DISINFO: The Guardian exposes how US Democrats exploited irregularities in mail-in voting
SUMMARY
Millions of mail-in ballots didn’t reach US citizens, which gave the Democrats some space for their machinations, according to statistics by The Guardian. Mail-in voting, started by the Democratic Party, is already plagued with problems, since around 60 percent of citizens in 9 competitive states didn’t receive their ballots. The problem is not unexpected. The community of experts warned repeatedly that the US electoral system is not ready for such a drastic transition to mail-in voting. In this context, even the OSCE challenges the legitimacy of the election.
RESPONSE
This is a complete distortion of an article published in The Guardian in cooperation with ProPublica, tracking mail-in ballots in US swing states. Though the original article gives some data about the difficulties experienced by some citizens, such as figures of vote rejection, it never states that “mail-in voting is already plagued with problems”. The figure that 60 percent of citizens in 9 states didn’t receive their ballots is completely fabricated. Also, the claims that mail-in voting was started by the Democratic Party is false: a rudimentary version of the system was already in place as early as the American Civil War. There is no evidence backing the affirmation that this system gave the Democrats some space for machination. The claim that the OSCE challenges the legitimacy of the US 2020 election is blatantly false. Pro-Kremlin media frequently resort to this manipulative technique of quoting sentences from serious publications and then introducing a distorted message as if it was part of the original article, in this case to promote a recurrent pro-Kremlin disinformation against the US Democratic Party and its presidential candidate Joe Biden, part of what US authorities, including FBI director Christopher Wray and the Department of Homeland Security, consider a wider campaign of interference in the 2020 election. See other examples of pro-Kremlin disinformation about the US election in our database, such as claims that Joe Biden is preparing a coup, and his militants are setting the US on fire; that Biden refused to condemn street violence because he fears losing electoral weight; that the US is on the verge of a civil war and militias are only a reaction against governmental abuse; that the CIA is organising a colour revolution to oust Donald Trump after November 2020; or that the result of the election doesn’t matter because the real ruler is the Deep State.