More than 40,000 social media users share clips from TV news networks showing two declines in votes for David Perdue, the Republican candidate in the Senate race in Georgia, claiming it is evidence of fraud and voter fraud. Edison Research, which provides election data, explained to Reuters that the drops were due to data entry errors that were subsequently corrected.
Two of the videos show that the votes for Perdue decrease from 774,723 to 742,323 on the automatic tick on ABC News ( here , here) and CNN (here, here , here). Another video shows how votes for Perdue decreased from 2,130,535 to 2,125,535 on the automatic tick on ABC News ( here , here and CNN here ). Captions and remarks include: “Democrats cheat AGAIN! UNDISPUTABLE PROOF !! ”; “VOTES STOLEN ON LIVE TV” ( here ); “Just another joke of an election !!”; and “It’s a sad day in America when their steel (sic) voice is right in front of the world !!”
Georgia voted on Jan. 5 to elect the last two senators to the U.S. Senate, in races between Democrat Raphael Warnock and Republican incumbent Kelly Loeffler, and Democrat Jon Ossoff and Republican incumbent David Perdue, where the party as both Democrats would win, take control of Congress, with greater power to advance President-elect Joe Biden’s policy goals (here).
An ABC News representative telephoned Reuters to confirm that the information was in Edison Research’s automatic tick. CNN did not immediately respond to Reuters’ request for comment, but had the same figures as ABC News, suggesting the source of the data is likely to be the same.
A spokesman for Edison Research explained the cause of the two drops by email to Reuters, saying “both errors in entering data were corrected within minutes”.
Edison Research told Reuters that the drop from 774,723 votes to 742,323 votes came from Bibb province and that it was due to a mistake an Edison reporter made at the state office. ” At 20:07, the poll reported from the Georgia state and Edison reported: Ossoff 27,986, Perdue 12,496. At 20:15 ET, the following voice update was entered incorrectly by a call center operator as reported by our reporter at the Bibb County office: Ossoff 27,986, Perdue 44,896. At 20:20 ET our quality control flagged this incorrect data and we deleted the update: Ossoff 27986, Perdue 12496. At 20:37 ET, the Georgia State Department provided a new update: Ossoff 28 888, Perdue 14 044. ”
The second reduction of the votes from 2 130 535 to 2 125 535 was’ a data entry error by a reporter in the province of Dekalb where a ‘3’ was read as’ 8 ‘and resulted in an error of 5 000, ‘a spokesman for Edison Research told Reuters. He further explained, “At 23:20 ET our reporter called in this information in Dekalb: Ossoff 254 622, Perdue 58 853. This was rectified four minutes later by deducting the state supply by deducting the 5k error for Perdue: Ossoff 25 , 4622, Perdue 53,853. ”
Reporting bugs like these are common: Reuters has dropped claims related to errors in voter turnout during the 2020 presidential election in places including Antrim County, Michigan (here), Shiawassee County, Michigan (here) and Fairfax County, Virginia ( which included deductions). for Joe Biden’s voices, here too).
VERDICT
Untrue. Edison Research explained to Reuters that the drop in votes for Perdue was due to human errors in data entry that were corrected within five minutes of the entry, and therefore is not evidence of fraud.
This article was produced by the Reuters Fact Check team. Read more about our fact-checking work here.