Shifting counts have a boring cause: who votes by mail, and when those votes get counted. That doesn’t mean all fraud claims are false, though.

Republicans hold both chambers and publicly back the president’s signature bill that would curtail mail-in voting and enforce strict voter ID laws. Here, a public policy and politics scholar explains why it still isn’t law.

Mail-in voting was created during the Civil War so soldiers could vote. That legacy helped shape how the Supreme Court ruled more than 160 years later.