Following a tweet from polling website FiveThirtyEight reporting “23,277 votes in Philadelphia, all for Biden” on Wednesday, many social media users were confused about how every ballot reported could be for Biden, with some taking this as evidence of voting chicanery.
Aaron Bycoffe, a computational journalist for FiveThirtyEight, told The Dispatch Fact Check that it’s not unusual to see an update that includes votes for only one candidate. “Election officials and vote tabulators occasionally enter results one candidate at a time, and it looks like that’s what happened here,” said Bycoffe. “That would explain why Trump had zero votes in this one update. His votes would have been added in a subsequent update.”
Bycoffe said that the following update was “considerably more Trump-leaning than others from around that time,” suggesting that it contained the Trump ballots that had not been included in the previous update.
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