PBS NewsHour is following Snopes as it live fact-checks Election Day rumors while polls are open and voters decide which party controls Congress, state legislatures and governors' offices. The site says it is monitoring falsehoods in real time and will keep tracking claims after polls close this evening.
Snopes and PBS NewsHour
Snopes says its journalists are watching rumors about counting and processing ballots after polls close this evening. It also relies on The to call races, a split that leaves one group focused on verifying claims and another on projecting winners.
The live checks are already moving through a handful of claims with clear practical stakes. Readers asked about a claim that Virginia governor Abigail Spanberger supposedly sent a letter to a dead dog reinstating the animal's voting rights, while Snopes also addressed a video that claimed to show a crowd booing Ohio gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy off stage.
Virginia, Ohio and Washington, D.C.
That Ramaswamy video was real, and Snopes said it was not the product of artificial intelligence technology or video editing. The implication that the booing stopped his speech was wrong, because he kept talking after the crowd reacted. Donald Trump, Jr. added another rumor point at a rally yesterday, telling the crowd that Democrats want to “make Ohio a state.” Snopes said that line was part of a longer statement about efforts to grant statehood to Washington, D.C.
Paul López, Denver's clerk and recorder overseeing elections, had already described the response he was preparing for outside pressure. In September, he said, “We have a plan put together just in case if that happens and it's not going to be a good day for any ICE agent or any other federal agent or anybody trying to intimidate anybody at the polls.”
Denver and the polls
Snopes is also monitoring for possible sightings of federal agents at voting sites, while rumors about “armed guards” at post offices spread ahead of today's elections. A Postal Service spokesperson said the agency deployed a “mix of unarmed and armed contract security officers” to some facilities and said that staffing change had “nothing to do with elections.”
Millions of voters have already cast ballots by mail or drop-off boxes, but the live fact checks are aimed at the people still voting today and the officials counting afterward. More election-related checks are expected in the coming hours, and the main test now is which rumors keep circulating as polls close and results start to come in.
