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  • 2020-11-03 (xsd:date)
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  • Did Erie County, Penn. Poll Worker Brag About Discarding Trump Ballots? (en)
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  • On U.S. Election Day, Nov. 3, 2020, several supporters of U.S. President Donald Trump, including his son and campaign surrogate Donald Trump Jr., promoted content on social media that they presented as evidence that a poll worker in Pennsylvania's Erie County had bragged online about discarding more than 100 ballots in favor of Trump. Patrick Howley, who contributes to the right-leaning National File website, posted what appeared to be a screenshot from the Instagram story of a user with the handle @omg_seabass, which contained the message: Howley added WHAT!!!!??? His tweet was retweeted by Trump Jr.: Similar tweets, some of which named the owner of the Instagram account as Sebastian Machado, were posted by the pro-Trump commentators and activists Courtney Holland; Robby Starbuck; Jordan Rachel; and Mike Coudrey. The right-wing website 100% Fed Up posted a story with the headline BREAKING: Poll Worker In Erie, PA Admits To Throwing Away ‘Over A Hundred’ Pro-Trump Ballots On Instagram. Adrian Norman, a conservative contributor to websites including The Epoch Times, said that the screenshots were strong evidence in support of broader claims of mass, Democrat-perpetrated electoral fraud, writing: Don't @ me about a lack of evidence of election fraud. They do it right in our faces while liberal media runs cover. The fix is IN. In reality, the posts did not constitute evidence of electoral fraud, and the claims highlighted above were false. In a written statement, Carl Anderson, chair of the Erie County Board of Elections, told Snopes that the person behind the widely shared posts did not work in any polling station in Erie County and likely did not even live there. Anderson told Snopes that Erie County Sheriff John Loomis had initiated a criminal investigation into the posts: It's not clear what the motivation was of the person behind the hundred ballots for Trump posts, but it appears that the president's son and several high-profile supporters of Trump may have fallen for a prank. In November 2016, a Twitter user with the handle @omg_seabass and the username Seb, who bore a close physical resemblance to Machado, posted a joke about committing voter fraud in that year's presidential election, writing: As an undecided voter I went out of my way to vote for BOTH Clinton and Trump just to be the best kind of citizen. (en)
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