Election

Does a 2022 ballot initiative in Connecticut "remove the requirement of a certified seal from certain ballots" and does it mean that "certain ballots don't have to have security seals to be processed" anymore? No, that's not true: Connecticut voters paying close attention to the full text of the initiative will see it does not mention anything about seals on…

Milli Legrain is a multilingual journalist and consultant based in Washington D.C. with 17 years' experience in the United States, Latin America, Spain and the UK. She is fully trilingual (English, Spanish and French) and speaks Portuguese. She covered the 2016 and 2020 US elections for Univision and Telemundo. Her freelance work has been published by The Guardian, BBC Mundo,…

Is it possible to cheat the mail-in ballot elections system in Live Oak County, Texas, and vote on behalf of a deceased person? It's possible, but it would be extremely difficult. Many safeguards are in place to prevent that from happening. In a phone interview with Lead Stories, Live Oak County Voter Registrar Deanna Atkinson said there are "a lot…

Did special counsel John Durham unveil President Joe Biden's "Russian plot," aimed at getting Hillary Clinton elected in 2024? No, that's not true: Durham has said no such thing. A post making the claim includes various Newsmax clips as supposed support for its statement, but the clips do not corroborate the allegation. They are unrelated to it. The claim appeared…

Did Home Depot donate $1.7 million in October 2022 to former NFL player and 2022 Senate candidate Herschel Walker? No, that's not true: Bernard "Bernie" Marcus, a co-founder of Home Depot who retired from the company in 2002, made two donations totaling $1.75 million to a political action committee that supports Walker in his race for the U.S. Senate seat…

Did Rep. Jim Jordan play a video downloaded from Hunter Biden's laptop that incriminated House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff? No, that's not true: The video with this claim shows Jordan criticizing Schiff over matters that have nothing to do with Hunter Biden or the contents of a computer hard drive that media reports have linked to him. The claim…

Does an image of Brazilian presidential candidate Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva show Brazil's former leader holding a statuette of the pagan deity Baphomet? No, that's not true: The photograph has been digitally manipulated to place the figure in his hands. Written in French, the claim was posted on Twitter on October 7, 2022, along with the photograph of a…

Can former President Donald Trump be reinstated by a Supreme Court decision in the case of Moore v. Harper? No, that's not true: Lead Stories asked legal experts about the claim and they said there's no chance that Trump could be reinstated as president because there's no constitutional mechanism for doing so. Also noted, the case has no bearing on…

Does the presence of "QR code signature mismatch" error codes reported in some Dominion voting machines in Tennessee invalidate Georgia election results? No, that's not true: Experts with whom Lead Stories spoke said there is no connection between error codes found in Tennessee voting machines and Georgia election results, and that such error codes are generic indicators election administrators use…