Video does not show Trump voter attacked at Wisconsin polling station

What is the claim?

A video showing a man wearing a red cap being assaulted at what appears to be a polling station has been shared alongside claims it shows an attack on a Trump voter in Wisconsin. 

"Trump voter bashed at polling booth," reads one post (archived here) on X. Others read, "CCTV captures the moment a Trump voter in WI is assaulted by two Kamala Harris thugs at a voting station in Wisconsin." (example archived here).

However, the Wisconsin Elections Commission has received no reports of such an incident, and we could find no reporting on it despite extensive coverage of election day in local media. 

What are the facts?

Joel DeSpain of the Wisconsin Elections Commission told Logically Facts that the commission did not know of any such incident as the one portrayed in the viral video. 

"No law enforcement contacted us about such an incident, nor did we hear anything from a Wisconsin polling place," he said.

The video circulating online has a timestamp in the top left corner, claiming the incident happened at 2:50 p.m. on November 5. 

Logically Facts examined multiple live blogs featuring local media coverage of election day in Wisconsin. None of them included references to attacks like the one in the video, neither before nor after 2:50 p.m. 

Darren Linvill, a Clemson University Media Forensics Hub professor, posted on X that the video appears to be Russian disinformation. He told Logically Facts that he has been tracking the Russian Storm-1516 campaign for the past year and is very familiar with it's tactics, techniques, and procedures. There're several reason why he attributes the video with the Storm campaign.  

"The nature of the video is exactly the kind of thing we would expect to see. They (the campaign, ed.) wanted to incite violence, and this attempted exactly that," he said: "Everything about how the video is made is consistent with their work: no faces shown, nothing that might possibly identify anyone, very simple in it's approach to telling the narrative." 

He also said that the origin account is one that only recently started posting, which is consistent with how the campaign have placed videos in the past, namely creating a social media account and make it look just plausible enough to be convincing if one does not look too hard.

Furthermore, he said Storm-1516 had attacked Pennsylvania and Georgia, and that Wisconsin was a clear third target as another battleground state.

We have contacted Wisconsin law enforcement for comment. 

The verdict

The Wisconsin Elections Commission does not recognize the incident and says that law enforcement did not contact the commission about such an incident, nor did the commission hear anything from a Wisconsin polling place. The attack was not reported in local media's extensive election day coverage. Therefore, we have marked this claim as false. 

Follow Logically Facts' coverage and fact-checking of the U.S. Election 2024 here.