Fact check: USPS investigation disproved claim of backdated ballots in Wisconsin

Eric Litke, USA TODAY
·6 min read

The claim: Postal Service contractor revealed 'MASSIVE Election Irregularities'

Election fraud claims are proving to be the phoenix of social media, rising again and again despite debunking by courts and fact checkers — and the simple fact that Joe Biden is now president.

One such example surfaced in late February when a video originally posted Dec. 12, 2020, on the Students for Trump Facebook page began widely circulating again.

The video — headlined “SHOCKING STATEMENT From USPS Contractor! MASSIVE Election Irregularities!” — shows testimony a former U.S. Postal Service subcontractor gave before a Wisconsin legislative committee on Dec. 11, 2020. A video description asks, “Where’s the investigation?!”

Despite the unusual timeline, the topic is worth revisiting since we now know even more clearly that the claims it lays out don’t held up to scrutiny. And we know there was in fact an investigation already underway at that point.

Fact check: What's true about the 2020 election, vote counting, Electoral College

What we knew at the time

Before we dive in, we’ll note the rating for this and any other post are about what is known at that time. It would be unfair to use information released after the fact to retroactively judge a claim.

But there was also plenty of reason to doubt this particular claim from the start — something we detailed in a fact check published Dec. 5, 2020, about a week before this post first surfaced.

Fact check: Alleged ‘backdated’ ballots wouldn’t have been counted even if USPS claim true

The man shown in the video, Ethan Pease, was a temporary employee with United Mailing Services, working as a route and box truck driver in the Madison, Wisconsin, area. His job was to pick up mail and bring it back to UMS, which then sorted it so he could drive the sorted mail to USPS. That mail included ballots housed in separate bins.

Election workers, right, verify ballots as recount observers, left, watch during a Milwaukee hand recount of presidential votes at the Wisconsin Center, Friday, Nov. 20, 2020, in Milwaukee.
Election workers, right, verify ballots as recount observers, left, watch during a Milwaukee hand recount of presidential votes at the Wisconsin Center, Friday, Nov. 20, 2020, in Milwaukee.

Pease claimed at the hearing, as he had in prior press conferences and a lawsuit affidavit, that a USPS employee told him the day after the election that USPS was searching for 100,000 ballots that had gone missing. He claimed another employee told him Nov. 5 that USPS employees had been ordered to backdate ballots. His allegations were widely shared by conservative media outlets and social media pages.

Our Dec. 5 fact check — rating Pease’s claim as "Missing context" — showed the timeline Pease laid out didn't pass logical muster, given the election laws in place in Wisconsin. Here’s what we wrote:

An array of litigation on absentee ballots in Wisconsin ended Oct. 26 with the U.S. Supreme Court ruling absentee ballots would only be counted if they were returned by Election Day — upholding previous practice. Democrats and other nonpartisan groups had sought changes allowing ballots to be counted if they were postmarked by Election Day, even if they were received later.

So local election workers across the state only counted absentee ballots that were submitted by the time polls closed on Election Day.

The entirety of Pease’s allegations involve actions taken Nov. 4 and 5. In terms of the vote tally, it doesn’t matter what USPS employees did with ballots at that point. No election officials were going to count them. And the entire state had already reported its election results (Milwaukee County was last, about 4 a.m. Nov. 4).

In Madison, where Pease worked, the last election results were reported the night of the election.

What we know now

With the benefit of hindsight, we know the situation Pease described not only didn’t affect the vote totals, it didn’t happen at all.

The USPS Office of Inspector General launched an investigation shortly after Pease first made his claim on the 4chan social media site on Nov. 5. The key findings of that investigation are laid out in a Dec. 14 report that said Pease’s claims were refuted by every USPS employee interviewed. It said no charges would be filed because “all allegations against (name redacted) were false.”

Among the report’s other findings:

  • Pease claimed USPS employees were trying to collect forgotten or misplaced ballots from firms like UMS, and several ballots were found at UMS. Investigators spoke to UMS management and determined no ballots were misplaced there, and Pease had never spoken to anyone at the company about his claims. Investigators also found no evidence that any USPS employees were collecting late ballots at any other site, or that any ballots were mishandled.

  • Pease at various points claimed 100,000 or more ballots were missing. Investigators said, “This allegation involves miscommunication between individuals and Pease's interpretation of a conversation” about news reports of late-night ballot counting. That discussion apparently involved the widely debunked conspiracy theory about a “vote dump” in Milwaukee. The vote tally in Wisconsin jumped in Biden’s favor about 3:30 a.m. on Nov. 4 because that’s when officials finished counting the city of Milwaukee’s absentee ballots. That group of votes largely backed Biden as expected since absentee ballots in Wisconsin lean heavily Democratic, as does Milwaukee as a whole. (That group of absentee votes was also long predicted to be among the last reported because of the volume involved in the state’s largest city.)

  • Pease claimed ballots postmarked by Nov. 3 would be counted. Investigators noted the same thing we did above, that state law only allows votes to be counted if they are received by the time the polls close on Election Day.

Our rating: Missing context

We rate this claim MISSING CONTEXT because it is misleading when taken at face value. This is an unusual circumstance with an old post circulating widely again months later. We rated the original post as missing context, as we knew already in December that any backdated votes wouldn’t have any impact on the Wisconsin vote totals. Now, we also have a completed USPS investigation that confirms the events alleged in Pease’s narrative simply didn’t happen.

Our fact-check sources:

Follow Eric Litke on Twitter: @ericlitke

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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Fact check: USPS investigation disproved claim of backdated ballots