Claims of a ‘massive transfer’ of fraudulent election ballots are false

Ciara O'Rourke, PolitiFact.com
·4 min read
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Viral Facebook post: There’s “evidence of a massive transfer of completed, curated ballots” that are fraudulent in the 2022 election.

PolitiFact's ruling: False

Recent Facebook posts sow doubt about next month’s midterm elections by relying on old misinformation from the 2020 presidential election.

"We have evidence of a massive transfer of completed, curated ballots ready to be injected - October 8, 2022," reads the caption for one Facebook post from that date.

"Jesse Morgan says he was suspicious of his cargo load of COMPLETED ballots from NY to PA - October 8, 2022," reads another post’s caption.

Both posts feature videos from One America News Network, but neither are from Oct. 8, 2022. Rather, both videos discuss unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election.

Fact-check: Did Democrats suggest 2016 presidential election was stolen?

These posts were flagged as part of Facebook’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed.

Claims that the 2020 election was stolen from former President Donald Trump are false. President Joe Biden fairly won the election, and we’ve debunked dozens of statements wrongly alleging otherwise.

The video in the first Facebook post shows part of a December 2020 press conference held by the Amistad Project, a group that’s part of a conservative legal organization called the Thomas More Society that worked with Trump’s legal team to file lawsuits challenging election results in key swing states. During the press conference, Jesse Morgan, who said he was a subcontractor who drove for the U.S. Postal Service, claimed he transported completed mail-in ballots from Bethpage, New York, to Lancaster, Pennsylvania, in October 2020.

The second Facebook post shows a One America News Network interview with Morgan, who had previously drawn attention for his YouTube videos alleging to show ghosts in his home. It was one of several interviews Morgan gave that year. He also appeared on Fox News, and his claims of voter fraud — presented without evidence — spread widely.

The district attorney’s office in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, declined to comment to PolitiFact on the Facebook posts, saying it was a "federal matter." The county’s board of elections didn’t respond to PolitiFact’s questions about the posts.

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The U.S. Postal Service Office of the Inspector General investigated the claims with the postal service and the FBI, and in April 2022 said it had found no evidence to corroborate Morgan’s story.

According to a report detailing the inspector general’s findings, the contents in the truck Morgan drove the day he alleged to have transported fraudulent ballots "indicate most, if not all the mail contents were packages, not letters or ballots."

"Investigators confirmed data records indicated all mail contents were properly transported, accounted for, and processed," the report said.

It’s also worth noting that in 2021, Craig Lehman, then a Lancaster County commissioner, told The Dispatch, a politically center-right online magazine, that the county’s election board receives absentee ballot applications to be mailed out of state every election cycle, so it wouldn’t be unusual for some complete ballots to cross state lines.

Students who are attending college out of state or out of the country, and Pennsylvania residents who are in another state visiting or caring for a loved one for an extended time are examples of people who request absentee ballots, Lehman told The Dispatch.

We looked for and found no news reports or other credible sources backing up the claims in the Facebook post that there’s evidence of massive election fraud leading up to the 2022 midterm elections.

We rate these posts False.

Our Sources

This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: Claims of ‘massive transfer’ of fraudulent election ballots are false