Post claims Pennsylvania poll worker threw out hundreds of Trump ballots. Fact Check

A post on Instagram has gone viral claiming to have been from a poll worker in Erie County in Pennsylvania who claimed to have thrown away hundreds of Trump ballots.

FALSE

The post reads –

Been working at a poll station in Erie county, PA all morning. A lot of people have already voted today 🙂 I’ve thrown out over a hundred ballots for trump already!! Pennsylvania gonna turn blue 2020!!

The post was made by a user named Sebastian Machado, username omg_seabass.

It is inevitable that given President Trump’s claims in the run up to the 2020 presidential election about voter fraud that we were going to see many claims about the subject, many of which is likely to be misinformation.

In this case, the Erie County Courthouse dismissed the claim, with an election coordinator Amy Dalessandro telling reporters that there is no poll worker with that name.

He is not one of our poll workers and there is no one with that name registered to vote in Erie, PA,

Erie County Board of Elections Chair Carl J. Anderson III also gave a fuller statement about the Instagram post –

Erie County has checked into the unfortunate claim being shared across social media by someone saying they are working as part of the Erie County Board of Elections and throwing out ballots. The person making the statements does not work in any way with Erie County or have any part of Erie County’s election process. In fact, the individual is not a registered voter and is not believed to be a resident of Erie County, Pa. Erie County Board of Elections takes the integrity of the election process very seriously, and we are proud that the people working on behalf of the voters in Erie County do so in a nonpartisan, fair and unified fashion for the betterment of our community.

Given the only “evidence” of such an assertion that a poll worker threw away hundreds of Trump ballots comes from an unverified Instagram post which has been dismissed by the Erie County Board of Elections, we rank this claim as false.