Fabricated CNN election broadcast spreads online, sparking false cheating claims
- Published on November 4, 2024 at 22:24
- 3 min read
- By Bill MCCARTHY, AFP USA
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"Are they planning on stealing Texas and it's 40 electoral votes?" says a November 2, 2024 post on X.
The image appears to show a "key race alert" on CNN indicating that, with "polls closed" and 16 percent of the estimated vote already logged in Texas, Democratic Vice President Harris had captured 51.8 percent of the vote compared with Republican nominee Donald Trump's 45.7 percent.
The apparent screenshot rocketed across the Elon Musk-owned platform, spreading widely in the so-called "Election Integrity Community" that the billionaire Trump surrogate created to "share potential incidents of voter fraud or irregularities." Similar posts also circulated on other sites, including Instagram and Threads, with several users questioning how CNN could have results before voters hit the polls on November 5.
"Hey Texas, looks like they are stealing your election," one November 3 post on X says.
"Funny how they can tabulate votes to influence an election before Election Day, but can’t get a total for WEEKS in states they are losing after Election Day," actor James Woods, a supporter of Trump whom AFP has previously fact-checked for amplifying misinformation, claims in another.
But the image circulating online is inauthentic, said Emily Kuhn, CNN's senior vice president of communications.
"This image is completely fabricated and manipulated and it never aired on any CNN platform," Kuhn told AFP in a November 4 email.
The network later posted a matching statement to X (archived here).
The fake graphic resembles those the network used to broadcast "key race alerts" during the 2020 presidential election and 2022 midterms. But among other signs of digital editing, the green ticker used to measure the "estimated vote" does not match the design of those from the network's past coverage.
The arithmetic in the fabricated broadcast is also wrong. It lists Harris's vote total as "121,408 ahead" of Trump, but says she received 1,113,499 votes while he earned 982,091. The difference between those two totals, however, is 131,408.
Polls had not closed in Texas when the image appeared online. On the contrary, they had not even opened -- the hours for in-person voting on November 5 are 7 am to 7 pm local time, according to Texas's secretary of state (archived here)
In subsequent posts, the X user who first shared the fake repeatedly doubled down and claimed without evidence that it was a photo of a CNN election night projection on his television screen.
AFP reached out to the X user for comment, but no response was forthcoming.
AFP has debunked other misinformation about the election here.
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