Explained: America's mail-in voting

The 2020 presidential election will surely be a vote unlike the US has ever seen before because of the coronavirus pandemic, a reckoning over racial injustice and massive unemployment. Amid this historic vote, the legitimacy of the election is being called into question as Donald Trump has raised concerns over the mail-in voting.

Washington: US President Donald Trump has been rampant against mail-in voting in the presidential election, questioning the legitimacy of the vote.

People have been voting by mail in the United States for nearly a hundred years, but it's never been as big an issue as it is in the 2020 election.

And there are two reasons for that.

First, more people are voting by mail than ever before. And that's because of the pandemic.

It's made voting in person risky and hard to do because a lot of poll workers don't want to staff polling stations, so fewer polling stations are open.

There's been as much a tenfold increase in requests for mail ballots in states that don't usually do mail voting.

Five states relied on mail-in voting before the pandemic and had very few problems.

It's considered a very safe and effective way to vote with very low rates of fraud.

The second reason mail voting has become a big issue is President Trump, who has been claiming that widespread mail voting will inevitably lead to huge amounts of fraud.

There's, again, little evidence for that.

There are, however, plenty of Republicans who'd like to vote by mail and want the party to continue voting by mail.

And it's important to understand that in the places where there is widespread mail voting, studies have shown that there is no big advantage to one party or the other.

With inputs from agencies