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  • 2020-08-18 (xsd:date)
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  • Did Thousands of Seattle Democrats Gather to Demand Mail-In Voting... (en)
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  • Did Thousands of Seattle Democrats Gather to Demand Mail-In Voting Because Voting in Person Is Too Dangerous? Claim Thousands of Seattle Democrats gathered to demand mail-in voting because it’s too dangerous to vote in-person in August 2020. Rating Not True Like this fact check? Reporting On August 18 2020, a photograph purportedly showing thousands of Seattle Democrats (at least, according to random people online) circulated on Twitter : https://twitter.com/CatramaJohn/status/1295442800939610115 And Facebook , where it was picked up and passed around as a post (and as a screengrab): https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=2772319263043477&id=1778442735764473 Examples On Twitter, the image was captioned: This is a photo of thousands of Seattle Democrats gathering to demand mail in voting because voting in person is too dangerous. Democrat and hypocrite are synonyms. On Facebook, the caption read in part: Thousands of Seattle Democrats gather to demand mail-in voting because it’s too dangerous to vote in-person. Florida is where wokes go to die... Please enable JavaScript Florida is where wokes go to die Context Concerns over the United States Postal Service (USPS) and August 2020 delays caused a groundswell of support for USPS and circulating warnings about sending ballots by mail: ‘Don’t Mail Ballots In, Drop at Board of Elections, This is an Inside Tip from a Postal Worker, Can’t Say More than That’ In August 2020, U.S. President Donald Trump addressed the mail-in voting controversy in an interview with Fox Business’ Maria Bartiromo: Did Trump Say That Without a Deal ‘They Can’t Have Universal Mail-in Voting, They Just Can’t Have It’? Concerns over potential issues with USPS and ballots spiked from late July 2020 onwards; our first page about the issue was published on July 28 2020: Did the United States Postal Service Urge Mail-In Voters to Request Envelopes by October 20th? As August 2020 wore on, social media users discussed the integrity of USPS as it related to the November 2020 election: Can You Have Your Mail-In Ballot Delivered as First Class Mail? Yes, but Did Thousands of Seattle Democrats Gather to Demand Mail-In Voting Because Voting in Person Is Too Dangerous? In the Facebook and Twitter posts above, the same story was paired with the same photograph. Descriptions — without citations, of course — claimed that the image of people gathered through a four-way intersection was part of the August 2020 discourse over whether USPS slowdowns would impact the November 2020 election. Moreover, the posters claimed it showed hypocrites gathering en masse to demand mail-in voting. Initially, a reverse image search was unproductive, possibly due to an image being cropped or reversed. However, we did manage to find tweets featuring the image with a different explanation of the events. A June 8 2020 tweet included the image in the Democrats gather to demand mail-in voting posts, making it no older than that date. We found two tweets from separate accounts. Those originally described the image as a Black Lives Matter protest in West Seattle : The protesters are peaceful. Hundreds of thousands of people came out to protest in Seattle all throughout the city (here is my small neighborhood West Seattle). There was zero or light police presence at all of them but one – capitol hill. Guess where violence erupted? pic.twitter.com/A11J54VXmi — Chet Faliszek (@chetfaliszek) June 8, 2020 Proud of my small community for marching in solidarity. #blacklivesmatter #WestSeattle pic.twitter.com/PO4psVUAVz — Carina Weyer (@carina_weyer) June 7, 2020 TL;DR Misleading social media posts described an image of crowds filling an intersection as Seattle Democrats gathering to demand mail-in voting, because in-person voting was too dangerous. Discourse about mail-in voting became widespread in very late July through August 2020; the image was taken no later than June 8 2020, and actually showed a Black Lives Matter protest, unrelated to mail-in voting. The claim about the image as part of debate over voting by mail appeared to be an attempt at invoking the straw man fallacy, fabricating a description of an in-person protest in support of human rights and equality months previously as inherently opposed to in-person voting. Posted in Fact Checks , Viral Content Tagged black lives matter , mail in ballots , mail-in voting , seattle , seattle democrats , strawman , thousands of Seattle Democrats gather to demand mail-in voting because it’s too dangerous to vote in-person , trump mail in voting , trump usps slowdown , usps , usps ballots , usps delays august 2020 , viral facebook posts , viral tweets , vote by mail , voter fraud (en)
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