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At an Oct. 29 event featuring prominent election speakers, an artist showed a video he made as a disturbing example of the vulnerability of America’s election infrastructure.
“This is an Iranian speaker,” said Mark Cook, who showed the video. “This just fell into my lap a couple of days ago. But this is so true.”
Cook said the video showed a whistleblower showing fraudulent military votes in the 2020 presidential election. He said the whistleblower used an online downloadable tool to connect to a U.S. voter registration database. . Then, Cook said, the whistleblower took Alaskan voter registration data and used it to create a “military vote.”
“This is video from their system and they did this, apparently, in the 2020 election,” Cook said at the press conference.–sponsored by the First United States Secretary of State. The coalition is a QAnon-affiliated group of Republican dissidents running in 2022 to take control of state elections in Nevada, Arizona, Michigan and other swing states.
Videos from the event circulated on social media in the days before the November 8 election, including an Instagram post on November 3.
The announcement was made as part of Instagram’s efforts to combat false and misleading information on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram.)
This video, which was shown at an event featuring popular pollsters, did not show the rigging of real votes. (Images from the ACCFEI event record)
When PolitiFact investigated the origin of the video shown by Cook, we found that it does not show real election fraud. A pattern was created in the 2020 presidential election as part of an effort to undermine voter confidence in the security of America’s election infrastructure, administration officials said.
Federal officials discovered this activity, investigated and charged two individuals with conspiracy to commit crimes. U.S. Attorney Damian Williams for the Southern District of New York in 2021 called the video “a fictitious video that purports to show actors who are manipulating elections overseas.”
The video does not show that fraudulent votes were cast in the 2020 election
Nicholas Biase, a spokesman for the U.S. Attorney’s Office, said the video showed Cook showing information related to a campaign of terrorism and influencing voters that occurred from August to November 2020.
He said it was very similar to a video mentioned in the 2021 indictment. The Justice Department said two Iranians created and distributed a “fake election video” that shows “someone who hacking into federal voter websites and using stolen voter information to create fraudulent ballots through the Federal Voting Assistance Program (FVAP) for military and overseas voters.”
Federal investigators clarified, however, that the video is not evidence that a person created fraudulent ballots counted in the 2020 presidential election.
“The software installations shown in the Virtual Election Video are simulated installations created by the members of the syndicate using their own servers and data obtained” when successfully completed hackers at a state’s voter registration website, the Justice Department said. “Furthermore, the (Federal Voting Assistance Program) cannot be used in the manner described by the Fraudulent Voting Video.”
Officials were described as “intelligent Iranian computer hackers.” The pair faced charges including one count of conspiracy to commit computer fraud and abuse, voter intimidation, and interstate transmission of threats; one count of voter intimidation; and an account of the transmission of threats between countries.
The US Treasury Department also announced in 2021 that it is imposing sanctions on six Iranians and an Iranian entity in connection with trying to influence the 2020 US election.
Our decision
A video on Instagram purportedly shows a whistleblower creating a fraudulent military vote in the 2020 presidential election.
The clip does not show the rigging of real votes.
A Justice Department official confirmed that the video is similar to one linked to the 2020 voter fraud campaign. The video is fake, and the people who made it are suspect for violating certain government laws.
We rule the claim false.
PolitiFact researcher Caryn Baird contributed to this report.
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