Kanye West Just Showed Us How Easily Phony Election Results Will Spread

“Get the West Wing ready.” That’s what Kanye West says in a video he posted on Twitter, after sharing a screenshot of what he claims are early presidential-vote tallies from Kentucky that showed him with 19% of the vote, ahead of both President Donald Trump and Democratic candidate Joe Biden.

The results were posted on the website of Lex18, a local news outlet based in Lexington, Kentucky, and they showed Libertarian candidate Jo Jorgensen winning the race with 36% of the vote, with former child actor Brock Pierce in second place with 29%.

Of course, the results were not real. While some states do count votes ahead of Election Day, Kentucky typically does not count absentee ballots ahead of time. The state recently introduced emergency legislation to account for the surge in mail-in votes due to the pandemic. However no counts will be published until after the polls close at 6 p.m. on Nov. 3.

The election results are not available on Lex18’s live website, but they can be found through a Google search on a cached version of the website dated October 11.

Moments after West posted the video, which has already been viewed 800,000 times, the website’s Twitter account posted a clarification, saying “the results shown were not valid, they were simply part of a test. We regret the discovery of the cached web link and have removed the data from that page. We apologize for any confusion.”

Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for comment about why the tweet didn’t breach it’s new policy on election result misinformation, and instead pointed VICE News to a blog about its synthetic and manipulated media policy.

In recent weeks, platforms like Twitter and Facebook have been ramping up efforts to prepare for what is likely to be a highly contentious election period due to the anticipated delay in counting a large number of mail-in ballots. Trump has repeatedly hyped baseless fears that the surge in absentee ballots will lead to rigged results.

In a bid to counter any problems related to premature claims of election victory, the platforms have announced new policies designed to prevent misinformation about results from spreading on their networks.

“Tweets which include premature claims will be labeled and direct people to our official US election page,” Twitter said in a blog post last week.

While Twitter has now flagged West’s tweet as “manipulated media, ”which is designed to “give people more context” the company says. The video itself and the claims made in it remain on the platform and people continue to share it.

Multiple Twitter users are commenting on the video as if the results are real.

West doubled down on the misinformation by retweeting a post from the hip hop news website SOHH, which showed a screenshot of the fake results alongside a picture of West, with the caption: “SO YE 2020 AFTER ALL? Kanye West is leading Joe Biden and Donald Trump in Kentucky precinct voting polls.”

This post has also been flagged as “manipulated media.”

Correction 10/19: A previous version of this story incorrectly explained when Kentucky counts its ballots. The text has been updated.

Cover: Twitter/Kanye West