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

The man in the video is not a voting mule – someone who illegally collects and downloads ballots. He’s a postal worker doing his job and dropping off mail-in ballots, United States Postal Service spokeswoman Martha Johnson told PolitiFact.

However, year October 30 X post said: “Ballot mule in Northampton County, Pennsylvania leaves a large amount of ballots AFTER the office closes. Says it’s from the post office. Is this legal?”

In the video, the person filming follows a man entering a building carrying a container. The person filming says, “Excuse me. How many ballots did you hand in there? You’re only supposed to hand in one ballot per person.”

The man doesn’t answer and places the container — which says “United States Postal Service” on the side and appears to contain mail-in ballots — onto the conveyor belt of an X-ray machine.

The person filming asks, “Do you have an affidavit for all of this?” A 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 filming replies, “I don’t know, it looks like he’s at the post office, but that looks very suspicious. There is someone here in Northampton County throwing out an obscene amount of ballots at the last second after the office has actually closed. .”

The claim originated from an X account which posted the video Oct. 29, asking for help identifying the man with the ballots. That post has garnered 5.8 million views since November 1.

“I need help identifying this guy who just dropped off an insane amount of ballots and says he’s at the post office, but (I don’t know) if I’m buying it. He didn’t want to talk to us and was acting very suspicious,” said user X, whose profile says he is regional coordinator for Early voting actiona grassroots movement to register Republicans and encourage early voting.

Conservative X accounts, including conspiracy theorists Alex Jones and MJTruthUltrashared the video.

(Screenshots from X)

Subsequent posts named the person carrying the ballots, and some people posted photos of a vehicle’s license plate, claiming the postal worker was from Rhode Island.

The camera zooms in on the man who left the ballots, then a uniformed person enters the frame and takes the ballots.

Johnson, the Postal Service spokesman, declined to name the worker in the video but confirmed he is a postal employee. The man has been named in some news accounts, but PolitiFact is declining to name him to protect his safety and privacy.

“We have a process for delivering election mail, including ballots, and our employee follows it,” Johnson wrote in an email. “Although this employee does not wear a uniform or drive a postal vehicle in the normal course of his duties, he is a postal employee and is properly delivering those ballots.”

Johnson showed a postal service from October 23 press release which details the agency’s “extraordinary” nationwide measures to ensure fast and secure mail-in ballot processing. These measures include additional deliveries and local handling and transport of postal ballots.

Pennsylvania Secretary of the Commonwealth Al Schmidt referenced the Oct. 31 video near its end daily press briefing about the Nov. 5 election, when he described misinformation and misinformation being shared online.

“Another widely shared video yesterday that I saw shows an acting postmaster himself bringing mail-in ballots to the Northampton County elections office, literally just delivering the mail,” Schmidt said. “That video led to false allegations of vote-rigging.”

Northampton County Executive Lamont McClure responded from X’s 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 return our request for comment, but said The Morning CalI, a newspaper in Allentown, Pennsylvania, “What was going on here was the most normal, legal thing imaginable.” He also told the newspaper that the building has many surveillance cameras, so trying to commit fraud would be “crazy”.

The Northampton County Elections Department is inside courthouse in Easton where the mailman left the ballots.

Our decision

An X post said a video showed a ballot mule dropping “a large amount of ballots” in Northampton, Pennsylvania.

He is not a mule, said a USPS spokesman and local and state officials in Pennsylvania. He’s a postal worker doing his job and dropping off mail-in ballots at the courthouse, which houses the county’s elections department.

The statement is Pants on Fire!