Postal ballot fraud incidences do exist, but are isolated

The argument

This position occupies the middle ground, accepting one half of the claim while rejecting the scale attached to it. There are rare occasions in which postal ballot fraud incidences do occur, so it is not an invention, and treating every allegation as baseless overstates the case in the other direction. What the record does not support is frequency: these events are isolated and do not occur frequently in the US. Two cases illustrate what the real incidents look like. In previous elections there have been isolated cases of postal ballot fraud, such as the 2018 North Carolina primary, which had to be re-run after a consultant for the Republican candidate tampered with voting papers. There was also a case early in 2020 in New Jersey, where two Democratic councilors were charged with alleged fraud in relation to postal voting after hundreds of ballots were found stuffed in a post box. The two involve opposite parties, which matters to the argument: postal fraud is not the practice of one side, and the cases cannot be read as evidence of a partisan scheme. What the examples establish about scale is as important as what they establish about occurrence. Both were detected, both were acted on, and in the North Carolina case the result was set aside and the contest held again, which indicates a system capable of catching interference of this kind rather than one blind to it. Both were also local in reach, confined to a single primary or a single municipality. That is the pattern the position rests on: real incidents, identified and pursued, occurring within individual contests rather than spread across a national election. Claims that the US election is rigged are therefore only partially accurate, right that fraud exists and wrong about the scale at which it happens.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Postal ballot fraud occurs frequently and is not at all isolated. In September 2020, Facebook photographs of "dumped" ballot envelopes in California were shared thousands of time on social media with claims of election rigging.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Both cases are accurately reported but they are not equivalent, and running them together blurs the distinction that matters. North Carolina involved an organised absentee-ballot operation run by a paid political operative, and it was detected, prosecuted and the election re-run — the system working rather than failing. The New Jersey matter was a set of charges, and charges are allegations rather than findings. [Rejecting P2] The premise states the frequency correctly but understates how firmly it is established. Databases maintained over decades record fraud of this kind in the low hundreds of instances against many billions of ballots cast, and the audits commissioned after 2020 — including by officials of the party alleging fraud — found no pattern capable of affecting an outcome. "Isolated and infrequent" is if anything generous. [Rejecting P3] The conclusion does not follow, and this is the argument's real problem. Rigging is a claim about an election being systematically manipulated to produce a false result, and isolated fraud that is detected and prosecuted is evidence against that claim rather than partial evidence for it. Calling such claims "partially accurate" concedes a term the premises do not support: what they establish is that a small amount of fraud occurs, which is not a partial version of a rigged election.