A viral video showing a man ripping apart election ballots voting for former President Donald Trump in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, is inauthentic. Local officials said their investigation showed the video to be fake, the Bucks County Republican Committee published a statement highlighting discrepancies between the ballots in the video and the actual ballots being used, and the U.S. intelligence community connected the video to a Russian disinformation scheme.
In the widely circulated video, an unidentified man is seen opening and examining mail-in ballots, tearing apart ballots marked for Trump while keeping intact ballots with votes for Vice President Kamala Harris. “So let’s see what we have here,” the man says. “This Bucks County.” Only the man’s hands and arms are visible in the video. “F— Donald Trump,” he says before ripping up a Trump-marked ballot, a line he repeats. “Donald Trump, motherf—” he adds after ripping up another ballot.
“Can anyone figure out who this is and put him in jail?” one X user, with nearly 60,000 followers, asked when tweeting the video on Friday. “Dems caught tearing up Trump ballots in Bucks County, PA.” Less than an hour later, the user acknowledged in a reply that the video was “debunked,” but did not remove his original tweet.
Another X user claimed the man depicted tearing apart ballots was an “election staff” worker. “It’s troubling that similar issue from 2020 is happening again in 2024, raising serious concerns about the system’s ability to ensure fair handling of every ballot,” he added. “If the U.S. cannot guarantee the integrity of the election process, how can we trust the outcome? What’s the point of the election?” A separate X user claimed that “Democratic operatives” were tearing up the ballots.
Four smaller X accounts tweeted the video with identical captions. “Again, nothing was done to stop this stuff from happening so of course it happens again,” all four tweets, posted within hours of each other, said. “Ballots with votes for Donald Trump are being opened and ripped up in Bucks County PA!!!” The second sentence was also repeated, verbatim, in a YouTube post. The YouTube account previously shared videos promoting anti-Israel views, and one falsely accusing Bill Gates of “geoengineering” hurricanes.
Local officials in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, quickly dispelled any notion that the video and ripped ballots were authentic. “Our investigation has concluded that this video was fabricated in an attempt to undermine confidence in the upcoming election,” said a joint statement on Thursday from the Bucks County District Attorney’s Office and the county’s Yardley Borough Police Department.
The Bucks County Republican Committee also found the video to be fake and outlined several inconsistencies between the ballots depicted in the video and authentic Bucks County ballots.
In a statement posted to Facebook, the group said:
The video is fake, with things such as the color of the envelopes being the wrong shade of green, the paper is not the same quality used by the Bucks County Board of Elections, the envelopes lack a return address, and no employee at Bucks County Board of Election meets the description of the person in the video. Furthermore, no mail-in or absentee ballots have been or will be opened and counted until election day on November 5th.
To us, this is disinformation, aimed at scaring voters and dissuading them from using mail-in ballots or on-demand voting that uses the same mail-in ballot process.
…
Our County Party Chair and staff all voted by mail because we are sure that our system in Bucks County works and is safe.
On Friday, the U.S. intelligence community connected the video to a Russian disinformation scheme. “Russian actors manufactured and amplified a recent video that falsely depicted an individual ripping up ballots in Pennsylvania,” the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the FBI, and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency said in a joint statement. “This Russian activity is part of Moscow’s broader effort to raise unfounded questions about the integrity of the US election and stoke divisions among Americans.”
Darren Linvill, a co-director of Clemson University’s Watt Family Innovation Center Media Forensics Hub, and his research team first discovered a Russian-based disinformation campaign known as Storm-1516 in December 2023. “We believe this to be a narrative originating from Storm-1516,” Linvill told The Dispatch Fact Check.
Storm-1516 often recruits Russian and West African immigrant actors living in St. Petersburg, Linvill previously told The Dispatch Fact Check, to use in fake videos, livestreams, and phone calls. That’s the “possible background of the actor in the [ripped up ballots] video,” Linvill said of this latest narrative.
As The Dispatch Fact Check previously wrote about Storm-1516,
Both Clemson researchers and, independently, Microsoft’s Threat Analysis Center—which detects and analyzes digital threats across the internet, and first shared concerns about Storm-1516 in April—found the Russian network initially pushed narratives that sought to undermine support for Ukraine and its president, Volodymyr Zelensky. But the network has recently switched its focus to the 2024 U.S. election. Since August 2023, Linvill and his team have linked 54 manufactured narratives to Storm-1516.
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