Trump exaggerates, saying ballots were printed without his name

By Amy Sherman -

A recurring theme in recent campaign events for President Donald Trump is that there are "fake" ballots everywhere.

At a recent event in Erie, Pennsylvania, Trump continued his attacks on the integrity of elections and mail-in ballots, saying, without specifying, that "there are fake ballots everywhere."

“They are throwing them away.

Oh, and it turns out they have the Trump name.

Isn't that surprising? ”The president said on October 20.

“And what about the ones that were printed without my name, right?

They had everything, they had every race, they had everything.

You had the Senate, you had everything, and they forgot to put me ".

We asked the Trump campaign for those alleged ballots without his name, but got no response.

It is possible that Trump was referring to defective ballots in a Los Angeles district, which the president spoke about on the social network Twitter and in an October 8 interview with the conservative Fox News network.

The ballots of a Los Angeles district did not show the options for the presidential election

On October 5, Los Angeles election officials discovered that a small percentage of mail-in ballots did not include the presidential election.

That means that not only was Trump's name missing, but also that of Democratic candidate Joe Biden.

The defective ballots were mailed to just a district of just over 2,100 voters, out of a total of more than 5.6 million registered voters in the county, according to a statement from the Los Angeles County Recorder.

Affected voters were contacted via automated phone calls and emails, and the county sent them new ballots.

By October 21, there were no more reports of ballots that skipped the presidential election, Mike Sanchez, a spokesman for the elections office, told us.

His office

Voters who have been sent a corrected ballot will only be able to vote once.

The envelopes in which these ballots are returned have a barcode with each voter's identification, so that election officials can record that person cast a vote and prevent a second ballot from the same person from being counted.

Less chaos and more respect: the presidential debate that could be heard

Oct. 23, 202004: 53

400 ballots in Michigan did not include Pence

On September 17, Trump wrote on Twitter about another ballot error, this time in Michigan.

The ballot did not include the name of the vice president, Mike Pence, and it made it look as if Trump was running alongside Jeremy Cohen, a libertarian candidate.

Trump said this was on purpose, but the Secretary of State said it was a misprint.

On about 400 ballots that were downloaded by local election officials, the vice presidential candidates were listed incorrectly, said Tracy Wimmer, a spokeswoman for Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson.

The error happened when officials were unloading ballots for voters in the Armed Forces and abroad.

Wimmer told PolitiFact that the issue was resolved within hours.

"The print failure was caused by isolated human error and will not happen again,"

Wimmer told PolitiFact.

“We don't know how many of these ballots were sent to the voters, but officials were immediately told to report the error and send them a corrected ballot.

In any case, the votes of the voters who used the wrong ballot instead of a corrected ballot will be counted. "

As of October 19, nearly 1.5 million of the 3 million requested ballots in Michigan had already been returned.

[Follow our full coverage on the presidential elections]

At his event in Erie, Trump also spoke about ballots that were thrown in the trash.

A New Jersey postman was charged by federal authorities with throwing away 1,875 items from the mail, including 99 ballots.

In Pennsylvania's Luzerne County, press reports indicated that an election official threw out nine military ballots in September.

The electoral authorities said that sometimes military ballots arrive in envelopes that are not clearly marked and that there was confusion about it.

Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar said it was a mistake.

Our rating

Trump said there were "fake ballots" that were "printed without my name."

We found one case where some 2,000 ballots that skipped the presidential election entirely - not just Trump's name, but also Biden's and other candidates - were sent to a Los Angeles district.

The county replaced those faulty ballots quickly.

Errors are not evidence of a conspiracy to favor a candidate or to commit fraud.

We rate this statement as

.

The translation of this article was carried out by Pablo Medina Uribe thanks to the FactChat agreement, coordinated by the 

International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN)

by clicking here

#Chatbot