President Trump has once again declared that there is massive voter fraud in states that permit Mail in ballots. He has used this assertion as  a reason to move the headquarters of the Space Force from Colorado Springs to Huntsville Alabama. There are good reasons to expand facilities in Huntsville Alabama, -- a.k.a. RocketTown! -- but voter fraud due to mail-in balloting is not one of them.

This issue is a great illustration of argument by possibility: a  notion based on a remote possibility becomes amplified as a high probability before actual data can be gathered to assess the assertion.  The voter fraud assertion  notion will not go away even though the empirical   is clear: while no voting system is perfect, the risk of fraud in mail-in ballots is statistically negligible, and the safeguards in place are robust and continually improving.

Over the past two decades, tens of millions of mail ballots have been cast across the United States. According to the Brennan Center for Justice, the overall rate of voter fraud in the U.S. is between 0.0003% and 0.0025%—a figure so low it is statistically insignificant (Brennan Center, 2017).

The "conservative" think tank The Heritage Foundation (most famous recently for its production of Project 2025) maintains The Voter Fraud Database.   Between 1997 and 2019, they documented 239 cases of mail ballot fraud,   a minuscule fraction of the hundreds of millions of ballots cast during that period.  

Of course, Donald Trump challenges any election where either he or his favorite candidates lose.  As a matter of  course therefore he challenged  the 2020 U.S. presidential election, in part because of the Covid-19 related  surge in mail-in ballots.  In response,  election officials from both parties conducted audits and recounts in key battleground states. In Georgia, for example, a hand recount confirmed the original results with negligible discrepancies. Similarly, ballot audits in Arizona affirmed the legitimacy of the vote count.   The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), part of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, declared the 2020 election “the most secure in American history.” Their statement emphasized that “there is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised” (CISA, 2020).