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Idaho election expert gives insight on what voter fraud would look like

With claims of election and voter fraud, the Ada County Director of Elections explains what evidence of fraud would be.

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BOISE, Idaho — Concerns about voter fraud and illegal votes have increased since Election Day. So far, no concrete evidence exists to support claims of mass voter fraud impacting the presidential election.

The concern surrounding voter fraud has raised one question: if there were evidence of voter fraud, what would it look like?

"There is a number of ways, be it physical or electronic that we would be able to see that pretty quickly," said Saul Seyler, director of Elections for Ada County.

Although election laws can vary from state to state, elections teams have tools to key in on a mass voter fraud attempt.

"It's just incredibly difficult. Every state has their own laws but given the verification that's required, be it by a signature, be it by identification, there are so many ways that we would be able to look at that and catch that. I know that is true across the nation," Seyler said. "We really are a group of dedicated civil servants that are just trying to ensure the accuracy and perpetuation of democracy."

The mass number of mail-in ballots sent in during this election has gained national attention. Those ballots are all supposed to go through a verification process and some are rejected for a variety of reasons. That process is in place to prevent voter fraud and typically only eliminates a small number of ballots.

"We only ended up having about 171 ballots that actually were rejected for various reasons, most typical is a no-signature reason," Seyler said. "As a part of that, we do go through and have a verification team that looks at every single signature to make sure that those points are covered."

A hypothetical fraud scenario that has been floated involved a person or group stealing mail-in ballots then filling them out and signing them. Would something like that be easy to catch?

"That would be completely obvious. We would be able to pick that up in no time," Seyler said.

There are cases where individuals try to commit voter fraud, but as technology continues to evolve those cases are easier and easier to catch.

"We are actually in a much better spot now than we were even four years ago in terms of the technology that we have," Seyler said. "We have a lot of ways to catch these things and make sure that we preserve that integrity because, really, everyone counts on that."

There were also concerns surrounding stolen and discarded ballots, but Seyler said an election team would certainly notice.

"We can actually see our return numbers all the way through and we have historic return numbers as well," Seyler said. "So we know basically what we are expecting to see in returns and if we had a major blip like that would definitely raise red flags that we would be looking into."

The amount of time it is taking some states to process votes sent by mail is drawing criticism and accusations about fraud. Like in Ada County, places are simply seeing historic returns that take time to process.

"It is not a new process and in-fact we actually have more tools to prevent fraud at this point," Seyler said.

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