FBI head: Don wrong on voting

WASHINGTON — Testifying before a Senate hearing on homeland security threats, FBI Director Christopher Wray downplayed President Trump’s oft-made claims that elections are plagued with voter fraud on Thursday.

Unsubstantiated allegations of election tampering have long been one of Trump’s biggest bugaboos, starting when he lost the popular vote during his electoral win in 2016, when he said it was because millions of undocumented immigrants voted.

His claim was false, and Wray reaffirmed the rarity of voter fraud to the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee.

“We have not seen, historically, any kind of coordinated national voter fraud effort in a major election, whether it’s by mail or otherwise,” Wray said when asked about threats posed by mail-in voting.

Trump has repeatedly claimed without evidence that people voting by mail amid the coronavirus pandemic would lead to massive fraud.

Wray said that there have been some local cases of voter fraud — that he said the FBI takes very seriously — but he suggested it would be incredibly difficult for anyone to carry out the sort of massive operation that would be implied by the president’s unsupported claims.

State-based Republican elections officials have testified in recent months to Congress that their systems are secure, including for mail-in ballots.

“To change a federal election outcome by mounting that kind of fraud at scale would be a major challenge for an adversary,” Wray told the senators.

In the 2016 contest, Russians tried to hack into state voting systems, and did get access to some, but were unable to manipulate the ballot systems, according to multiple subsequent reports.

To be safe, Wray said the FBI was watching carefully.

“People should make no mistake — we’re vigilant as to the threat and watching it carefully, because we’re in uncharted new territory,” he said.