Old photo of ballots shared in posts baselessly claiming US election fraud
Baseless claims of fraud in the US election flooded social media as voters went to the polls. Posts shared hundreds of times on X and Instagram circulated an old picture of boxed ballots alongside a false claim they were Republican votes being fraudulently discarded. In fact, the image - cropped from a photo by a US newspaper - showed a poll officer handling absentee ballots in 2020.
"For my next trick, I'm going to make all of these Donald Trump and Mark Robinson ballots disappear. Happy #ElectionDay #NCPol #MAGA2024 #MAGA," read a post on social media site X on November 5, 2024.
Donald Trump claimed victory and pledged to "heal" the country as results put him on the verge of beating Kamala Harris in a stunning White House comeback.
Republican Mark Robinson, who faced criticism after a report that he had called himself a "Black Nazi", lost the North Carolina race for governor to Democrat Josh Stein ( archived link ).
Similar false posts also shared the photo - showing US postal service boxes stacked with white papers, as well as green ones that say "ballot" - elsewhere on X here and here . It was also shared on Instagram .
Other posts baselessly claimed the picture showed evidence of voter fraud in the US states of Ohio and Georgia .
However, a reverse image search on TinEye found the picture in an about mail-in voting in the US state of Connecticut, published by The Associated Press on November 5, 2024 ( archived link ).
Credited to photographer Dave Zajac of the Connecticut-based Record-Journal newspaper, the caption stated the photo was taken in October 2020, over a month before that year's presidential election.
It read: "Town Clerk Barbara Thompson gets ready to bring nearly 7,000 absentee ballots to the post office from Wallingord Town Hall, Friday, Oct. 2, 2020, in Wallingford, Conn."
The photo in the false posts has been cropped, omitting Thompson from the image.
The Boston Globe newspaper also published the photo - credited to Zajac via the AP - in a report on November 3, 2020 about historic numbers of people in Connecticut casting absentee ballots because of the coronavirus pandemic ( archived link ).
Below is a screenshot comparison between the photo in the false posts (left) and the one published by the AP (right):
