post office, which works with election officials to process ballots, will have to be oblivious to fake ballots moving through their system. If someone dumps a bunch at a single location, that will be suspicious. Certainly if they are overseas addresses
— Michael McDonald (@ElectProject) June 1, 2020
Before further sowing the false belief that the pandemic-prompted expansion of absentee voting could lead to mass fraud, Barr also indicated that his Justice Department was going to be taking a back seat in the legal fights over the 2020 elections.
He told the New York Times that “the voters” would referee the 2020 elections and that the Department’s role would be limited.
