Diving into Election fraud ‘evidence’ shared on Twitter
With the 2020 Election in the United States still an ongoing topic in the nation, there have been a lot of posts on social media that have focused on voter fraud.
Since several news outlets declared Democratic nominee Joe Biden as the projected winner to be the 46th president of the country, the current commander-in-chief, Donald Trump, has gone on a Twitter onslaught. Denouncing the results and claiming fraud in different states.
This has caused plenty of controversies and has led to many people looking for proof of the president’s strong claims that Biden is not the rightful winner of the election.
While Trump is insistent on Twitter, plenty of people on social media have taken it upon themselves to prove that the 2020 election was filled with interference and fraud.
This has also caused plenty of misinformation to be shared across all social media platforms, which has made it more important for people to be extra careful when looking for posts that are shared and being presented as fact.
Looking for misinformation
In an effort to see what “evidence” people are sharing on social platforms, I scoured the Twitter-world to look for potential misinformation posts and did a dive on one in particular that caught my attention.
These were my findings:
Step One: Searching
The first thing I did as I searched for potential misinformation was hopped on TweetDeck and use its search bar to type in the keywords “thrown away” and “ballots.”
Once I scrolled through a plethora of tweets with plenty of strong claims and plenty of capitalized letters and exclamation points, I settled on one post that caught my attention.
Step Two: Reverse image search
Once I chose to focus on this tweet, I took a “screenshot” of the picture using the good old Sniping Tool on my computer and then I went over to Google and used the technique known as reverse image search.
What this does is that it allows you to search the image itself and find where else it has been posted on through the internet. In this instance, I found a news article from Fox News, which did provide a story on 18 ballots that had been discovered near a field in Glendale, Arizona.
Not only that, but there was also an image used in the article that was identical to the one that the user shared on Twitter.
However, there were a few differences between this news story and the manner, in which the user on Twitter used the photo.
The ballots were discovered a few days before Election Day, and the envelopes were still sealed and were intended to get to voters, who had asked for ballots. According to the AGO, they had been stolen from the individual’s mailboxes and not been filled out yet.
According to the Fox News article, after discovering the ballots, a Glendale Police officer and two attorney general special agents delivered the ballots to the original voters and offered them a chance to alert them and either fill them out or confirm they had already voted.
In the tweet, however, the user writes that Republicans did mail-in votes and they were thrown away.
The news article makes no mention of that claim, and because the ballots were sealed, it was not possible to know, who each of the people they belonged to voted for or are associated with.
Step Three: Shadow Analysis
When I first found the image, the reason it stood out to me was because of how grainy and low quality it was.
While in this case, the image of the envelopes and ballots were real, my first instinct when examining the photo was to check to see if it look doctored in any way, and a great way to do that is to see if the shadows are in the places you’d expect them to be, or if they match the shape that is causing them.
As I studied the image, I mainly focused on the shadow cast by the large rock on one envelope, and it appeared to be in order.
Another key thing to look for when studying images is the markings on an image, in this case, it would be the stripes and writing on the envelopes, however, because of the low quality of the image, I was unable to study much more.
Step Four: Geo-Location Analysis
As the user says in his tweet, the envelopes were found in Arizona, and upon finding the Fox News article, I was also able to find a more precise location to where these ballots were found, which was near the intersection of 99th and Glendale avenues according to the article, which is in Arizona.
With this information available, I looked it up on Google Maps, and this what I found.
From searching up the location, I was able to find a field that fit the description of the location that the news article described, which brought more validity to my findings.
What I took away
While finding that one picture on Twitter led me on a digital scavenger hunt, it also provided me with a few takeaways.
Even though the picture, is in fact, that of numerous ballots that were discovered and had been thrown away according to Fox News, the user on Twitter used the image to spread misinformation.
As mentioned earlier, there was no proof that this incident was directly targeted at Republicans, nor that it was an ongoing issue both in Arizona and in the entire country.
From the article, it appears that this was one confirmed isolated incident that while concerning, is not proof of a widespread problem.
Ultimately I encourage all users to use these steps when confronted with an image on social media that is being used to paint a story that may not be entirely true.
andyyanez05@gmail.com
