AP FACT CHECK: Faulty Trump claims on virus drug, vote fraud

WASHINGTON (AP) — When President Donald Trump doesn't like the message, he shoots the messenger.

So it was this past week when he took very personally a scientific study that should give pause to anyone thinking of following Trump's lead and ingesting a potentially risky drug for the coronavirus. He branded the study's researchers, financed in part by his own administration, his “enemy.”

Boastful on the occasion of Memorial Day, Trump exaggerated some of his accomplishments for veterans' health care. Over the weekend, he also repeated a baseless allegation of rampant mail-in voting fraud and resurrected claims of unspecified conspiracies against him in 2016.

A look at the rhetoric and reality as the pandemic's death toll approached 100,000 in the U.S.:

VOTING FRAUD

TRUMP: “The United States cannot have all Mail In Ballots. It will be the greatest Rigged Election in history. People grab them from mailboxes, print thousands of forgeries and ‘force’ people to sign. Also, forge names. Some absentee OK, when necessary. Trying to use Covid for this Scam!” — tweet Sunday.

THE FACTS: Voting fraud is rare.

It’s true that some election studies have shown a slightly higher incidence of mail-in voting fraud compared with in-person voting, but the overall risk is extremely low. The Brennan Center for Justice said in 2017 the risk of voting fraud is 0.00004% to 0.0009%.

“Trump is simply wrong about mail-in balloting raising a ‘tremendous’ potential for fraud,” Richard L. Hasen, an elections expert at the University of California, Irvine School of Law, recently wrote in an op-ed. “While certain pockets of the country have seen their share of absentee-ballot scandals, problems are extremely rare in the five states that rely primarily on vote-by-mail,...