The Week the Election Became a Story About the Election

A rumor about armed guards

The story arrived first on social media and then in the newsrooms that track it. Posts on X and Facebook in October said the U.S. Postal Service had hired private security firm Prosegur to station 1,000 armed guards at post offices primarily in blue states ahead of the 2026 midterms. One archived post put it bluntly: USPS has hired security company Prosegur to station 1,000 armed guards at post offices primarily in blue states. Prosegur has a history of human rights violations in Brazil.

The claim traced back to reporting by the independent newsroom RawStory in early October, which said Prosegur had deployed nearly 1,000 armed security officers to at least 55 post office locations as part of a contract with the Postal Service. Snopes examined the claim on Oct. 28 and found no proof. A spokesperson for the U.S. Postal Inspection Service said the service had deployed a mix of unarmed and armed contract security officers to key USPS facilities, but that the deployment started in 2025 and had absolutely nothing to do with elections. The statement added the deployment was ongoing since last year, under supervision, and represented supplemental staffing to career employee Postal Police Officer complement.

Postal Service policy, as described in the inspection service statement, bases security staffing on the number of employees at a facility, not the political leaning of the state. The service said it could not confirm where it stationed armed or unarmed guards in order to maintain operational security. The executive director of the union that represents postal police officers said RawStory’s nearly 1,000 estimate was based on the union’s tally of approved work hours for contracted armed security officers rather than the number of contracts. Neither the Postal Inspection Service nor Prosegur confirmed how many officers had been contracted or where.

Cathy K. Purcell, a senior public relations representative for the Postal Service, reportedly told The New Republic in October that armed security officers had been deployed since last year. Frank Albergo, executive director of the Postal Police Officers Association, told Snopes that wider deployment of armed security officers began after October 2025 and added that claims the guards were brought in to meddle with the election are not supported by the information we have.

Machines that supposedly flip votes

A separate wave of anxiety centered on touchscreen voting machines. Several Facebook posts made the claim that machines were changing Democratic votes to Republican votes. The claims started spreading last week and mentioned incidents in Texas, South Carolina and Tennessee, among other states.

On Oct. 21, WSMV-TV in Nashville reported multiple early voters experiencing problems with electronic voting machines incorrectly marking their intended choice. The issue surged after Stella Parton, sister of the late Dolly Parton, took to Facebook on Oct. 21 to complain she had to go back three times and correct my vote because it kept defaulting to Marsha Blackburn. Blackburn, a Republican senator from Tennessee, is running for governor against Democrat Jerri Green.

Elections experts and state election commissions disputed the idea of deliberate switching. David Becker, executive director and founder of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, described the pattern during a press briefing on Oct. 22: 2022, 2020, 2018, 2016, 2008. I mean, every election we get these smattering of vote-flipping claims. For some jurisdictions — including some in Tennessee — ballots are still processed using a direct recording electronic machine, an older version of touchscreen, which can sometimes have a little bit of calibration problems. For more common modern touchscreens on ballot marking devices, almost all of the claims of vote-flipping are understandable human error.

State Coordinator of Elections Mark Goins told WSMV-TV: It’s not a vote-flipping situation. It’s normally like an unintended touch that they may not even realize. He explained there are multiple safeguards between the candidate being selected on the machine and the ballot being processed. Voters see a review screen of their selections before printing out their ballots. After the machine prints the filled-out ballot, it can be reviewed before it is deposited into the scanner and counted. The votes aren’t being counted on the screen. They’re actually being counted on that paper ballot that’s going in the scanner.

Justin Levitt, a law professor at Loyola Marymount University and an election law expert, said he had heard a few reports of a few instances in which touchscreen machines were apparently having difficulty registering individuals’ choices, citing the Tennessee news report. He suggested that if a voter encounters an issue, the fix is easy: pay attention when the system asks you to verify that your choices are correct, and if you’re having difficulty, bring it to the pollworker or precinct inspector’s attention.

Andrew Appel, a professor emeritus of computer science at Princeton University and an electronic voting security expert, said this happens, in a few places, every couple of years. It is typically a touchscreen calibration issue. It is unlikely to be malicious hacking, because a hacker who wanted to steal an election would use a method that voters couldn’t notice. He noted a more plausible cheating attempt would be to hack the voting machine to display the chosen selection but print an incorrect ballot, since 93% of voters don’t look at the paper closely enough to notice an error if one would occur there.

Alaska’s same-name fight

On the campaign trail, the claims turned personal. Donald Trump spoke at a midterm campaign rally at the Rock Hill Sports & Event Center in Rock Hill, South Carolina on 29 October. Speaking to a campaign audience in South Carolina, he reiterated his belief that Mary Peltola should be criminally prosecuted and disqualified from the Alaska Senate contest. This is voter fraud at the highest level, Trump said of the Peltola campaign’s alleged scheme to recruit a man who shared the name of her Republican opponent, Dan Sullivan, to run, all in a bid to peel away votes. He added Peltola should be removed from the ballot and prosecuted, and so should the fake Dan Sullivan. I think it’s a criminal act, what they did.

The dispute centers on Dan J Sullivan, a retired schoolteacher and former US Forest Service employee who entered the Alaska Senate race as a Republican in May, challenging incumbent Republican Dan S Sullivan and Democrat Mary Peltola. Republicans accused Democrats of planting Dan J Sullivan in the race to deliberately confuse voters. Peltola’s campaign denied encouraging or soliciting him to run.

On Wednesday, the New York Times reported that Peltola’s campaign engaged in an effort to recruit Dan J Sullivan, and other potential candidates with the name Dan Sullivan, to run against Dan S Sullivan. Information came to light in interviews with at least a dozen people who participated in or were told of the plan, including Peltola’s former campaign manager and longtime aide, Elisa Rios. Text messages and documents revealed Peltola’s campaign staff worked with senior aides at the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee to find spoiler candidates, including Dan J Sullivan, to run in hopes of helping Peltola’s campaign.

Ballot stacking is a political tactic used in elections to draw votes away from an opponent by stacking the ballot with other candidates. A political party, campaign or outside group may recruit additional candidates to run in an election. Sometimes the candidate may have a similar name to another opponent or appeal to a similar base of voters. The New York Times noted ballot stacking is common and used by both Republicans and Democrats. It is not illegal.

The U.S. justice department is reported to have issued subpoenas in response to the report. ABC News and the Associated Press reported the subpoenas, citing sources familiar with the matter. The federal investigation comes a day after the New York Times found the effort to recruit a second candidate named Dan Sullivan was led by Peltola’s campaign, which had for months denied involvement. Earlier on Thursday, Alaska’s Republican governor, Mike Dunleavy, announced a criminal inquiry into the effort, which the Times reports was intended to confuse Alaskans who wanted to support the Republican incumbent.

Lisa Murkowski, a Republican Alaska senator, denounced ballot stacking and said the report revealed a pattern of lies and coverups and a culture of deception. However, Murkowski condemned the justice department for filing its lawsuit. The justice department has historically avoided taking overt investigative actions against candidates in the weeks before an election, or other public steps that could be perceived as attempting to influence a political outcome. Justin Levitt, a former Department of Justice official under Joe Biden, said I don’t know what they’re putting out subpoenas to investigate because I don’t know what federal violations are implicated that DoJ would have jurisdiction over. Sure makes it seem like the point of the investigation is to become the story.

California’s ballot fight

The same day subpoenas were reported in Alaska, the justice department issued subpoenas to California officials in an escalation of its scrutiny of local election administration. The department has issued grand jury subpoenas to local election officials as part of a widening effort to prove unsubstantiated claims about large numbers of illegal voters in the state.

A federal judge rejected a Trump administration request to stop California from processing the ballots of up to 20,000 people over allegations they are likely noncitizens. U.S. District Judge David O. Carter ruled on Wednesday, as more than 3.7 million people had already voted in the state. Eroded trust in our democracy is irreparable. Once a vote is segregated, lasting harm has occurred, Carter wrote. If the Executive can discount votes and threaten an ongoing election due to unproven allegations, then our democracy is in danger. This Court declines to be a party to such process.

Prosecutors for the Justice Department said they would immediately appeal the decision. The Republican administration sued election officials in the Democratic state in mid-October, accusing the officials of failing to meet a 48-hour deadline to review a list of 20,000 people it alleged were likely noncitizens on the state’s voter rolls. The administration had asked the judge to require the state to wait to count those ballots until the voters’ immigration status could be verified.

Carter argued that segregating ballots at this time would require counties to develop new methods for sorting ballots and risk disenfranchising an untold number of voters. In other words, it would have the same effect as purging voters and therefore violates the National Voting Rights Act, which prohibits changes to voter rolls within 90 days of an election. The federal government’s request, Carter wrote, would wreak havoc and disrupt the election that is already underway, create a chilling effect on election workers and voters alike, and discount the votes of United States citizens.

California mails ballots to all 23 million registered voters. Court filings show over 500,000 ballots had already been processed by this week, meaning their envelopes had been verified and the ballots removed. That would make it virtually impossible to know which ballot belonged to a particular voter, Los Angeles county officials testified. First Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli doubled down on the lawsuit’s arguments after the ruling. Every day, more ballots are processed by election officials. This ongoing emergency disenfranchises American citizens through dilution. He argued segregating a ballot does not prevent it from being counted later. It is designed to preserve the status quo and prevent the infection of our election with illegal ballots.

The rally that keeps talking

Throughout October, President Donald Trump has traveled across the country holding campaign rallies supporting Republican candidates in the 2026 midterms. He has several more rallies scheduled before Election Day on Nov. 3. In his remarks, which tend to last more than an hour, he has mostly boasted about his and Republican policies, while attacking some Democrats running for office and others who are not.

FactCheck.org flagged a number of false, misleading or exaggerated claims. In Syracuse on Oct. 9, Trump falsely claimed he inherited the worst inflation in American history, then added Now we have it down to 1.8%. The worst inflation occurred after World War I, when the 12-month increase in prices was 23.7% from June 1919 to June 1920. The annualized inflation rate during the Biden administration peaked at 9.1% in June 2022, and was down to 3.0% when Trump took office in January 2025. It was most recently up to 3.7% for the 12 months ending in September. Core inflation, which refers to the rise in prices excluding food and energy items, was 2.6% for the 12 months ending in September.

While talking about the Iran war during his Syracuse rally, Trump said: As soon as the war is over, oil is tumbling down like you’ve never seen. It’s already coming way down. The price of crude oil is not way down. West Texas Intermediate crude was $98.73 a barrel on Oct. 9, and was up to $105.25 as of Oct. 26. The price was $66.96 a barrel on Feb. 27, the day before the war with Iran began.

In San Antonio on Oct. 7, Trump said: The poverty rate has just reached its lowest level, so the best poverty numbers, lowest level in American history. The official U.S. poverty rate was 10.2% in 2025, the lowest on record. The official poverty rates for Hispanics and Native Americans also reached record lows last year. But 2025 was not a record year based on the supplemental poverty measure, which factors in government assistance programs. By that measure, 13.1% of the U.S. population was living in poverty in 2025, which was higher than the low of 7.7% in 2021.

The latest quarterly update on Trump’s second term notes job growth became sluggish, with only 776,000 jobs created. The unemployment rate edged up to 4.2%. Inflation worsened. Consumer prices are up 5.4%. Gasoline is up 38%. The economy grew 2.2% in the second quarter. Consumer sentiment remains low. Home prices increased 6.2%. The violent crime and murder rates in 2025 continued to decline, dropping by the largest percentages since the FBI began collecting nationwide data in 1936.

As ballots move through counties and the Associated Press prepares to call races, the conversation about the election has become, in its own way, a contest over the integrity of the process itself. Rumors about guards, machines and ballot manipulation have traveled faster than any official response, while lawsuits and subpoenas add a federal layer to state-run elections. Voters are left to navigate a final week in which the story about voting is as loud as the vote.