Is Trump being truthful saying: “We’re the only country in the world that has mail in ballots”?

Donald Trump has consistently tried to sow doubts about the validity of election results, at least the ones that don’t go in his favor, since he first started campaigning for the presidency in the 2016 election cycle. One of his major targets has been mail-in ballots with claims aren’t safe and prone to fraud.

The U.S. president supposedly has this on good authority, sharing with Sean Hannity that Russian President Vladimir Putin, whose country is a model of free and fair elections, told him the 2020 U.S. presidential election was “rigged” because of mail-in voting.

While Trump’s arguments have been proven to be unfounded time and time again, that hasn’t stopped him from trying to convince the American public otherwise. On Thursday, he repeated a whale of a tale saying that the United States is “the only country in the world that has mail in ballots.”

Social media users were quick to counter his demonstrably false claim pointing out that there are dozens of countries that allow their citizens to mail in their ballots. But what do the experts who actually research these things have to say?

The truth about Trump’s outlandish mail-in ballot claim

According to International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (International IDEA), as of 2023, there were 32 countries around the world that allow voters to send in their ballots via the postal system. Of those, 21 allow some voters this option and 11 allow it for all voters, including the U.S. but with a caveat that it varies by state.

The other ten countries include:

1. Canada
2. Germany
3. Iceland
4. Korea, Republic of
5. Liechtenstein
6. Luxembourg
7. New Zealand
8. Poland
9. Switzerland
10. United Kingdom

Not exactly a list of countries that are known for voter fraud. In the United States, voter fraud is so exceedingly rare that the “share of reported cases of fraud over the past 13 to 38 years is less than 1%,” states The Brookings Institute in their analysis of the data.

Even though Trump continues to rehash that the 2020 election was stolen from him, his own administration at the time told that he had lost.

However, that still didn’t stop Trump from stoking up a angry mob spouting numerous lies and inciting his supporters to assault the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, where they violently attacked police officers, over 140 of them were injured and one later died, threatened to kill lawmakers including Vice President Mike Pence, and besides defecating inside the building caused millions of dollars in damages.

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