Has DHS and Trump set up secretly watermarked ballots to detect fraud? Fact Check

Conspiracy theories online are claiming that voting ballots in the 2020 US election have been secretly watermarked by the Department of Homeland Security under the order of President Trump in a “sting” operation intended to detect and discard voter fraud committed by the Democratic party.

FALSE

Consider: Dept of Homeland Security controlled “official ballots” production. Dems print extras, not knowing about non-radioactive isotope watermarks on “official ballots”. Military sting operation. After weeding out all counterfeit ballots, Trump landslide confirmed.

Apparently all legit ballots have been secretly watermarked and the Dems have been caught with their hand in the cookies jar!

Various permutations of this bizarre conspiracy have popped up online, all making slightly nuanced claims. Many variants have been linked to the notorious 4Chan.org forum that is responsible for kickstarting a large number of widespread online hoaxes and has more recently become prolific in starting politically themed conspiracy theories.

Other variants of this claim have been linked to the QAnon series of conspiracy theories that are also responsible for starting many conspiracy theories, and whose fundamental belief is that President Trump is locked in a secret battle to expose a large pedophile ring operated by Democratic politicians and various business personalities and celebrities.

The claims are, to say the least, bizarre. The most popular variants of these claims assert that it is the Department of Homeland Security that is printing the secretly watermarked ballots and that they are doing so as a “trap” that has been kept secret from the entire US Democratic party.

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Of course, such a story is exceptionally fanciful, with no shortage of holes. For one, it is the states themselves that produce and print their own ballots, since each state is in charge of their own state elections. Each state produces their ballots to their own standards and requirements and employ various third party printing companies to get the ballots printed, and each state is responsible for validating voting ballots cast.

The notion that the Department of Homeland Security has taken over this entire process for every single state, all without any single member of the Democratic Party knowing (or leaking) – whether they belong to a particular state’s election board, secretary of state’s office, polling station workers or anyone involved in the production of the ballots or the logistics involved in distributing them – is of course entirely nonsensical.

Secondly, the notion of secret watermarks makes no sense since many US states really do use watermarks to help with the security and legitimacy of voting ballots, and they do so publicly. For example, California announced back in August 2020 that they would be using the watermark of a poppy.

The watermark for the November 3, 2020, General Election, is the CA Poppy. The tint for the background and watermark is Red PMS 192. The watermark and tint must appear on the ballot itself, not only on the stub.

Individual states can employ any number of different techniques to help secure their ballots. According to Sam Mahood, spokesman for the California secretary of state’s office, those measures include:

• Vote-by-mail ballots use specific paper-types and have unique watermarks.
• All vendors who print ballots must be certified by the state.
• Every vote-by-mail ballot return envelope has a unique barcode that elections officials scan (ballots cannot be returned in a different envelope and be counted).

Other claims assert that small dots on the paper ballots are covert watermarks. While we cannot determine exactly what these are, they are most likely the result of printer imperfections caused by dust and other foreign materials that can result in seemingly random dots that will replicate on each piece of paper that goes through a printer.

Dots are typically caused by foreign material inside the machine (for example, paper dust, glue from labels or envelopes, paper clips, staples) sticking to or damaging the surface of the drum. Toner builds up on or sticks to these areas on the drum and creates black dots on the printed pages.

A similar claim comes in the form of a yet-to-be-published “leaked press statement” from an anonymous author about a DHS “sting” that secretly marked ballots and discovered that 80% of over 14 million ballots had been reviewed in Arizona and Michigan, most of which were found to be supporting Biden.

Not only does this baseless claim also fall foul of the points we’ve made above, this “statement” first appeared on November 4th 2020, the day after the presidential election. For it to be true, we’d have to assume that the Department of Homeland Security managed to secretly count and tabulate 14 million votes, analyse their findings and then issue a press release about their findings, all within 24 hours. We think that is somewhat unlikely.

Not only do these silly theories fail to provide any evidence to support their ludicrous claims, they even fail to make any sense.

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