Social media users shared images allegedly showing shredded ballot papers in the U.S. state of Georgia during the Senate election. This is not true: the photos show waste paper, not ballot papers.
The allegations first appeared on Twitter on January 6, receiving more than 77,600 preferences. The tweet has a full-box image with shredded paper along with the caption: ‘Our team is in Georgia. They walked a bit. They got shredded ballots in Dell boxes. The police also came. They wanted to confiscate cell phones with evidence. Here are just the first few photos ”( here and here ).
The tweets were later shared here on Facebook, here, here, here, here, here and here.
Georgia’s run-off election led to the Democrats taking control of the US Senate after Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff emerged victorious (here).
There is no evidence that the boxes photographed in Georgia on January 6 were filled with broken ballot papers.
The tweet was identified as being taken at the Georgia World Congress Center in Fulton County. The BBC reports that district election director Richard Barron told reporters that the newspapers in the photo were not ballot papers, but waste from a machine for opening letters used to cut envelopes (www.bbc.co. uk / news / 55561877).
Fulton County Government spokeswoman Jessica Corbitt-Dominguez confirmed in an email to Reuters: “The paper seen in the photo is not ballot papers, but paper waste.”
The claim that the waste was as ballot papers was also denied here by Politifact.
Reuters has identified similar instances of misinformation regarding Georgia’s two Senate by-elections here.
VERDICT
Untrue. The images shared online show shredded paper in boxes, not voices thrown away.
This article was produced by the Reuters Fact Check team. Read more about our fact-checking work here.