Baseless fraud claims in California Senate primary surface on X

"#BREAKING: AGAIN??? The video shows Adam Schiff taking votes from the opponent," a March 6, 2024 post on X claims, sharing a recording of live vote tallies from the California Senate primary as published on the New York Times (NYT) website (archived here). In the clip, a live update showed the vote total for Garvey decreased sharply as Schiff gained votes.

Similar claims circulated elsewhere on X, including here, here and here.

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Screenshot of a post on X taken on March 8, 2024

Schiff and Garvey triumphed in the March 5 nonpartisan primary race in California (archived here) -- a system in which candidates compete for the top two spots regardless of their political affiliation.

But claims of fraud in the California Primary are baseless, and the sudden change in the vote tally was attributed to a data entry error subsequently corrected.

Human error

A New York Times representative said the screen recording seen in the social media posts showed data gathered by the AP, which compiles vote return data and provides it to other news organizations.

Every election, a network of local AP stringers collect vote tallies at a local level from county clerks.

"The vote count reporters call in results to a vote entry clerk, who keys in the results to AP's election system. Those clerks also enter results from official sources online and monitor automated feeds provided by election officials," the AP describes on its website (archived here).

Lauren Easton, AP corporate communications vice president, said on March 7 that a "typo led to an extra digit being added to California Senate candidate Steve Garvey's vote totals, errantly increasing them by about 900,000 votes for about 30 minutes early Wednesday morning before it was fixed."

The AP website also says: "Voters are human -- and so are the people who collect and count their ballots. They make mistakes on occasion. Those mistakes are almost always caught within a few minutes. Sometimes within a few seconds. It's rare that an error lingers for hours."

A California Secretary of State spokesperson also told AFP on March 7, 2024 that the posts misrepresented the election counting process.

"Vote tallies change as election results are reported. There are still ballots coming in from overseas, from people who mailed them by the required postmark day, etc.," the official said in an email.

"There is nothing about vote tallies changing prior to certification of election results that constitutes fraud," they added.

Susan Hyde, a political science professor at the University of California, Berkeley, said she has observed ballot counting in parts of California and has "a high degree of confidence" in the process.

"The election is not yet certified, counting is still happening, and reporting news outlets sometimes grab data and aggregate it in ways that produce mistakes," she said.

Porter concedes

Shortly after the race was called, Democratic candidate and third-place finisher Katie Porter posted on X (archived here) and complained that special interest money was used to "rig" the election -- a characterization she later said was not a reference to the vote count and called the election process "beyond reproach" (archived here).

Super Tuesday primaries further cemented the likelihood of a rematch between Joe Biden and Donald Trump in the 2024 race for the White House despite concerns over the incumbent president's age, anger over his handling of the Israel-Hamas war and substantial anti-Trump resistance among moderate suburban voters.

AFP has recently fact-checked other baseless claims of fraud from the 2024 primaries here and here.