No Evidence of Fraudulent Votes From a California Dorm
The Claim
3,000 illegal votes were reported from an empty dorm building in California.
Emerging story
Early this month, a range of social media users began sharing reports that claimed that a major incident of voter fraud regarding the 2020 election had been uncovered in California. These reports alleged that 3,000 votes were recorded from an empty dorm building at the University of California, Santa Barbara. The reports stated that the voting must have been fraudulent, as no students were present in the building during the election, due to the coronavirus pandemic. Additionally, the reports stated that if an individual had forwarded the mail-in ballots to students who were living off-campus, then that made the votes illegal, as it is a felony to forward mail-in ballots.
The social media posts sharing this story have gained thousands of interactions.
Misbar’s Analysis
Misbar’s investigation has concluded that this allegation of voter fraud cannot be considered credible. First, the source has no previous experience with examining voter fraud. Second, the results of the California election were in alignment with every poll/prediction, including from conservative researchers, such as Fox News’s polling. This research extensively examined a cross-section of different demographics in California and resulted in the accurate prediction that Biden would win the election.
Sources that have made the claim of the 3,000 illegal mail-in ballots link to an article in the Santa Barbara News-Press which states that the fraud was uncovered by Thomas Cole of Analytics 805, which is not a credible news site. Analytics 805’s claims contradict what every reliable news network and non-partisan reporter has found about the election results in California. For instance, Fox News stated that Joe Biden won the election in California by taking 63.5% of the overall vote in the state. FiveThirtyEight found that Biden was likely to win the state, giving Trump a less than 1% chance of winning California. 270 To Win also compared a range of polls that predicted that Joe Biden would win the race in California by a significant margin.
The Analytics 805 site appears to indicate that it is a media production company that only recently attempted to move into election fraud monitoring. Their “About” page describes the company as a digital media PR start-up. At the end of every page on this website is what appears to be a vacation photo of the company founder.
Their Election Fraud page details the criminal complaint that the site founder filed over allegedly fraudulent ballots at the University of California, Santa Barbara. In 2020, much more qualified and bipartisan election officials could only identify a small number of election fraud incidents. For example, officials in Wisconsin were able to charge one person with voter fraud, and in Michigan, officials charged two people with voter fraud.
Former President Trump’s Department of Justice stated that it had uncovered no fraud worthy of overturning the 2020 election. On his LinkedIn page, Cole claims that he can find out if a political candidate's votes got switched in China, which contradicts the U.S. intelligence community’s statement that China did not interfere with the 2020 election. Cole appears to have worked as a filmmaker, campaign manager, speechwriter, and director of operations for Analytics 805 for the majority of his career. It does not state that he has any experience in uncovering election fraud.
Therefore, we rate the 3,000 fraudulent votes claim as false, because the source of the claims is unreliable, and the results of the California election were in line with polls/predictions.
