A video appears to show an anti-Trump supporter burning dozens of voting ballots in a bag.
It is not explained in the video how the person apparently collected what he describes as “around 80” ballots that are all marked Donald Trump.
The video first surfaced on Election Day November 3rd and was subsequently given a significant boost when it was retweeted by Eric Trump a day later. (Eric Trump also retweeted another false claim about Biden receiving 100% of mail-in votes during a ballot dump.)
Firstly, the video appears suspicious simply because it exists and is online. If someone chooses to supress votes for a particular candidate by burning them, it would make little sense to post a video online of you doing just that, since by doing that, you are no longer supressing those votes, rather demonstrating to anyone with an Internet connection that you destroyed them.
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However, secondly and most importantly, the ballots being burned are not real. The ballots, which are marked as belonging to the Virginia Beach in Virginia, have been dismissed as samples by the City of Virginia Beach who issues the following brief statement –
A concerned citizen shared a video with us that ostensibly shows someone burning ballots. They are NOT official ballots, they are sample ballots. See the attached freeze frame image and photo of the official ballots, which have the bar codes.
As per the statement, official ballots have bar code markings around the perimeter of the ballot, which are lacking on the ballots in the circulating video.
Below is a screenshot of the video allegedly showing ballots being burned.
And below is an image of an official ballot from Virginia. Note the bar code markings around the perimeter.
It appears the video has been designed to promote the notion of voter fraud, which has been a popular claim made by President Trump in the run up to the 20202 US presidential election.
As such, we rank the claim that someone burned ballots marked for Trump as false.
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