Trump questions why mail-in ballots are going against him. He spent months baselessly attacking them

In his first in-person remarks in two days, president bemoans ‘one-sided’ ballots

In his first on-camera remarks in two days following Election Day, Donald Trump returned to the White House with a 17-minute screed amplifying false claims about mail-in ballots and voter fraud, while election workers across the US continue to process thousands of votes and his lead winnows in a handful of swing states.

The president has attacked mail-in ballots in recent months as election officials extended voting options in several states during the coronavirus pandemic to prevent crowded in-person polls.

"If you count the legal votes, I easily win,” he told reporters on Thursday.

He baselessly claimed that mail-in voting has “destroyed our system” and made it a "corrupt system."

The president also falsely claimed that Democrats “want to find out how many votes they need and they seem to be able to find them.”

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“It’s amazing how those mail-in ballots are so one-sided,” he said.

But the president has spent months undermining vote-by-mail’s integrity, despite members of his own campaign and administration, along with election watchdogs and the FBI, finding no evidence of widespread fraud – his supporters have echoed those claims, while Democrats have urged voters to cast their ballots safely by mail ahead of Election Day.

A number of states were not legally permitted by their Republican-controlled legislatures to process mail-in ballots until Election Day, and with potential surges in mail-in ballots amid the public health crisis and Democratic urgency, election workers have experienced delay producing results.

His 2020 attacks also followed sweeping cuts at the US Postal Service, with his recently appointed postmaster general overseeing the disappearance of letter-sorting equipment and delayed and missing mail that prompted congressional intervention and mass protests.

The president and First Lady Melania Trump, among other administration officials, have cast absentee ballots several times. 

Most incidents of voter fraud are instead traced to other issues, including clerical errors, according to the Brennan Center for Justice at New York School of Law.

The centre’s The Truth About Voter Fraud report found that it’s more likely a voter “will be struck by lightning than that [they] will impersonate another voter at the polls.”

Read more: US election results map: Live updates by state 

The FBI also has “not seen, historically, any kind of coordinated national voter fraud effort in a major election, whether it's by mail or otherwise,” according to agency director Christopher Wray, who appeared before the Senate’s homeland security committee in September.

And in 2018, the president’s own voting integrity commission – which he later disbanded – found no evidence to support claims of widespread voter fraud, according to administration documents compiled by a former member.

The president convened his Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity to investigate 2016 election results after he claimed as many as five million ballots were illegally cast.

In June 2018, the commission released its documents following a lawsuit from Maine's Secretary of State and commission member Matthew Dunlap, who later argued that instead of “widespread evidence of fraud” the commission’s findings “actually reveals a troubling bias.”

In a letter to Vice President Mike Pence and Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, Mr Dunlap said that the commission’s “purpose was not to pursue the truth but rather to provide an official imprimatur of legitimacy [from] President Trump’s assertions that millions of illegal votes were cast during the 2016 election and to pave the way for policy changes designed to undermine the right to vote.”

Mr Dunlap wrote that there is "no single document that reveals there is no widespread voter fraud" but points to a lack of evidence that fails to substantiate the president's claims.

In recent litigation in Pennsylvania ahead of Election Day, the president’s re-election campaign also could not produce any evidence of vote-by-mail fraud.

A federal judge ordered the campaign to “produce such evidence in their possession, and if they have none, state as much”. In more than 500 pages of court filings, it produced evidence pointing to only a handful of election fraud cases, none of which involved mail-in ballots.