Clip shows Pennsylvania mail carrier, not illegal voting

A video amplified by a popular promoter of the QAnon conspiracy theory purports to capture a man in the US state of Pennsylvania’s Northampton County illegally smuggling ballots into a courthouse ahead of the 2024 presidential election. But the claims suggesting malfeasance are false; the clip shows a postal worker lawfully transporting votes.

“Need help identifying this guy that just dropped off an insane amount of ballots who says he’s with the post office but idk if I buy that,” says an October 29, 2024 post on X. “He wouldn’t talk to us and was acting very suspect.”

In the clip, a camera trails and zooms in on a man carrying a box full of ballots into the Northampton County Courthouse and placing them through a security scanner. The person behind the camera shouts: “You’re supposed to only turn in one ballot per person.”

“There’s somebody here in Northampton County dropping off an obscene amount of ballots at the very last second, after the office is actually closed,” the person says. “This guy.”

The video, as well as follow-up posts sharing photos of the ballot-carrying man’s car with a Rhode Island license plate, comes from Brandon Matlack. His X bio says he works for Early Vote Action, an activist group aimed at registering Republican voters.

The clip quickly racked up millions of engagements across X and other platforms, amplified by an account called “MJTruthUltra,” a prominent backer of the baseless QAnon conspiracy theory that claims Donald Trump is waging a secret war against a cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles.

Alex Jones, founder of the conspiratorial website InfoWars, shared the QAnon account’s post and said: “They don’t even try to hide it!”

Numerous comments call for the man handling the ballots to be tracked down and jailed.

The swing state of Pennsylvania has been a target of numerous fraud claims during early voting in the tight 2024 presidential contest between Trump, the Republican nominee, and Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris.

“We’ve seen several videos shared widely online that lacked proper context or were inaccurate, leading to false narratives,” Pennsylvania Secretary of State Al Schmidt said during an October 30 media briefing. “It’s critical that, at this juncture in the election cycle, voters get their information from trusted sources.”

Claims that the man in Matlack’s video is illegally harvesting votes are the latest example of misinformation about fraud affecting the election outcome.

“It’s literally the postmaster,” Northampton County said in an October 30 X post responding to Matlack (archived here).

A spokesperson for the US Postal Service (USPS) confirmed that in an October 30 email.

“The employee in this video is an area postal manager (who does not wear a postal uniform or drive an official vehicle in the usual course of his duties) seen delivering ballots to election offices in alignment with the extra efforts we are deploying across the country this week,” the spokesperson told AFP.

The spokesperson pointed to a USPS press release that lists the local handling and transportation of ballots among the measures the agency is taking to ensure all mail-in votes are delivered in time to count (archived here).

‘It’s so ludicrous‘

Northampton County Executive Lamont McClure told AFP that the man in the footage circulating online is serving as the temporary officer in charge of the USPS branch in Easton, Pennsylvania. The Northampton County Courthouse is in Easton.

McClure provided the name of the postal worker, whose identity AFP verified via a photo on a USPS-affiliated website (archived here). AFP is not publishing his name out of concern for his safety and privacy.

McClure said the acting postmaster is from Rhode Island and stepped into the role after a previous leader’s promotion left a vacancy. He said the video shared on social media is being presented “out of context” to spread “election misinformation and disinformation.“

“He was doing the most normal, natural, legal thing in the world — the thing we want — which is the post office to deliver our mail,” McClure said October 30. 

He said the man is “already being harassed because of this tweet that went viral,” adding that people “have been putting his license plate on social media and talking about looking him up and trying to figure out where he lives.”

McClure said there has “absolutely not” been any evidence of fraud in his county’s elections, and that nonstop video surveillance and security at the courthouse guards against the type of fraud alleged online.

“You’re on video from the time you leave your car until the time you leave this building, and it’s all recorded. So I mean, you really would have to be a stone-cold moron to try and smuggle ballots in that way, past deputies who are X-raying your bin. It’s so ludicrous.”

Matlack, who first shared the video on X, promised October 30 to “take this down and issue a correcting statement” if the man was truly from the postal service. He had not removed the video or corrected the record as of October 31.

AFP has debunked other misinformation about the election here.