Doctored Video Of Vote Counting Circulating: Delco Officials

DELAWARE COUNTY, PA — Delaware County authorities say a video manipulated to show voter fraud has been making rounds online.

According to the county, the video purport to show Delaware County election staff fraudulently filling in blank ballots.

"The video was taken from the official live stream provided by Delaware County, however, the circulated video is zoomed in to crop out the surrounding area, including the bipartisan observers who were not more than six feet away and does not give the full picture of the process," officials said

According to the county, the video shows an election worker, seemingly alone at a table, marking a ballot.

However, officials said the actual video shows the election worker at a table with other coworkers in a room full of people with bipartisan observers a few feet away at each end of the table, closely observing the worker from about six feet away.

"This arrangement was agreed upon between the Election Bureau and the former Republican Chairman of Delaware County Council, acting in his capacity as counsel for the Delaware County Republican Party," officials said.

The pre-canvass and canvass of mail-in ballots has been livestreamed since 7 a.m. Tuesday.

Officials made the stream available to give residents a "transparent view of the process."

"Unfortunately, some residents have altered the video and are making false accusations, which baselessly and wrongly attacks the integrity of the election staff and the completely transparent process by which votes are being counted in Delaware County," the county said.

According to the county, a machine extractor opens the ballots during the processing.

Some ballots were damaged by the extractor during this process in such a way that the ballots could not be scanned successfully. According to the scanner manufacturer, Hart, the best practice to deal with damaged ballots that cannot be scanned is to transcribe the votes on each ballot to a clean ballot and scan the clean ballot.

Following that guidance, the Chief Clerk of the Delaware County Bureau of Elections told elections staff to manually transcribe the damaged ballots. As ballots were being transcribed, the original damaged ballots were directly beside the new ballots and bipartisan observers witnessed the process at close range.

Damaged ballots have been preserved, officials said.