- President
Donald Trump made numerous false or inflammatory statements about the election during this year's first general-election presidential debate, including calling for his supporters to "carefully watch" at voting locations. - "I am urging my supporters to go into the polls and watch very carefully, because that's what has to happen," Trump said on Tuesday night. "I am urging them to do it."
- Trump falsely claimed that poll watchers with his campaign were being wrongly barred from satellite in-person absentee voting sites in Philadelphia.
- In reality, as The Philadelphia Inquirer reported, no poll watchers affiliated with the Trump campaign are certified to observe polls in the state of Pennsylvania.
President Donald Trump spread a slew of misinformation about voting and elections during Tuesday night's presidential debate against
Trump falsely claimed during the debate that voter fraud and election fraud with mail ballots were rampant and also sowed doubt about the integrity of in-person voting, as he did before and after the 2016 election.
"Will you urge your supporters to stay calm during this extended period not to engage in civil unrest, and will you pledge tonight that you will not declare victory until the election has been independently certified?" Wallace asked the candidates.
"I am urging my supporters to go into the polls and watch very carefully, because that's what has to happen," Trump said. "I am urging them to do it. As you know today, there was a big problem: In Philadelphia, they went in to watch, they're called poll watchers — it's a very safe, very nice thing. They were thrown out, they weren't allowed to watch. You know why? Because bad things happen in Philadelphia, that's why."
He added: "I hope it's going to be a fair election. If it's a fair election, I'm 100% on board. But if I see tens of thousands of ballots being manipulated, I can't go along with that."
—Axios (@axios) September 30, 2020
Contrary to what Trump said, legitimate poll watchers in Philadelphia have not been denied from observing at the polls. Pennsylvania has not commenced traditional in-person voting yet statewide, but Philadelphia began allowing voters to pick up and fill out absentee ballots at satellite locations on Tuesday, a type of voting sometimes referred to as "in-person absentee."
As The Philadelphia Inquirer reported on Tuesday: "The Trump campaign has no poll watchers approved to work in Philadelphia at the moment. There are no actual polling places open in the city right now. And elections officials are following coronavirus safety regulations, such as those limiting the number of people indoors."
Al Schmidt, a Republican Philadelphia city commissioner, told The Inquirer that poll watchers weren't approved to observe at such satellite voting locations because "We don't give someone a poll-watcher certificate to … watch somebody fill out their ballot at their kitchen table."
While voter and election fraud does occur, it's all but nonexistent.
A database of voter- and election-fraud cases maintained by the conservative Heritage Foundation found that documented cases of fraud with mail ballots were more common than cases of in-person voter impersonation, ballot-petition fraud, and registration fraud but that overall rates of fraud were vanishingly low.
Heritage's database identified 193 criminal convictions, civil penalties, diversions or other official findings for fraudulent use of mail ballots from 2000 to 2020, a time period during which approximately 250 million mail ballots were cast. That puts the rate of mail ballots resulting in criminal convictions at 0.0006% and the rate of mail ballots resulting in any kind of official action at 0.00007%.
Rates of in-person voter fraud, commonly known as in-person voter impersonation, are even rarer, with Heritage's database identifying just 13 cases of voter impersonation over the past several decades.