The video shows a Pennsylvania postal worker dropping off ballots, not an election mule

A video of a postal worker delivering ballots to the Northampton County Courthouse in Easton, Pennsylvania, has gone viral on social media, with some users falsely claiming he committed election fraud.

The man in the video is not an election mule — someone who illegally collects and unloads ballots. “He’s a postal worker doing his job and handing out ballots,” U.S. Postal Service spokeswoman Martha Johnson told PolitiFact.

Nevertheless, an October 30 X post said: “An election mule in Northampton County, PA is dropping a large number of ballots AFTER the office closes. He says he is from the post office. Is this legal?”

In the video, the person filming follows the man who enters the building with the container. The person taking the picture says, “Excuse me. How many ballots do you cast? You must submit only one ballot per person.”

The man doesn’t answer and places the container — with the words “United States Postal Service” on the side and what appears to be postal mail — on the X-ray machine’s conveyor belt.

The person filming asks, “Do you have affidavits for all of these?” The man off camera says the man with the ballots is at the post office.

Another person off camera asks, “Who is he?” and the person taking the video replies, “I don’t know, maybe he’s at the post office, but it looks very suspicious. Here in Northampton County, someone is dropping an obscene amount of ballots at the last second after the office actually closes.”

The claim arose on account X which posted a video on October 29 with a request to help identify the person with the ballots. As of November 1, the post had 5.8 million views.

“Need help identifying this guy who just dropped off a crazy amount of ballots who says he’s at the post office but (I don’t know) if I’m going to believe it. He didn’t want to talk to us and was acting very suspicious,” said user X, whose profile says he is the regional coordinator Early votinga mass movement to register Republicans and encourage them to vote early.

Conservative accounts of X, including a conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and MJTruthUltrashared the video.

(Screenshots from X)

Posts later named the person carrying the ballots, and some people posted photos of the car’s license plates, claiming to be a postal worker from Rhode Island.

The camera zooms in on the man who was throwing the ballots, then a person in uniform enters the frame and takes the ballots.

Johnson, the Postal Service spokesman, declined to name the worker in the video, but confirmed he was a postal worker. The man was named in some news stories, but PolitiFact is declining to release his name to protect his safety and privacy.

“We have a process for delivering campaign mail, including ballots, and our staff follow it,” Johnson wrote in an email. “Although this employee does not wear a uniform and does not drive a postal vehicle in the performance of his duties, he is a postal employee and properly delivers these letters.”

Johnson pointed to the October 23 mail service press release which detailed the agency’s “emergency” nationwide measures to ensure safe and prompt processing of mail-in ballots. These measures include additional deliveries and local handling and transportation of postal ballots.

Pennsylvania Secretary of the Commonwealth Al Schmidt referenced the Oct. 31 video at the end of his daily media briefing about the election on November 5, when he described the false and misinformation being spread on the Internet.

“Another video that was widely shared yesterday that I saw shows the acting postmaster himself delivering the mail ballots to the Northampton County Board of Elections, literally just delivering the mail,” Schmidt said. “This video has led to false accusations of ballot harvesting.”

Northampton County Executive Lamont McClure responded from his X account to X’s original post asking for help identifying the man, saying: “We can help you. It’s literally the postmaster.”

McClure did not immediately respond to our request for comment, but told The Morning Call, Allentown, Pennsylvania newspaper, “What was going on here was the most normal, legal thing imaginable.” He also told the newspaper that the building has a lot of CCTV so trying to commit fraud there would be “crazy”.

Northampton County Elections Department within Easton Court House, where the postal worker left the ballots.

Our decision

X’s post says the video shows the election mule dropping “a large number of ballots” in Northampton, Pennsylvania.

“He is not a mule,” said a USPS representative and Pennsylvania state and local officials. He’s a postal clerk who does his job and mails out ballots at the courthouse that houses the county’s election department.

Claim – pants are on fire!