Misrepresented 2020 US election footage revives false fraud claims

This article is more than one year old.
Published on August 9, 2023 at 20:19
4 min read
By Bill MCCARTHY, AFP USA

Social media users are claiming a video shows a van unloading hundreds of thousands of illegal ballots in Michigan hours after counting in the 2020 presidential election had stopped. This is false; the vehicle dropped off votes that were lawfully cast before the US state's deadline, while tabulation was ongoing.

"Here is a van dropping off 100s of thousands of ballots around 3 AM in Detroit after the vote counting was stopped & w/o any GOP monitors," says an August 5, 2023 post on Twitter, which is being rebranded as "X."

Screenshot from Twitter, which is being rebranded as "X," taken August 8, 2023

Similar posts circulated across X and other platforms. Conservative commentators such as Chuck Callesto and Rogan O'Handley, who have previously spread misinformation, amplified the claims.

The posts follow former president Donald Trump's indictment for trying to overturn the 2020 election outcome. Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel in mid-July announced criminal charges against 16 Trump supporters who joined a scheme aimed at reversing the state's results.

Similar claims about the van footage have circulated online for years. They appear to stem from the Gateway Pundit, a conservative website that has previously published misinformation and conspiracy theories about US elections and other topics.

AFP was unable to identify the source of the video shared online, but it does not show illegal activity.

Voters in Michigan had until 8 pm on November 3, 2020 to return absentee ballots at a clerk's office or in a secure drop box. The Michigan Department of State says on its website (archived here) that all valid votes that were submitted before the deadline and passed signature verification were counted, while thousands that arrived late were not (archived here).

The 8 pm deadline was not for election workers tasked with counting the ballots, a process that takes days in some battleground states.

"If a ballot arrived at a clerk’s office at 8 pm, it may not move through the process and be sent to the counting board for several hours," the Michigan Department of State says on its website. "This is why, in cities including Detroit, ballots arrived at counting boards several hours after polling places had closed."

A Michigan judge rejected Republican efforts to stop the certification of results in Wayne County, writing shortly after the election that the lawsuit's interpretation of vote counting at Detroit's Huntington Place, formerly known as TCF Center, was "incorrect and not credible" (archived here).

Chris Thomas, Michigan's former director of elections who in 2020 served as an adviser to Detroit's city clerk, said in a sworn affidavit (archived here) that there was "no fraud, or even unrectified procedural errors, associated with processing of the absentee ballots for the city of Detroit."

Here is what Thomas said about the van that dropped off ballots:

 "Early in the morning on Wednesday, November 4, approximately 16,000 ballots were delivered in a white van used by the city. There were 45 covered trays containing approximately 350 ballots each. The ballots were not visible as the trays had a sleeve that covered the ballots. The ballots delivered to the TCF Center had been verified by the City Clerk’s staff prior to delivery in a process prescribed by Michigan law ...

"It would have been impossible for any election worker at the TCF Center to count or process a ballot for someone who was not an eligible voter or whose ballot was not received by the 8 pm deadline on November 3, 2020. No ballot could have been 'backdated,' because no ballots received after 8 pm on November 3, 2020 were ever at the TCF Center."

Thomas confirmed to AFP that the van in the footage shared online is the same one he described in his affidavit.

The vehicle delivered the last batch of ballots from overseas voters, he said -- and everyone at Huntington Place could observe it. Thomas added that if the van had carried hundreds of thousands of votes, as the posts claim, the total turnout in Detroit would have been much higher.

Thomas also noted that Trump received thousands more votes in Detroit in 2020 than he did in 2016, when he won the presidency.

Biden won approximately 94 percent of the vote in Detroit in 2020, according to the city's election summary report (archived here). Nationally, Biden received 81.2 million votes, topping Trump's 74.2 million.

AFP has fact-checked other 2020 election misinformation here.