Fact check: Post falsely links Pennsylvania drop boxes ballots to election fraud
The claim: Ballots found in Pennsylvania drop boxes show cheating in the election
Ahead of Election Day, some social media users claim there's evidence of election fraud in Pennsylvania, a battleground state in the midterm elections.
An Oct. 27 Facebook post includes a link to a Gateway Pundit article with the headline, "BREAKING: Ballots Discovered 'Pre-Loaded' Inside Drop Box in Pennsylvania… Two Others Reportedly Also Had 'Pre-Loaded' Ballots Inside the Boxes.
The article includes a video clip of officials in Centre County, Pennsylvania, opening a drop box to place an official bag of early ballots in it for Election Day and finding 10 ballots already inside.
"Has the cheating in PA already started? Looks like it," reads the caption of the post. "This is shameful. VOTE REPUBLICAN to stop the steal!"
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The Gateway Pundit story was shared nearly 2,000 times on Facebook within a week. Other posts with a link to the article have spread widely on Facebook and Instagram.
But the discovery of the ballots is not indicative of election fraud.
Centre County election officials told USA TODAY voters slipped their ballots into the locked drop boxes prior to the opening date. The drop boxes had a slight defect that allowed voters access. None of the ballots were fraudulent, and they could not be accessed once inside the box except by county officials.
USA TODAY reached out to the social media users who shared the claim for comment.
Ballots in drop boxes is not proof of election fraud
Officials found 18 ballots in three Centre County drop boxes on Oct. 25. But this discovery is not proof of cheating in the midterm election, according to Michael Pipe, a Centre County Commissioner.
About 14,000 absentee ballots and mail-in-ballots were sent to Centre County voters on Oct .9, according to a county press release. While instructions sent with the ballots indicated that drop boxes would open on Oct. 25, some voters chose to slip their ballots into the closed and locked deposit slot of the drop boxes prior to that date.
The locked drop boxes had a defect that allowed voters to insert their ballots, according to Pipe. That defect is being corrected. The ballots could not be retrieved once inside the box except by county officials who had the keys to the drop boxes, Pipe said.
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"Typically the drop boxes are installed and opened up and then the mail ballots are sent out," Pipe said. "We did it the other way this year where the ballots were out prior to the drop boxes being opened up and so that's what caused this issue."
All the voters whose ballots were in the box were registered to vote in Centre County, and county officials have checked that their completed applications requesting a mail-in or absentee ballot were valid, according to Pipe.
"We actually had seven out of the 18 voters come in to our office and show us a form of ID, and they basically took the ballot from us and then they gave it right back to us establishing the fact that they did indeed return it to us in an appropriate way," Pipe said.
Processing of these ballots will also be addressed by the county's Board of Elections on Nov. 14, when it reviews ballots with questions or missing information, according to Beth Lechman, Centre County elections director.
There has been no evidence that the use of drop boxes to collect paper votes has led to any type of widespread or systematic fraud in an election, Wesley Leckrone, an election expert at Widener University, told USA TODAY in an email.
PolitiFact also debunked the claim.
Our rating: False
Based on our research, we rate FALSE the claim that ballots found in Pennsylvania drop boxes show cheating in the election. Voters slipped their ballots into the locked drop boxes prior to the opening date due to a defect in the boxes. The ballots could not be obtained once inside the box except by county officials, and none of them were fraudulent, officials said.
Our fact-check sources:
Beth Lechman, Nov. 1, Email exchange with USA TODAY
Wesley Leckrone, Nov. 1, Email exchange with USA TODAY
Michael Pipe, Nov. 1, Phone interview with USA TODAY
Centre County, accessed Nov. 2, Instructions to return mail-in and absentee ballots
Associated Press, May 3, FACT FOCUS: Gaping holes in the claim of 2K ballot ‘mules’
New York Times, Oct. 31, Letters, Tweets, TV: How Midterm Disinformation Has Washed Over Pennsylvania
Centre County Elections & Voter Registration Office, accessed Nov. 3, Press release
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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Fact check: No link between ballots in PA drop boxes, election fraud
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