The 2022 midterm elections are underway, with many Americans, in particular Republicans, increasingly fearful that the outcome will be affected or even determined by election fraud.
Thousands of poll watchers have been dispatched. Drop boxes are under surveillance. Many GOP candidates in key battleground states refuse to say they will accept the results if they received fewer votes than their opponents.
A Fox News poll conducted in early October found that 55 percent of those surveyed were extremely or very concerned about voter fraud. Among Republicans, nearly three-quarters said they were that concerned.
These fears have been further fanned by the constant refrain by former president Donald Trump and his allies that Joe Biden triumphed in the 2020 race only because he stole the election — a lie that has been debunked over and over again.
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Here’s the truth:
— By every single metric, election fraud is rare in the United States.
— Almost no elections in the past 50 years have been flipped because of documented voter fraud, with occasional exceptions at the local level.
There are logical reasons for this.
The decentralized system of American elections — where elections are run by more than 8,000 local governments and almost 90 percent of Americans vote on paper ballots, according to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission — make it impossible to steal a nationwide election through voter fraud.
It is true that election results can be manipulated. Politicians,...
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