Fact check: Human error caused CNN to momentarily report wrong vote results from Kentucky in 2019

Sudiksha Kochi, USA TODAY
·6 min read
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The claim: A CNN clip shows election fraud during a vote count of the 2019 Kentucky gubernatorial race

Almost three years after Democrat Andy Beshear won the Kentucky gubernatorial race besting Republican Matt Bevin, false claims that the election was a fraud have resurfaced on social media.

A Facebook video shared July 10 shows a clip of vote counts from the Kentucky gubernatorial race as they were coming in to CNN. The clip in the video is taken from the Nov. 5, 2019, broadcast of ''Anderson Cooper 360,'' and it is accompanied by a voiceover from an outside narrator. Before the clip starts, "SMOKING GUN VOTE FRAUD CAUGHT ON CNN" appears on screen.

At the beginning of the clip, the CNN graphic displaying the current vote count shows Beshear has 673,948 votes and Bevin has 662,235 votes. But a few frames later, the graphic in the clip is updated, and Beshear's lead over Bevin grows. Then, the clip shows Beshear has 674,508 votes and Bevin has 661,675 votes – a change of 560 votes for each candidate.

“At the exact same second that Andy Beshear has gone up 560 votes, Matt Bevin has gone down 560 votes,” the man commenting about the CNN report says. “This is vote-switching in the computer.”

The caption of the post reads "Lulz at CNN for the constant fake news and this election fraud in plain sight. You all are not slick. Btw it was done in all electios (sic) in 2020."

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The post generated more than 900 interactions and 1,000 shares in less than week.

But the claim is baseless.

The initial vote count shown in the clip was incorrect and caused by Edison Research, a spokesperson for the company told USA TODAY in an email. Edison Research is a third party that provides vote counts to CNN, and a data-entry error led to the problem, according to the spokesperson. The company quickly realized it had made the mistake, and the numbers were updated to reflect the correct vote counts.

USA TODAY reached out to CNN and to the social media users who shared the claim for comment.

Clip is not proof of election fraud

The original vote count shown in the clip was incorrect and caused by "a typo in the Edison Research vote entry of a Henderson [C]ounty vote report," Rob Farbman, executive vice president of Edison Research, told USA TODAY in an emailed statement. The mistake was corrected within three minutes, and that is what accounts for the change in numbers in the CNN clip.

At 10:38 p.m., an Edison Research reporter at Henderson County, Kentucky, "accidently read the vote tally backwards" – crediting Bevin's 6,303 votes to Beshear and Beshear's 6,863 votes to Bevin, Farbman said. The first vote count in the clip reflects the data-entry error: 673,948 votes for Beshear and 662,235 votes for Bevin.

"Within 2 minutes we saw the discrepancy of this vote with the Kentucky state feed data and verified that the numbers had been read to our input center backwards," Farbman said.

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At 11:41, the vote counts were corrected so that Beshear had 6,863 votes and Bevin had 6,303 votes. That accounted for the vote change in the clip, with a 560 net vote increase for Beshear. The second frame in the clip shows the corrected vote total: Beshear with 674,508 votes and Bevin with 661,675 votes.

These final vote tallies for Henderson County are also documented in the Commonwealth of Kentucky's official 2019 election results.

The Edison Research feed does not represent the official vote total, Philip Stark, an election integrity expert at the University of California, Berkeley, told USA TODAY in an email. The official systems are generally run by the jurisdictions themselves, not by CNN or Edison Research. Human error in "transferring election-night subtotals from the official systems to Edison are not uncommon," he said.

Kentucky Secretary of State Michael Adams's official website notes that "the only place to get the verified unofficial results is through the State Board of Elections Election Night Reporting webpage." Official results are typically "not certified until weeks later to ensure all validly cast ballots have been counted," the website says.

CNN reported that Bevin did request all 120 counties in Kentucky to "recheck the results" of the gubernatorial election, and the results were the same: Beshear beat Bevin by more than 5,000 votes. There is no evidence 560 votes were ever wrongfully attributed to Beshear in the official results that should have gone to Bevin.

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The claim that there was widespread election fraud in 2020 is also false. USA TODAY has previously reported on how the 2020 presidential election was not rigged and President Joe Biden won the race legally.

There is no evidence “any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised” during the 2020 election, according to a joint statement from election officials.

Our rating: False

Based on our research, we rate FALSE the claim that a CNN clip shows election fraud during a vote count of the 2019 Kentucky gubernatorial race. The vote initially displayed in the clip was a mistake that was caused by an Edison Research data entry error. The numbers were quickly updated to correct the mistake, and that correction had nothing to do with official vote counts.

Our fact-check sources:

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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Fact check: 2019 CNN clip showing wrong vote count due to human error