Does a brief vote spike followed by a sudden drop of 90,000 votes reported by the Associated Press in Nevada's House District 2 on Nov. 4, 2026, indicate election fraud? No, that's not true: An AP spokesperson told Lead Stories it was a glitch caused by a "vote-entry error" that was "quickly identified and corrected." The person who recorded the changes and posted about it on social media called it suspicious in an interview with Lead Stories, but he acknowledged he had no evidence that it was fraud.
The claim originated in a post shared by the @FSociety_1942 X account on Nov. 8, 2026. It read:
NEVADA HOUSE DISTRICT 2 - IMPORTANT
At 3:27 AM Eastern 34,957 votes were removed from Democrat Teresa Benitez-Thompson and 56,329 were removed from Republican David Flippo. This was a net loss of 21,282 votes from Flippo. Who, apparently, lost the race by 18,896.
So we have an example of vote reductions in the Election Night Reporting whose magnitude would have changed the race. I hope my Nevada friends can let Mr. Flippo know and start asking hard questions in District 2!
This is a screenshot of a chart created by Jeff O'Donnell, the owner of the @FSociety_1942 X account, to illustrate the vote count timeline:
(Image source: LindellTV)
Jeff O'Donnell, who posts on social media by the username "The Lone Raccoon," said in a phone interview with Lead Stories that he subscribed to the New York Times stream of vote counts, which was provided to media organizations by the AP. O'Donnell imported the data into his computer and then analyzed it for signs of voter fraud. The chart above, which he shared during an interview with Mike Lindell, shows the timeline of the vote count for the Nevada district 2 House race between Republican David Flippo and Democrat Teresa Benitez-Thompson during the first half of the three o'clock hour of the morning on Nov. 4, 2026. It shows a sharp increase of about 120,000 votes for each candidate at 3:13 a.m. ET. The count remained unchanged until 3:28 a.m. ET when it reflected a decline of about 35,000 for Benitez-Thompson and 21,000 for Flippo.
AP media relations manager Nicole Mier confirmed the up-and-down vote count in an email reply to Lead Stories' inquiry:
A vote-entry error caused an incorrect vote total to briefly appear in AP's results for Nevada's 2nd Congressional District race. We quickly identified and corrected the total.
O'Donnell said what "just raises my hackles" is that Flippo was leading before the rise, but trailing after the fall. AP eventually declared Benitez-Thompson the winner by a nearly 19,000 vote margin. He wants a more detailed explanation of how the error occurred:
If I give them the benefit of the doubt and I say that this was an unintentional something, I think they owe it to the people to tell them where did the wheel come off?
The AP spokesperson directed Lead Stories to an explanation given by AP Vice President of Elections David Scott in an article titled "Inside AP's election night vote count" (archived here) published by the AP corporate communications department on October 14, 2026. It read:
Most ballots cast in American elections are still marked-up pieces of paper. There will be well over 100 million of them in this year's general election. Voters are human - and so are the people who collect and count their ballots. They make mistakes on occasion. Those mistakes are almost always caught within a few minutes. Sometimes within a few seconds.
Not every change in the vote count is the result of a mistake, of course. Election officials often count and report results in batches, which means thousands of votes can be added to the totals all at once. That's a normal part of the process.
I understand why people might worry about this. I'm a journalist and for close to 30 years have lived by AP standards, which put accuracy in reporting the news at the top of our list of values.
In a statement to Lead Stories, the Nevada Secretary of State's Office said:
The Secretary of State's Office has several safeguards in place to ensure that vote counts are reported accurately. The office confirmed that under no circumstances are votes removed from a candidate's totals.
Lead Stories investigated similar claims about AP's data feeds in previous elections, including when Trump votes appeared to become Biden votes in Wisconsin in November 2020. An AP spokesperson then told Lead Stories it was just a glitch caused by "a brief technical error" that was "quickly corrected."
