Misinfo about ‘suitcases’ of ballots and a burst pipe in 2020 return after Trump’s Georgia indictment
A worker at the Fulton County Board of Registration and Elections works to process absentee ballots at the State Farm Arena Monday, Nov. 2, 2020, in Atlanta. Years-old false claims about ballot counting in the state are recirculating on social media in the wake of Trump and 18 of his allies being indicted in Georgia on Monday over their efforts to overturn the former president’s 2020 election loss.(AP Photo/John Bazemore)
CLAIM: On election night in 2020, a burst water pipe at a ballot processing site in Georgia’s Fulton County allowed workers to steal the election from former President Donald Trump.
AP’S ASSESSMENT: False. A water leak briefly delayed ballot processing in Atlanta’s State Farm Arena early that morning. Unrelated surveillance footage from the late evening showed workers removing ballot containers from under a table after confusion arose about when work was ending for the night. This was the subject of false claims that it depicted workers pulling out “suitcases” of illicit votes, but investigators later determined it was part of normal ballot processing and there was no evidence of improper ballots.
THE FACTS: In the wake of Trump and 18 of his allies being indicted in Georgia on Monday over their efforts to overturn the former president’s 2020 election loss, years-old false claims about ballot counting in the state are recirculating on social media.
The posts falsely link a brief delay in the count at State Farm Arena — caused by an issue with water pipes — to a long-debunked claim that “suitcases filled with ballots” were hidden under a cloth-covered table and then illicitly tallied without supervision after workers were told to leave.
One Instagram post that included the surveillance footage stated: “Never forget. Trump was leading Georgia by 160,000 votes, then a ‘water pipe burst’ and 4 suitcases came out…” It had received more than 102,000 likes as of Thursday.
Another Instagram post claimed that after the pipe burst, “video would later show multiple people inside the arena continuing to count votes unsupervised,” then suggested that this event robbed Trump of his lead in the race.
But these claims are falsely conflating two incidents that happened hours apart, neither of which are evidence of fraud.
Around 6 a.m. on Election Day — Nov. 3, 2020 — a “plumbing incident” briefly delayed the processing of Fulton County absentee ballots at State Farm Arena, the county tweeted at the time. Work resumed after two hours and no ballots or equipment was damaged. The incident was first reported as a burst pipe, but officials later said the water leak was due to a faulty urinal.
Separately, the posts’ mentions of “suitcases” and “unsupervised” vote-counting refer to a false narrative about surveillance footage of the facility much later that day, starting about 14 hours after the water issue was resolved.
In reality, the footage showed some confusion that arose after election workers mistakenly thought they were done for the evening, but nothing illicit, as the AP reported in 2020.
Gabriel Sterling, a top elections official in the Georgia secretary of state’s office, told the AP in December of that year that some workers, as well as members of the media and Republican observers, started leaving the facility. However, no one told observers they had to leave, then-Fulton County Elections Director Richard Barron said during a public meeting around the same time.
Other workers began packing up, Sterling said. This involved putting ballots that had been opened and flattened for scanning into boxes and under a table. Barron said he found out around 10:30 p.m. He then called the supervisor on site and instructed the team to continue scanning ballots that had already been prepared. They pulled the same boxes back out — regular ballot containers on wheels, not suitcases — and resumed working, according to Sterling.
It’s true that there was a brief period where observers were not present, Barron said at the public meeting, however this is not a breach of protocol. Georgia law permits observers to stay in the room the whole time, but doesn’t require them to be there for counting to take place.
Regardless, after that short period, an independent state election board monitor arrived to oversee the scanning at 11:52 p.m., according to Barron. A state investigator arrived at 12:15 a.m. Both individuals remained at the facility until the count concluded for the night.
The secretary of state’s office said it was aware of the late-night counting and after reviewing the entirety of the surveillance footage, investigators later determined that it showed “normal ballot processing,” Sterling tweeted in December 2020.
A lawsuit Trump filed against Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger that same month, in an effort to overturn the state’s election results, used the surveillance footage — and the aforementioned false narrative — as evidence of alleged fraud. The suit was dismissed by the Supreme Court of Georgia less than two weeks later after being rejected by a lower court for administrative errors.
Trump lost Georgia to President Joe Biden by 11,779 votes, according to Federal Election Commission data. Georgia officials have said on numerous occasions that the state’s count was accurate and that there was nowhere near enough fraud to put the results in question.
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This is part of AP’s effort to address widely shared misinformation, including work with outside companies and organizations to add factual context to misleading content that is circulating online. Learn more about fact-checking at AP.
