This video has circulated since 2018 in reports about voter fraud in Russia
- This article is more than one year old.
- Published on November 11, 2020 at 06:30
- 2 min read
- By AFP Hong Kong
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The 30-second video was published on Twitter here on November 5, 2020. It has since garnered more than 13,300 views.
The traditional Chinese-language tweet translates to English as: “Evidence of organised fraud by staff members at the polling station”.
The post circulated online two days after the US presidential election, following which President Donald Trump repeatedly made unsupported claims of widespread voter fraud, as AFP reported here.
As of November 11, Trump is yet to formally concede to former vice president and Democratic challenger, President-elect Joe Biden, who was declared the winner by US media on November 7.
The CCTV footage of a polling station was also shared alongside a similar claim on Twitter here.
The claim, however, is misleading.
A reverse image search on Yandex and a further keyword search found video was published by US newspaper The Washington Post on YouTube here on March 19, 2018, two years before the 2020 US election.
The video is headlined: “Watch: CCTV footage shows alleged ballot-stuffing in Russia elections”.
The video’s caption reads: “While Russian President Vladimir Putin was reelected in a landslide victory on March 18, videos emerged of alleged ballot-stuffing at polling stations across Russia.”
The footage shared in the misleading tweet corresponds to the one-minute 25-second mark of The Washington Post’s video.
Below are screenshot comparisons of the footage in the misleading tweets (L) and The Washington Post’s video (R):
The same footage of voter fraud in Russia was also published in 2018 by AFP here, by Canadian television network Global News here and by British newspaper The Guardian here.
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