Where does Detroit Van Take Us?

Reading Time: 3 minutes

Reading Time: 3 minutes

27
VIEWS

On February 9, the Alt-Info TV program “Alt Interview” hosted Beka Vardosanidze, Georgian supporter of former U.S. President Donald Trump, who reiterated that the U. (modafinil) S. presidential election was rigged. In response to Myth Detector’s article covering this issue and in an attempt to illustrate ballot fraud in the United States, he cited a video footage allegedly showing a van delivering hundreds of thousands of ballots to Detroit.

Alt TV, Alt Interview, February 9, Beka Vardosanidze: “By the way, Detroit still… There is one of the websites hated by our liberals and fact-checkers and it obtained a video footage, showing how a Marshrutka [a van] delivers hundreds of thousands of ballots to the vote counting center in Detroit and after the video footage was released, Twitter blocked the account of this media outlet forever. ” (06:42 – 07:06)

Beka Vardosanidze echoes the false claim made by the conservative website The Gateway Pundit about late night deliveries of “hundreds of thousands” of ballots to the Detroit vote counting center. The November 4 dawn was the deadline for delivering absentee ballots, not counting them and the process of counting was still underway.

  • What ballots were delivered to the TCF Center in the early morning on November 4?

The U.S. population had an opportunity to vote by mail during the 2020 presidential election. This is how absentee ballots emerged. Due to the coronavirus pandemic, a lot of instances of absentee voting were reported. Though every state has absentee voting, rules on who can take part vary. According to the voting rules of a specific state, an absentee ballot is sent to a voter; the latter fills it out and returns to a local election office or another location. An absentee ballot filled out by a citizen may be invalidated due to the mistakes made in filling it out, and may therefore not be included in final vote tallies.

After receiving absentee ballots, citizens had until 8 pm on Election Day (November 3) to complete the ballot and return it to the clerk’s office where its validity had to be confirmed. Only after going through this procedure, it would be possible to deliver ballots to the vote counting hub, like the TCF Center in Detroit. Just these ballot papers were delivered to the TCF Center early on January 4 for counting. Thus, 8pm deadline on November 3 was the deadline for delivering absentee ballots, not counting them. It is obvious that the process of vote counting would have continued in Michigan after the deadline for delivering absentee ballots had expired.

The video referred to by Beka Vardosanidze was released by the conservative website The Gateway Pundit on February 5, along with the article. The website claimed that the ballots were delivered upon expiration of the deadline that was a violation. The article as well as the accompanying video was verified by the fact-checking platform PolitiFact. In the interview with the latter, Christopher Thomas, the former Michigan Director of Elections who worked at the TCF Center, clarified that no late-arriving ballots were ever counted. He said that only the absentee ballots sent by citizens until 8pm that went through the validation process were delivered to the center in the early hours of November 4.

It is noteworthy that identical claims about delivering illegal ballots to Detroit’s TCF Center were also spread in November 2020. The video taken by a member of Lawyers for Trump showed a black box being taken out of the van parked outside the TCF center. The same person raised alarms that the box might have been a ballot box that arrived long after all ballots were expected to have been received at the counting facility. In fact, the video showed a WXYZ photographer loading his camera and other gear into a wagon for work.


The article has been written in the framework of Facebook’s fact-checking program. You can read more about the restrictions that Facebook may impose based on this article via this link. You can find information about appealing or editing our assessment via this link.

Read detailed instructions for editing the article.
Read detailed appeal instructions.

Topic: Politics
Violation: Disinformation
Country: USA
Source

Last News

Welcome Back!

Login to your account below

Retrieve your password

Please enter your username or email address to reset your password.

Add New Playlist