“[Trump] walked back part of his comments on Thursday and suggested that people should merely go to their polling places to inquire about the status of their absentee ballots. This is legal, but generally speaking, it's not a good idea… there are plenty of reliable options for voters to track the progress of their absentee ballots from home… In North Carolina, there are at least three more efficient ways to track a mail ballot… Many states use the BallotTrax app… All 88 counties in Ohio have tracking systems where voters can follow the status of their absentee applications and ballots.”
Marshall Cohen, CNN

“North Carolina, like other states, has systems in place to prevent double voting… But these systems are designed under the sensible premise that few people are going to risk felonies and vote twice. It’s the same design for police departments, which would look very different if people were trying to rob every 7-Eleven every day…

“Lines are already going to be long in some places on Election Day. The pandemic means it is harder to find poll workers and so there will be polling place consolidations and fewer workers, all contributing to a longer queue. Trump’s suggestion for his supporters to go to a polling place to try to vote twice—and via a complex procedure of trying to get a poll worker to confirm that an absentee ballot has been tabulated, which in some cases it will not have been—will add to those long lines. The lines will be even longer if the voter insists on casting a provisional ballot… [This] will do real damage to an Election Day infrastructure that is already looking stretched to the limits.”
Richard L. Hasen, Slate

“Barr has claimed that foreign countries could mail in thousands of fake ballots. Blitzer asked Barr what he’s basing that on. ‘Logic,’ he explained. In fact, both U.S. intelligence and election-security officials have said they’ve detected no such foreign plot, and that it would be extraordinarily difficult to carry out. ‘The hyperlocal nature of ballots and elections is a natural barrier to fraudulent schemes, especially for national campaigns. Mail-in ballots are also scrutinized closely; they must be signed, and elections officials compare the signatures to those already in voters’ registration files,’ reported the New York Times last week, after speaking to federal election-security officials who have studied the problem closely.”
Jonathan Chait, New York Magazine

“Elections experts say cases of mail-in voting fraud, and electoral fraud in general, are exceedingly rare in the US. Past attempts to commit mail-in voting fraud have generally been small, local scams that, typically, failed because of a wide array of safeguards in place to prevent and catch such efforts… In a local race, a small number of fraudulent ballots can affect the outcome. [But] ‘It's not realistic to do that on a scale that would matter for a presidential election,’ [the attorney who represents an incumbent city council member and alleged fraud victim] said. ‘And, frankly, you're probably going to get caught,’ as was the case in Paterson [New Jersey].”
Bob Ortega and Scott Bronstein, CNN

“The Carter-Baker commission, which completed its work in 2005, did include in its report an assertion that ‘[a]bsentee ballots remain the largest source of potential voter fraud.’… Notice the important difference between what the Carter-Baker team wrote and what Barr said. Barr claimed that mail-in voting was ‘fraught with risk.’ The commission said that it was ‘the largest source of fraud’ — but not that fraud is common, because it isn't…

“Before compiling its report, the group looked at existing mail-in voting systems and offered recommendations for change. This was 15 years ago, since which states have broadly expanded mail-in voting options. A Post analysis of 14.6 million ballots cast by mail in 2016 and 2018 found only 372 possible instances in which someone might have voted twice or where a ballot might have been submitted for a deceased person. If each of those votes was, in fact, fraudulent, it would mean that 0.003 percent of votes in those two years were suspect.”
Philip Bump, Washington Post