Does a video show an Orange County, California, election worker committing electoral fraud by scanning ballots three times? No, that's not true: A spokesperson for the Orange County Registrar of Voters denied the accusation of fraud, saying the video "shows an Orange County election worker scanning a batch of ballots three times, but only saving the batch once." The first two scans likely showed that the scanner needed cleaning, and that was done before the third scan was run and saved, according to the spokesperson. They added, "We complete quality checks and audits to ensure ballots are only counted once."
The claim appeared in an article (archived here) published by joehoft.com on January 16, 2025. It began:
An election worker in Orange County, California is caught on camera shoving a large batch of ballots through an election machine three times. What is going on?
Orange County, California is a large conservative county just south of LA. There were six US House seats voted on in this county. A month after the 2024 election, 5 of the 6 seats were awarded to Democrats.
This is what the article looked like on joehoft.com at the time of writing:
Orange County's election results (archived here) were officially certified on December 3, 2024.
Following an inquiry sent on January 20, 2025, Lead Stories received this response from a spokesperson for the Orange County registrar of voters on January 21, 2025:
This video is from our security cameras in the Ballot Counting room but no, what the article says happened did not happen. This video shows an Orange County election worker scanning a batch of ballots three times, but only saving the batch once.
This is shown at the 1:25 mark of the video you posted when following her third scan of the batch of ballots a batch report printed from the printer at the end of the table, which she then attached to the top of the batch of ballots. This batch report did not print the first two times she scanned the batch of ballots, meaning she did not save those scans.
She likely scanned the batch of ballots twice and then cleaned the scanner before scanning the batch of ballots a third time because during the first two scans some of the ballots were rejected by the scanner. Given the large number of vote-by-mail ballots we must scan during an election, we must regularly clean the scanners.
What the registrar of voters spokesperson described does correspond to what can be observed in the video. In response to the same inquiry, the spokesperson added:
We complete quality checks and audits to ensure ballots are only counted once, including:
- Other Orange County election workers will later quality check the batch two additional times, making sure the ballots in the batch match the information printed on the report. Ballots are not uploaded into the tally until these two reviews are completed.
- Before our registrar certifies the results of the election, we audit the results of each of the 171 contests on the ballot. The audit is conducted by randomly selecting one percent of the precincts in the county (23) and then selecting additional precincts (62) until every contest is included. Then four-person audit teams hand count every ballot in those selected precincts. Our audit teams hand counted about 40,000 ballots for this election. These hand-counted results are compared to the voting system tally to ensure the results of each contest are correct. You can review information about these audits on our website at ocvote.gov/audit.
I hope this helps in understanding the processes in what the video showed.
Lead Stories previously debunked another claim pertaining to electoral fraud, also in Orange County.
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Additional Lead Stories fact checks on claims concerning election fraud can be found here.
