President Donald Trump wrongly claimed a video that showed election workers collecting legally cast ballots in Los Angeles the day after the election showed evidence of fraud.
“You are looking at BALLOTS,” the President claimed in his video caption. “Is this what our Country has come to?”
A woman heard in the video asks the workers why they are collecting the ballots when “they already called the state.”
Facts First: This is the latest false insinuation – and another baseless claim – of mail-in voting fraud by Trump. The suggestion by the President is that the video shows ballots being collected in California a week after the election. But the video, originally posted on November 4, shows workers collecting legally cast ballots from a ballot box that the LA County Registrar says had been locked since election night.
The video the President posted isn’t the only one circulating on the internet showing similar scenes of workers collecting legally cast ballots in Los Angeles County. Reuters has previously debunked similar claims.
Within an hour of the video’s posting by the President on Twitter, it had well over 2 million views.
The LA County Registrar said it closed and locked all ballot boxes at 8:00 p.m. on November 3, preventing anyone from submitting late ballots.
“These are valid ballots processed and counted during the post-election canvass,” the LA County Registrar said in a tweet.
Shortly after the President’s tweet, the LA County registrar reemphasized that the ballots were “valid, legally cast ballots” that were “collected and processed by authorized election officials in accordance with the California Elections Code.”
That message was retweeted by Trump’s own appointee, Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency director Christopher Krebs in what appears to be a rebuke of the President’s insinuation. Krebs has been increasingly vocal about shooting down disinformation, included things that the President’s own supporters are spreading.
California Secretary of State press secretary Sam Mahood called the President an “internet troll” on Twitter, saying that he had been “trafficking already debunked conspiracy theories.”
“There is no credible evidence of any significant voter fraud or systematic issues in this election,” Mahood told CNN in an email.
The President has repeatedly attacked mail-in voting, trying to erode public trust in it and the election because Democrats made up the overwhelming majority of the mail-in vote.
CNN’s Cheri Mossburg contributed to this report.
