President Trump has described postal votes as ‘very dangerous’, due to the possibility of ‘fraud’ involved in them. However, the rate of voter fraud in the US is around 0.0009%, and there is no evidence to suggest significant fraud has been committed by postal votes in the recent election, so why is Trump claiming that these votes are ‘corrupt’? And why do postal votes seem to favour Joe Biden?

Postal votes in American elections are not new; in fact, postal votes were first widely used in the US during the 1864 presidential election, won by Abraham Lincoln, when 150,000 Civil War soldiers voted from the battlefields. However, the issue of mail-in ballots became a much larger topic of conversation this year due to the Coronavirus pandemic, which meant many people felt uncomfortable voting in person, and also made organising polling stations logistically much more difficult.

As expected, postal ballots came in huge numbers, with over 100 million votes cast by mail, but President Trump continues to attack these perfectly legal votes. Each state has its own rules about counting postal votes, but in many states, these took longer to count than in-person ballots. This meant that, since postal votes tended to favour Joe Biden, some states, such as Pennsylvania and Georgia, that were ultimately won by Biden, initially showed a Trump lead.

For Trump and his supporters this lead signalled that many postal ballots were fraudulent, but there is no evidence of this, and in many ways, it is harder to commit election fraud via mail-in ballots. In the state of New York alone almost 100,000 ballots were returned after being filled out incorrectly, and many protections are in place across the US to prevent fraud, including making both ballots and envelopes very hard to replicate, and requiring signatures which are compared to the voter’s registration.

But why did Biden receive a larger proportion of postal votes? Because Trump told his supporters not to vote by mail. Back in April, Trump said ‘bad things can happen’ to postal votes’, which clearly influenced his supporters, meaning Trump received a larger proportion of in-person votes.

Yet Trump continues to retweet claims of fraud committed by the democratic party.. Either Trump does not understand that words can create action, or he is purposely misleading his followers, and perhaps he had always planned this. With consistently low approval ratings and early predictions of a Biden win, perhaps Trump saw his loss coming and wanted to invalidate the very valid election results.

With a history of calling people ‘losers’, winning the election was clearly the only option for the President’s ego, especially as he now joins Jimmy Carter as the only living American to lose an election as the sitting president. By his own definitions, Trump is now a ‘loser’ and rather than conceding and accepting defeat, he has decided to dispute his loss, not out of concern for the American democracy—again, there is no evidence of voter fraud in this election—but to protect his pride.

So yes, Joe Biden received a higher proportion of mail-in than in-person votes, but there is no evidence that this is not due to fraud, instead it is much more likely that it is due to the words and actions of a president who puts his own pride ahead of America, its people, and the democratic process.

For more of Comment’s coverage of the American Presidential Election: