Because the 2024 presidential election attracts nearer, social media customers are crying foul over what they declare is an occasion of voter fraud in Missouri.
An Instagram reel shared a screenshot from X that claimed state voter registrations spiked unusually.
“Missouri registered 78,421 in simply ONE WEEK of February of this 12 months,” the screenshotted put up claimed. “Out of that quantity, 23,253 had been DEAD PEOPLE! Right here we go, AGAIN!”
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The screenshot cited Tim Pool, a conservative commentator and podcaster, as its supply.
Pool talked concerning the registrations throughout an April 3 episode of his podcast, saying the figures got here from the Social Safety Administration’s Assist America Vote Verification database for the week of Feb. 17.
“These are voter registrations the place somebody is making an attempt to make use of a Social Safety quantity and a reputation, and when it got here again to the (Social Safety Administration), they stated that particular person is lifeless,” Pool stated.
He questioned the way it didn’t strike officers as “odd” that almost a 3rd of the individuals who tried to register to vote in Missouri that week weren’t alive. (Pool is one in every of six Tenet Media content material creators whose work is below scrutiny following a federal indictment alleging two workers of Russia-owned broadcaster RT paid Tenet to push pro-Russian propaganda.)
Social Safety Administration and Missouri secretary of state officers stated Pool’s framing of the info was incorrect.
The Assist America Vote Verification database reveals the variety of verification requests despatched by a state’s election workplace to verify an individual’s eligibility to vote — not the quantity of people that registered to vote in a given week — a Social Safety Administration spokesperson stated in an announcement despatched to PolitiFact.
“Below the Assist America Vote Act, when a voter registrant doesn’t have a driver’s license, states are permitted to submit the voter registrant’s title, date of start and final 4 digits of their Social Safety quantity to the Social Safety Administration for verification,” the assertion stated.
Forty-three states use the database, which tracks the full variety of verification requests processed in a given week. It breaks down what number of requests will be matched to people who find themselves alive or lifeless. It doesn’t tally the variety of people who find themselves registered to vote or who’re making an attempt to register to vote.
In a earlier fact-check associated to the database, PolitiFact discovered that states can run a verification request for an individual a number of instances, contributing to the general numbers.
JoDonn Chaney, communications director for the Missouri secretary of state’s workplace, instructed PolitiFact that the state’s native election authorities have a mandate to scrub their voter rolls. As a part of that course of, they might periodically ping the database to find out who must be eliminated, based mostly on whether or not they had left the state or died.
“We don’t have that data of individuals making an attempt to register based mostly on the quantity (referred to within the declare),” he stated. “We don’t see that as folks making an attempt to register to vote.”
Chaney offered a month-by-month breakdown of the state’s variety of registered voters, exhibiting the video’s declare was off base.
Missouri had 4,270,843 voters in January and 4,268,935 million in February — a decline of 1,908. The full variety of voters within the state dropped by 574 folks in March to 4,268,361.
The state in April had a rise of 20,250 registered voters, bringing the full quantity for that month to 4,288,611.
Madison Walker, a Missouri secretary of state’s workplace communication specialist, stated there’s no particular cause for the spike, however the timing coincided with presidential caucuses and basic municipal elections.
The state by no means had 78,421 folks register to vote inside a single week.
Our ruling
An Instagram reel claimed knowledge from the Social Safety Administration confirmed that Missouri “registered 78,421 in only one week of February of this 12 months” and that “23,253 had been lifeless folks!”
The numbers cited within the declare come from the administration’s Assist America Vote Verification database, which states use to confirm folks’s voter data. States can ship a number of verification requests for a single particular person, which provides to the general numbers proven within the database.
These numbers don’t symbolize voter registrations.
We fee this declare False.
