Fact check: Image shows network error reporting Pennsylvania vote totals, not election fraud

Ana Faguy, USA TODAY
·2 min read
134

The claim: Post implies Pennsylvania elections graphic with conflicting data is a sign of fraud

Josh Shapiro, the Democratic candidate for Pennsylvania governor, beat Republican candidate Doug Mastriano by more than 14 percentage points, according to official Pennsylvania election results.

But an image spreading on social media seems to cast doubt on the election results.

It shows a vote count graphic where Shapiro has fewer votes than Mastriano but is labeled with a higher portion of the vote total. In the corner of the image is the logo for the Right Side Broadcasting Network, a conservative media company commonly known as RSBN.

One Nov. 10 Instagram post, which received more than 200 likes in a week, shows a screenshot of those RSBN election results.

Social media users claim the discrepancy is evidence of election fraud.

"They don't care that we all know they cheat," one commenter wrote. "Who's going to do anything about it??"

But the image does not show election fraud. It shows a brief error by RSBN, which the network acknowledged in a press release.

USA TODAY reached out to the user who shared the post for comment.

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Democratic gubernatorial candidate Josh Shapiro departs after voting at the Rydal Elementary School West polling location on Nov. 8, 2022, in Rydal, Pennsylvania. Shapiro faces Republican gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano in today's midterm general election.
Democratic gubernatorial candidate Josh Shapiro departs after voting at the Rydal Elementary School West polling location on Nov. 8, 2022, in Rydal, Pennsylvania. Shapiro faces Republican gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano in today's midterm general election.

Image shows network error

On election night, the network briefly reported incorrect vote counts and incorrect percentages in the Pennsylvania gubernatorial race on air, according to a statement RSBN released on Nov. 11.

"Our third-party service provider, which was feeding our system with election data, had an issue with their servers," reads the statement. "As a result, this caused us to need to manually input election numbers for the first five hours of our broadcast. Due to this issue with our provider and the manual input required, we incorrectly reported numbers in our broadcast."

The incorrect numbers were displayed on screen for just over a minute beginning at 10:04 p.m. eastern time, according to the statement. Anchors who were on-air when the mistake occurred told viewers the graphic was incorrect and subsequently compared the data in it to the numbers reported by Pennsylvania's secretary of state.

A typo made during the creation of the on-screen graphic, which is not an official election report, is not evidence of fraud.

Fact check:No correlation between winning candidates and number of social media followers

Our rating: Missing context

Based on our research, we rate MISSING CONTEXT the implication that a Pennsylvania  elections graphic with conflicting data is a sign of fraud. The image shows an error in the graphic aired by RSBN. The network acknowledged it was human error that led to the incorrect numbers being aired, not fraud in the race.

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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Fact check: Image shows network typo in Pennsylvania governors race