The Daily Express published a comment piece alleging evidence of widespread ballot fraud in the US election. There is no evidence to support this.

The piece was written by Patrick Basham, director of a London and Washington-based think tank called the Democracy Institute, and has since been removed from the paper’s website.

He wrote: “If you don’t include the fraudulent ballots, most pollsters failed on a spectacular scale… If only valid votes are counted, Trump and Biden share the popular vote. Already, there is a mountain of evidence, direct and circumstantial, of widespread ballot fraud.”

Since the election, President Trump and his supporters have made multiple allegations of voter fraud. Twitter marked claims of widespread fraud as “disputed”.

At Prime Minister’s Questions, Labour MP Ruth Jones claimed that the Welsh contact tracing programme cost £32 per person while the English system cost £1,700 per person. 

This is wrong. 

Full Fact asked Ms Jones for the source of her data. A spokesman confirmed the figure for England came from a tweet which was miscalculated.

The Welsh cost of £32 per head was arrived at by dividing the £102 million the Welsh government allocated to contact tracing by the population of Wales (roughly 3.15 million people).  

The figure for England was calculated by dividing the £12 billion provided for Test and Trace by an approximation for the population of the UK. Even then, this figure covers the cost for the whole of the UK, not just England, so can’t really be compared to the Welsh figure in this way.

However, doing the calculation properly actually gives a per head figure for England of around £177, not £1,700.

It appears that the original tweet rounded the per head figure down from £177 to £170, and then accidentally added a rogue zero.

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