Americans’ interest in voting by mail has surged this year as the coronavirus pandemic rages on. Allegations of double voting in the southern U.S. state of Georgia have further fueled a politically fraught debate over voter fraud ahead of the November presidential election.This week, Georgia’s top election official announced that as many as 1,000 voters may have double voted in the state’s primary elections in June, showing up at the polls to vote after mailing in their ballots.Although the attempted double voting was caught and did not change voting tallies, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, said he wanted each case investigated and prosecuted if determined to be illegal.Scrutiny of double voting – a felony in Georgia as in most other states – comes amid a larger debate over voter fraud and whether efforts to combat it constitute a safeguarding of the democratic process or partisan voter suppression.President Donald Trump has repeatedly claimed that voting by mail is prone to widespread fraud that would benefit his opponent, Democrat Joe Biden. Indeed, Trump has urged his supporters to attempt to vote twice in the November 3 general election – once by mail and again at the polls on Election Day – to demonstrate such fraud is feasible.But voting rights advocates say there is little evidence of rampant voter fraud. During Georgia’s chaotic primary elections, they say, confusion may have led officials to incorrectly count some votes as “voting twice.”“We wholeheartedly agree that people who intentionally vote twice should be subject to the usual criminal penalties for election law violations,” Aunna Dennis, executive director of Common Cause Georgia, said in a statement. “But we are concerned that voters who were simply trying to vote may get caught up in the dragnet.”While Democrats and voting rights groups say voter fraud is exceedingly rare, many Republicans contend it is more prevalent than is commonly known and dilutes the will of legitimate voters at the ballot box.Here are four things you need to know about the debate over voter fraud:What is voter fraud?Voter fraud covers many actions, from casting illegitimate ballots to vote buying to impersonating a voter.Yet there is no universally agreed-upon definition of the practice.Voting rights activists have a relatively narrow definition. According to the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University, voting fraud “occurs when individuals cast ballots despite knowing that they are ineligible to vote, in an attempt to defraud the election system.”Conservatives prefer a more expansive definition. The Government Accountability Institute, a think tank co-founded by conservative political strategist Steve Bannon, defines it as “illegal interference in the process of an election” and lists things like “fraudulent addresses” and “registration fraud” among voter fraud types.This lack of consensus means that what election integrity advocates may see as an instance of fraud, voting rights advocates might view as a clerical error or an honest mistake.Types of voter fraudVoter fraud can take many different forms. The conservative Heritage Foundation has tracked nine different types of election fraud.The most common type in the foundation’s voter fraud database is voting by people ineligible to vote, such as noncitizens and convicted felons.Another common voter fraud type: absentee ballot fraud or obtaining an absentee ballot and filling it out without the knowledge of the actual voter.Other types of election fraud in the database include voter impersonation, vote buying, ballot petition fraud, duplicate voting and false registrations.How widespread is voter fraud?This is a politically charged question.The Heritage Foundation’s database includes 1,296 “proven instances of voter fraud” out of the hundreds of millions of votes cast going back to 1992. Of those cases identified, 1,120 resulted in criminal convictions.The cases include a North Carolina Republican operative and several others who were accused of ballot tampering in connection with a 2018 congressional race. Not included in the database is the recent indictment in North Carolina of 19 noncitizens accused of illegally voting in the 2016 election.Hans von Spakovsky, a senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation and a former member of Trump’s now-defunct election integrity commission, says the database is merely “the tip of the iceberg.”“There’s actually more fraud occurring out there than actually gets reported and prosecuted,” von Spakovsky said.Yet little hard evidence of widespread voter fraud has turned up.After the 2016 election, Trump alleged that as many as 5 million illegal votes had been cast for his opponent, Democrat Hillary Clinton. But an election integrity commission he formed to investigate the matter did not turn up evidence of widespread fraud. Multiple independent studies by academic researchers and news outlets similarly found no proof of rampant fraud in the election.“It doesn’t happen often at all,” said Justin Levitt, a law professor Loyola Law School and a voting expert. “But when it happens it’s a one-off: One person decides to file a false ballot or something like that.”Levitt keeps track of voter impersonation and says it’s extremely rare.“I’m up to 45 since 2000, and in that time there has been more than a billion and a half votes cast,” Levitt said.Other types of voting fraud such as voting by noncitizens are equally rare, according to researchers.Last year, Texas officials announced that they’d found the names of nearly 100,000 “possible noncitizens” on their voter registrations rolls and that as many as 58,000 of them may have voted in elections over the previous 22-year period.  But the state dropped a review of the cases in the face of legal challenges.Voting by mailTrump and his Republican allies oppose voting by mail, saying ballots in the mail system can be stolen, fabricated and otherwise fraudulently used.But voting rights advocates say this doesn’t mean voting by mail is any less secure. Five states – Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Utah and Washington – have successfully adopted universal mail balloting while detecting only a small amount of double voting or voter impersonation.“Despite (a) dramatic increase in mail voting over time, fraud rates remain infinitesimally small,” the Brennan Center said in a recent report. “None of the five states that hold their elections primarily by mail has had any voter fraud scandals since making that change.”
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Calmer winds and rising humidity are helping firefighters battle more than 100 wildfires Saturday that continue to rage largely uncontrolled along the U.S. West Coast, and President Donald Trump announced he would visit California on Monday to see the devastation himself.After days of hot, windy weather, on Saturday the winds calmed and shifted to the west, bringing cooler, more moist weather from the ocean to help firefighters in California, Oregon and Washington state, where entire towns have been incinerated and at least 28 people killed.The thick smoke that hung in the air brought lower temperatures and higher humidity. It also brought the dirtiest air in 35 years to some cities, triggering health warnings and prompting officials to urge residents to remain indoors.In Salem, the state capital of Oregon, the air quality index reading was 512 on Saturday morning. The scale tops out at 500. Anything above 200 is considered “very unhealthy,” and anything above 300 is deemed “hazardous.”In Paradise, California, a city devastated by wildfire in 2018, the reading was 592, according to the PurpleAir monitoring site.”Above 500 is literally off the charts,” said Laura Gleim, a spokesperson for the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality.Thick smoke and haze blanketed much of the region, triggering health warnings and prompting officials to urge residents to remain indoors.The skeletal silouhette of burnt trees are seen after a wildfire swept through an RV park destroying multiple homes in Estacada, Oregon, Sept. 12, 2020.The White House said Trump, a Republican, will meet Monday with local and federal officials in McClellan Park near the California state capital of Sacramento to be briefed on the California wildfires.The president visited California in November 2018 after that year’s devastating wildfires and took to Twitter to blame California’s forest management and environmental laws.His Democratic opponent, Joe Biden, on Saturday linked the conflagrations to climate change.”We absolutely must act now to avoid a future defined by an unending barrage of tragedies like the one American families are enduring across the West today,” Biden said.Twenty-eight active, major fires have burned about 11,000 square kilometers in California, killing at least 19 people since mid-August. More than 16,000 firefighters are working in the state.In Oregon, at least six people have died, and authorities are concerned that the receding flames could lead to the discovery of more bodies across the blackened terrain in the region. Dozens of people have been reported missing, but the hope is that they are just unable to communicate their whereabouts.“We are preparing for a mass fatality incident based on what we know and the numbers of structures that have been lost,” said Andrew Phelps, director of the Oregon Office of Emergency Management (OEM), on Friday.More than 40,000 people in Oregon have been evacuated and some 500,000 — more than 10% of its population — remained under some level of evacuation protocol as fires in the state destroyed thousands of homes and burned hundreds of thousands of hectares. Oregon Gov. Kate Brown on Friday amended Thursday’s statement by OEM that said a half-million people throughout the state had been ordered to evacuate.The Oregon Convention Center in Portland has been transformed into a shelter for evacuees. Other evacuation centers were opened across the state, while many evacuees have simply taken refuge in their cars in large parking lots.In southern Oregon, an apocalyptic scene of burned residential subdivisions and trailer parks stretched for kilometers along a highway — a scene mirrored in parts of California, where the governor gave a blunt assessment.“This is a climate damn emergency. This is real and it’s happening. This is the perfect storm,” California Gov. Gavin Newsom said. “What we’re experiencing right here is coming to communities all across the United States of America unless we get our act together on climate change.” More than 68,000 people are under evacuation orders in California.In Oregon’s most populated region, helicopters dropped water and fire retardant on two fires that threatened to merge.In this aerial view from a drone, homes destroyed by wildfire are seen on Sept. 12, 2020, in Talent, Oregon.Governor Brown said Friday dozens of people are missing in Jackson and Marion counties.In California, the largest fire in the state’s history is burning in the Mendocino National Forest, about 190 kilometers northwest of Sacramento.The amount of land burned in Washington state in just the past five days has made this the state’s second-worst fire season, after 2015.”This is not an act of God,” Washington Gov. Jay Inslee said Friday. “This has happened because we have changed the climate of the state of Washington in dramatic ways.”This year’s wildfires in California have already burned record areas of land. The year also saw the largest wildfire in the state’s recorded history, along with five of the top 10 largest fires in state history. The fire season is still young in the region, where wildfires have historically intensified in the fall.In addition to beating back the wildfires, authorities are now challenged with fighting misinformation on social media sites that the fires were ignited by arsonists from far right and far left groups. The FBI said Friday it has investigated some claims and so far has found them to be untrue.On Friday, however, the Jackson County Sheriff’s Department in Oregon announced that 41-year-old Michael Bakkela had been arrested on two counts of arson and other charges in connection with the Almeda fire in southern Oregon. Bakkela has denied starting the blaze.The sheriff’s department also said a man was found dead near an ignition point of the Almeda fire, which burned hundreds of homes, and that a search was underway for about 50 missing people.Meanwhile, meteorologists said California’s wildfires are responsible for the orange glow in the sky that people across Britain woke up to Friday.Meteorologist Simon Lee told The Telegraph: “Meteorologically speaking, in the last few days we have seen a very strong and straight, west-east, jet stream, flowing across the North Atlantic from North America to Europe, which has undoubtedly helped rapidly and coherently transport the aerosols from North America.” 
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When flames chased Chuck and Janie Dee down the mountain two years ago, they thought they’d never be back.Yet there they were Sunday, parking a camper next to their dirt lot and the shell of what had been their swimming pool, excited for their role in restoring their hometown of Paradise to what it was before the deadliest wildfire in California history destroyed their home and most of the community.They installed a septic tank. They filed for a building permit. They were really doing it.The couple made it three days before they had to flee again. They awoke after daybreak Wednesday to darkness, the sky blackened by smoke as the ridge above them glowed orange. Their minds went blank as fear reintroduced itself.Heading down the mountain again, Janie Dee couldn’t help but doubt their decision to return.”I wondered if we were really doing the right thing,” she said.The fire never made it to Paradise as other foothill communities bore the terrible brunt, suffering thousands of destroyed structures. But the flames paused the hopeful, exciting and — at times — frustrating work of rebuilding a town that has become synonymous with heartbreak.In the nearly two years since the Camp Fire, Paradise has tried to entice people back. The road sign heading into town still boasts of a population of more than 26,000. But the reality is closer to 4,000 now, local leaders say.Paradise Town Councilman Steve Crowder stands on his property in Paradise, Calif., Sept. 10, 2020. Crowder lost his home in a 2018 wildfire that destroyed most of the town. But he has since built a new house.The 2018 fire struck two weeks before Thanksgiving, destroyed roughly 19,000 structures in and around Paradise and killed 85 people. Before the fire, the town averaged about 25 to 30 new homes built per year, according to Vice Mayor Steve Crowder. As of Wednesday, the town has issued 1,051 building permits for single-family homes and 345 of them are built.With so much demand, Paradise hired a private company to act as the city’s building department, which they set up in a building donated by Bank of America.Many local governments shut down when the coronavirus hit. But Paradise kept its building department going — with a few modifications — to prevent a slowdown in permits.But rebuilding is expensive. New homes must have special fire-resistant siding and roofs, and property owners have to pay to clear their lots of debris before they can rebuild. A government program to pay for the removal of thousands of hazardous trees has been delayed for months by a dispute over the contract.FIRE – In this photo from November 2019, a building in Paradise burned by the fire still stands, a reminder of the destructive force of the wildfire. (Elizabeth Lee/VOA News)Meanwhile, the town is covered with RVs — the result of a local law letting people live on their property if they meet certain requirements. But that law is set to expire at the end of the year, and it’s unclear if the town council will extend it because of opposition from homeowners.”I’ve got people from standing homes and new construction saying, ‘We didn’t do this to live in an RV park,’ ” Crowder said.Town leaders are also wrestling with how to make the town safer by both preventing wildfires and making it easier for people to flee.The Paradise Parks and Recreation District is looking into building a buffer zone around the town by buying land and turning it into parks that would limit trees and other fuel for wildfires.The evacuation plan before the Camp Fire split the town into zones and had them leave at different times. But the 2018 fire came so quickly everyone had to leave at once, clogging the few roads out of town — which briefly happened again Wednesday. The council is weighing plans to connect various roads throughout town to give people more avenues of escape.Communication is still a problem. The latest fire to threaten the town came when Pacific Gas & Electric had shut off power in Paradise and parts of more than 20 counties for fear of high winds causing power lines to spark fires — as happened in 2018.No electricity made it harder for people to know what was happening and whether they needed to leave. The town has plans to install a siren system but is waiting on funding.All of those issues have framed the November election. It’s the first local election in Paradise since the fire, giving residents a chance to weigh in on the town’s future. Three of the five town council seats are on the ballot, and 15 people are running for them.Paradise Town Council candidate Steve Oehler stands in the parking lot of a Starbucks in Paradise, Calif., Sept. 10, 2020. Oehler lost his home in a 2018 wildfire that destroyed most of the buildings in the town. But he has since rebuilt.They include Steve Oehler, who moved to Paradise six months before the 2018 fire and has since rebuilt and moved back. He says the current council doesn’t respect property rights.”Paradise was built by pioneers,” he said. “The people that are coming back are the pioneers of 2020. They’re the people that are taking nothing and turning it into something.”Construction resumed in Paradise on Thursday. Cement mixers poured a foundation for one house as falling ash from nearby fires swirled around the construction workers. It’s a reminder of the danger of living in some of the most beautiful parts of California and a potential deterrent to bringing people back.But the Dees’ second thoughts about returning to Paradise didn’t last long. They thought of their son and daughter-in-law — who have bought the lot across from them — and their friends who stayed in Paradise and welcomed them back with such excitement.One day after they fled, the Dees were back, sitting in lawn chairs outside their camper beneath the smoky skies.”Just like tornado alley. We see this on television. Oh, that whole town got torn up by tornadoes. We ask each other, ‘Why do they keep living there?’ ” Chuck Dee said. “And here we are. We want to continue living here with the threat of fires. I guess it just depends on what you like.”
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Calmer winds and rising humidity helped firefighters battle more than 100 wildfires Saturday that continued to rage largely uncontrolled along the U.S. West Coast from California to Washington state and beyond, incinerating entire towns and killing at least 24 people.Authorities were concerned, however, that the receding flames could lead to the discovery of more bodies across the blackened terrain in the region.“We are preparing for a mass fatality incident based on what we know and the numbers of structures that have been lost,” Andrew Phelps, director of the Oregon Office of Emergency Management (OEM), said Friday.More than 40,000 people in Oregon have been evacuated and some 500,000 — more than 10% of its population — remained under some level of evacuation protocol as fires in the state destroyed thousands of homes and burned hundreds of thousands of hectares. Oregon Governor Kate Brown on Friday amended Thursday’s statement by OEM that said a half-million people throughout the state had been ordered to evacuate.A woman is seen at a makeshift distribution center for people displaced by the wildfires, at a parking lot in Oregon City, Ore., Sept. 11, 2020.The Oregon Convention Center in Portland has been transformed into a shelter for evacuees. Other evacuation centers were opened across the state, while many evacuees have simply taken refuge in their cars in large parking lots.In southern Oregon, an apocalyptic scene of burned residential subdivisions and trailer parks stretched for kilometers along a highway — a scene mirrored in parts of California, where the governor gave a blunt assessment.“This is a climate damn emergency. This is real and it’s happening. This is the perfect storm,” California Governor Gavin Newsom said. “What we’re experiencing right here is coming to communities all across the United States of America unless we get our act together on climate change.” More than 68,000 people are under evacuation orders in California.Health warningsThick smoke and haze blanketed much of the region, triggering health warnings and prompting officials to urge residents to remain indoors.In Oregon’s most populated region, helicopters dropped water and fire retardant on two fires that threatened to merge.Brown said Friday that dozens of people were missing in Jackson and Marion counties.In California, the largest fire in the state’s history was burning in the Mendocino National Forest, about 190 kilometers northwest of Sacramento.The amount of land burned in Washington state in just the past five days has made this the state’s second-worst fire season, after 2015.”This is not an act of God,” Washington Governor Jay Inslee said Friday. “This has happened because we have changed the climate of the state of Washington in dramatic ways.”A commercial aircraft is seen as smoke from wildfires covers an area at the Portland International Airport, in Portland, Ore., Sept. 12, 2020.This year’s wildfires in California have already burned record areas of land. The year also saw the largest wildfire in the state’s recorded history, along with five of the top 10 largest fires in state history. The fire season is still young in the region, where wildfires have historically intensified in the fall.In addition to beating back the wildfires, authorities are now challenged with fighting misinformation on social media sites that the fires were ignited by arsonists from far right and far left groups. The FBI said Friday that it had investigated some claims and so far had found them to be untrue.Arrest madeOn Friday, however, the Jackson County Sheriff’s Department in Oregon announced that Michael Bakkela, 41, had been arrested on two counts of arson and other charges in connection with the Almeda fire in southern Oregon. Bakkela has denied starting the blaze.The sheriff’s department also said a man was found dead near an ignition point of the Almeda fire, which burned hundreds of homes, and that a search was underway for about 50 missing people.Meanwhile, meteorologists said California’s wildfires were responsible for the orange glow in the sky that people across Britain woke up to Friday.Meteorologist Simon Lee told The Telegraph: “Meteorologically speaking, in the last few days we have seen a very strong and straight, west-east jet stream, flowing across the North Atlantic from North America to Europe, which has undoubtedly helped rapidly and coherently transport the aerosols from North America.”
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