Bill Barr slapped down for spreading ‘impossible’ vote-by-mail conspiracy theory

Attorney General Bill Barr has been spreading a new conspiracy theory about mail-in voting that experts are saying would be nearly "impossible" to pull off.

As Bloomberg reports, Barr has repeatedly floated an idea that foreign countries will try to alter the results of the 2020 election by sending out counterfeit ballots en masse to American households.

However, elections experts say that the difficulties in mass producing counterfeit ballots for every individual county in America on a nationwide scale would make enacting such a scheme a massive logistical headache for any foreign country.

"You would basically have to reproduce the entire election administration infrastructure atom-for-atom in the middle of Siberia in order to have any chance of doing that," Charles Stewart III, an elections scholar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, tells Bloomberg.

In addition to needing county-by-county knowledge of each ballot, Bloomberg notes that a foreign saboteur would also need to reproduce "the unique printing on the correct type of paper for scanners programmed to read that ballot," as well as "the bar codes and signature on envelopes used to identify each voter."

And that all assumes that the would-be saboteurs sent out ballots to voters who wouldn't be flagged for potential double voting.

"If I just printed 10,000 ballots and took them over to the county to try to get them to tabulate them, they’re going to have a sheriff on top me in a heartbeat," said Jeff Ellington, president of Arizona-based Runbeck Election Services Inc.