Electoral laws typically stipulate a series of checks to protect against voter fraud and allow for the integrity and secrecy of the submitted ballot to be maintained. Known instances of fraud are very rare. Coordinated, large-scale fraud by postal voting is likely hard to pull off undetected because the large number of interested parties (such as officials, political operators, and journalists) as well as a large number of scholars and analysts who are capable of detecting statistical outliers in vote totals signifying large-scale fraud. Officials can confirm instances of fraud by checking signatures and conducting basic detective work.