President Trump has made it clear that he is against expanding alternatives to in-person voting amid the coronavirus outbreak, saying that mail-in voting risks “tremendous potential for fraud” and gives an advantage to Democrats.

“Perhaps there’s more potential for fraud than in in-person voting, but both can be done safely and securely,” says George Hornedo, a delegate expert from South Bend Indiana “Election fraud in all instances is extremely rare.”

Hornedo suggested several ways to reduce the risks of fraud in mail voting, including ballot tracking, pre-paid postage and the setting up of ballot drop boxes that would “eliminate the need for voters to hand over ballots to third parties.”

Vote-by-mail programs are already extremely common and have been in use for years.

Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Utah and Washington conduct their elections almost entirely by mail.

Myrna Pérez, the director of the Brennan Centre’s Voting Rights and Elections Program, said that the narrative of mail-in voting being a “brand new thing” is “not consistent with the real world.”

“We are in the middle of an emergency situation, and the appropriate thing to be doing right now is to be looking at all things we know and figuring out how to make those things work for us in this crisis,” she said.

Republicans however have continued to express skepticism about vote-by-mail measures.

“I don’t think the Republicans are going to embrace any of the languages that we’ve seen Senators Klobuchar and Wyden put forward to make the election universally accessible for every American,” said Matt Liebman, of the left-leaning group the Voter Protection Project.

“Republicans are going to take advantage of the situation to suppress voter turnout, and not only try to use that to hold the presidency, the United States Senate but, you know, some of these critical state legislative races across the country,” he continued.