THE FACTS:

In early November 2024, pro-Kremlin sources shared a 50-second video showing men in military uniform shooting at a mannequin wearing a “Make America Great Again” shirt and hat, claiming that it showed Ukrainian soldiers expressing their dissatisfaction with a potential Trump presidency.

In fact, there is no evidence that the video shows members of the Ukrainian Armed Forces. In a Nov. 9, 2024, X post, Ukraine’s Center for Countering Disinformation (CCD), part of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council, said that the video is “fake” and “another piece of Russian-made disinformation.” The CCD added that the claim “appears to be a coordinated effort to turn Trump’s supporters against Ukraine and create doubt about the gratitude of Ukrainians.”

In a Nov. 7, 2024, X post, Clemson University’s Darren Linvill said the video “is likely fake” and a product of a Russian disinformation campaign dubbed by Microsoft as Storm-1516, reported to be an offshoot of the Internet Research Agency, a Russian troll farm which the U.S. government has accused of interfering in American elections. The claim resembles campaigns previously manufactured and spread by Storm-1516. For example, in May 2024, Storm-1516 staged a fake video falsely claiming to show Ukrainian soldiers setting ablaze an effigy of Trump, according to an August 2024 report from Microsoft.

And in Wisconsin, state Elections Commission members stated in a November 2024 article for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that voting “machines are never connected to the internet, and in fact are unable to connect, to prevent tampering.” The state’s largest city, Milwaukee, reports election results using flash drives, local news site Wisconsin Watch reported in November 2024.

States also have safeguards in place to confirm the accuracy of their election results. All but one state — Alabama, a traditionally red state that Trump won in a landslide — will audit its November 2024 election results, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

THE FACTS:

On Nov. 5, 2024, the day of the U.S. 2024 presidential election, X users posted a 30-second video purporting to show two Harris supporters attacking a Trump voter at a Wisconsin polling station. The video, which has no sound, shows an individual in a hoodie marked “Harris” confronting an individual in a red pro-Trump “Make America Great Again” hat, as he casts his vote. The supposed Trump supporter is taken off-camera, and thrown to the floor by a third person.

In fact, the video is a fabrication, likely involving actors and a staged scene. A Wisconsin Elections Commission spokesperson told NewsGuard in a November 2024 email, “We had no reports from law enforcement, or from any Wisconsin polling place that an incident like this took place.” Meagan Wolfe, an administrator from the Commission, told CBS News, which first debunked the claim, that the video is “not legitimate and does not show a Wisconsin polling center.”

Moreover, the Wisconsin Elections Commission does not allow people at the polls to wear “politically-themed attire … supporting a candidate, political party or ballot initiative,” according to poll worker training requirements listed on the Commission’s website.

Clemson University’s Darren Linvill, who first identified the video, said in a Nov. 5, 2024, X post that the videow as linked to Storm-1516, a Russian influence operation, and was “created in a manner consistent with past Storm narratives.” Indeed, as Linvill noted, the video was amplified by @alertchannel, an account that NewsGuard found to have amplified false claims by Storm-1516 on at least five occasions.

THE FACTS:

The claim that U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party planned an elaborate voter fraud scheme to seize power in the 2024 U.S. presidential election is baseless. The narrative is based on a supposed “investigation” that is backed by no credible evidence and was published by the Foundation to Battle Injustice (FBR), an organization linked to Russian intelligence that has repeatedly advanced false and baseless claims about Harris and the Democratic Party.

The so-called investigation, published on the foundation’s website on Nov. 1, 2024, accused Harris and the Democratic Party of planning an elaborate voter fraud scheme to seize power by hiring actors to increase waiting times at polling stations in swing states, spray caustic chemicals at polling stations, conduct cyberattacks on electronic voting systems, and other tactics.

As supposed evidence, the article cited statements by several anonymous sources, including an unnamed “top analyst at Northwestern University’s Research Center,” an anonymous “politician and former independent U.S. Senate candidate,” and an unnamed “senior Pentagon official.” For example, the article claimed that the unnamed Northwestern University “top analyst” discovered that two U.S. advertising and political consulting firms, GMMB and Bully Pulpit International, published advertisements seeking actors to participate in the elections, to “create fake lines” and slow down voting in swing states. The article provided screenshots of the two companies’ logos, but did not provide any evidence of the purported advertisements. NewsGuard was unable to identify any credible reporting or evidence of any advertisements hiring “actors” to “spend the entire day outdoors simulating participation in political activity,” as the article claimed.

The article also did not provide evidence to substantiate other alleged Democratic plans to undermine the election, including the claim that Democrats recruited “individuals with criminal backgrounds” to “spray dangerous substances” at polling stations on election day.

In a Nov. 4, 2024, joint statement, the FBI, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency said, “The IC [intelligence community] assesses that Russian influence actors recently posted and amplified an article falsely claiming that U.S. officials across swing states plan to orchestrate election fraud using a range of tactics, such as ballot stuffing and cyber attacks.”

THE FACTS:

It is baseless to claim that U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential candidate, ran over a 13-year-old in a hit-and-run in San Francisco in June 2011.

The claim originated in a Sept. 2, 2024, article on KBSF-TV.com, a website created only three weeks earlier that masquerades as a local San Francisco news outlet. The article included a nearly five-minute video featuring a woman claiming that, as a child, she was hit by a car while walking at the corner of Post Street and Jones Street in San Francisco on June 7, 2011. KBSF-TV.com alternatively referred to the woman as Alicia Brown and Alisha Brown. Speaking from a wheelchair and wearing a gray sweatshirt in the video, Brown said the driver who hit her was Harris and that she suffered a fractured spine and was left unable to walk as a result of the crash.

In fact, there is no evidence that Harris was involved in a hit-and-run in 2011. Indeed, when the video is slowed to quarter-speed, some inconsistencies become apparent and point to the use of AI to create the woman seen in the video. For example, her teeth sporadically disappear when she is speaking, the video around her face blurs, and the video glitches as if the frame had been cut while she speaks. 

THE FACTS:

A document shared on social media purporting to be a copy of former President Donald Trump’s transcript from a semester at New York’s Fordham University indicating a 1.28 Grade Point Average is fake, according to Fordham officials.

A March 8, 2019, post from the official Fordham University X account stated: “The image is a forgery, not an actual Fordham University transcript. Fordham University respects the privacy of its students and alumni, and follows federal law regarding the handling and release of academic records.”

Trump attended Fordham University for two years before transferring to the University of Pennsylvania, where he earned a degree in economics. As of October 2024, Trump has not released his grades or transcripts from his time at either school.

THE FACTS:

On Nov. 6, 2024, a day after Trump was projected to be the winner of the U.S. presidential race, pro-Kremlin sources circulated two images: one purporting to show Putin and Trump toasting with wine glasses at a restaurant and another supposedly depicting the two taking a selfie. Sources sharing these photos claimed that the images were the “first photos” of Trump after winning the election.

In fact, the images are not authentic. Multiple AI detection tools including Hive and TrueMedia determined that the photos were likely AI-generated. Other indicators that AI was used to create the photos include a missing stem from the wine glass and unnaturally distorted flowers in the background.

A reverse image search shows that the photos of Putin and Trump were originally posted to Instagram by the account NFT Plug, which says it covers crypto and artificial intelligence. NFT Plug disclosed that the photos were created using AI, stating in the caption, “AI creates a scenario for a date night involving Trump and Putin.” However, many subsequent posts about the photos did not include the AI disclaimer. The latest publicly available photo of Trump and Putin together is from July 16, 2018, during their summit in Helsinki, Finland.

THE FACTS:

The fact that Democrat Kamala Harris won fewer votes in 2024 than President Joe Biden did in 2020 does not prove that Biden won because of voter fraud, as conservative social media users have alleged. Those advancing the claim stated that the millions more votes cast for Biden in 2020 must have been fraudulent ballots that were used to ensure Biden’s win.

In fact, Harris’ smaller vote total — approximately 12 million fewer than Biden’s 2020 total as of Nov. 8, 2024, when millions of ballots were left to be counted — can be explained by changes in voter preferences, according to elections experts. Moreover, most states had not finished counting their votes by the time these false claims began spreading in early November 2024, so the relatively large difference in vote totals is likely to become smaller over time.

As of Nov. 8, 2024, three days after the election, Democrat Kamala Harris had earned about 69.2 million votes, while Republican candidate Trump received approximately 73.5 million votes, The Associated Press reported. By comparison, Biden received approximately 81.3 million votes in 2020, while Trump earned about 74 million votes, according to the election analysis website Cook Political Report.

The difference in how many votes Biden and Harris received in 2020 and 2024, respectively, is not indicative of fraud or out of the ordinary, according to an elections expert who spoke to PolitiFact. “Democrats did not suddenly lose 20 million voters,” Kim Wyman, a senior elections fellow at the Bipartisan Policy Center who served as a Republican secretary of state of Washington from 2013 to 2021, told the fact-checking organization in November 2024.

According to Wyman, millions of citizens who voted for Biden in 2020 could have decided to vote for Trump or a third-party candidate in 2024. Wyman also said that Democrats in states won by Harris and Biden may have opted not to vote in the 2024 election, which would further explain the difference. Indeed, NewsGuard reviewed voter turnout data from 2020 and 2024 and found that in many blue states, Trump maintained a similar number of votes whereas Harris received far fewer than Biden in 2020. For example, in New Jersey, Trump won approximately 1.88 million votes in 2020 and 1.89 million votes as of Nov. 7, 2024, when the state had counted about 94 percent of ballots. Harris won the state with 2.1 million votes in 2024 — half-a-million fewer votes than Biden’s 2020 total of 2.6 million.

THE FACTS:

There is no evidence that Starlink, an internet provider owned by billionaire X owner Elon Musk, was used to rig the 2024 U.S. presidential election for Republican Donald Trump. Jen Easterly, director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, an agency in the U.S. Department Homeland Security monitoring election security, said in a Nov. 6, 2024, statement that her office saw “no evidence of any malicious activity that had a material impact on the security or integrity of our election infrastructure” in the 2024 election.

Websites for the secretaries of state in Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, and Pennsylvania, as well as the site for the North Carolina State Board of Elections, say that voting machines in their states are not connected online, making it impossible to hack equipment through an internet provider such as Starlink. Pennsylvania’s website states, “Voting systems are never connected to the internet, and every vote cast on a voting machine is recorded on a user-verifiable paper ballot.” Georgia’s website says voting “machines do not connect to the internet, which limits cybersecurity risks.”

The Michigan Secretary of State’s website says its voting equipment may go online to transmit results “only after counting has finished.” However, the site also states that when precincts in Michigan use the Internet to report election results to the county clerk, election workers “will bring a hard copy of the paper tally to the county clerk to ensure all vote counts remain accurate.”

And in Wisconsin, state Elections Commission members stated in a November 2024 article for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that voting “machines are never connected to the internet, and in fact are unable to connect, to prevent tampering.” The state’s largest city, Milwaukee, reports election results using flash drives, local news site Wisconsin Watch reported in November 2024.

States also have safeguards in place to confirm the accuracy of their election results. All but one state — Alabama, a traditionally red state that Trump won in a landslide — will audit its November 2024 election results, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

THE FACTS:

Dominion Voting Systems machines in Whitfield County, Georgia, did not switch votes cast for Donald Trump to Kamala Harris. During Georgia’s first week of early voting, which began on Oct. 15, 2024, a Whitfield County voter reported that their “ballot did not reflect their desired choice,” the Whitfield County Board of Elections said in an Oct. 19, 2024, news release. The elections board said that a poll worker then helped the voter throw out the incorrect ballot and re-cast a new one “with no further incident.”

Right-wing social media users alleged this incident was a sign that election machines were switching Georgians’ votes. However, there is no credible evidence that Dominion Voting Machines are switching votes in Whitfield County. Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, said the incident had a benign explanation.

“What happened in Whitfield County was the lady thought she had pressed a certain selection and then when she printed out the ballot she saw that, and she made [the poll workers] aware of it and it got corrected,” Raffensperger, a Republican, stated during an Oct. 20, 2024, appearance on CBS News’ “Face the Nation.” He added that “the equipment is working.”

Gabriel Sterling, Georgia’s Republican Secretary of State’s chief operating officer, said in an Oct. 18, 2024, X post: “Anyone claiming machines are flipping votes are lying or don’t research. This issue is human/user error.”

Dominion Voting Systems also denied the claim, saying in an Oct. 19, 2024, statement on its website: “The false claim that voting machines can switch votes has been repeatedly debunked. As both state and local election authorities have confirmed, the issue reported in Whitfield County was due to voter error. The county provided the voter with an opportunity to mark and print a new ballot with their correct choices and the issue was quickly resolved.”