Map showing Trump winning election with 410 electoral votes is bogus

One feature of 2020 election misinformation that fact-checkers are hip to: faulty electoral maps that claim to show the supposedly "real" outcomes of the presidential election.

President-elect Joe Biden leads with 306 votes to Trump’s 232, with all battleground states certifying their results. But some of the maps we’ve seen online show Trump winning — they’re simply inaccurate or, in one case, old, like this one showing results from the 2016 election.

Now, a new Facebook post is spreading an unrealistic electoral map that shows Trump with a stunning 410 votes, and Biden at 128 votes.

"This is the actual results of the election," text above the map reads. "People in Germany saw this before Dominion servers were seized. This will probably get removed so share as much as possible. The fraud is massive. Shame on these people."

The post was flagged as part of Facebook’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Facebook.) 

This is wrong. 

The map does not reflect the real election results, as the post claims, and there’s no evidence any servers were seized. The map was aired by One America News Network, known as OAN or OANN, a pro-Trump cable network based in the U.S., and there is no evidence it surfaced in Germany.

OAN included the map in a segment it aired on the unfounded conspiracy theory that the U.S. military seized election-related servers in Germany.

In a clip of the segment found on YouTube, an anchor is heard saying that "new reports claim the real results of the 2020 U.S. election were found on a computer server that was seized by the U.S. military in Frankfurt, Germany."

The anchor then refers to a tweet with the map, which flashes on the screen, and says it's "allegedly based off the data from that server" and shows "a landslide victory for President Trump with 410 electoral college votes including liberal strongholds, California and Minnesota." 

The map is sourced solely to a defeated congressional candidate Manga Anantatmula, and does not reflect state-certified election results. Among its wild inaccuracies: it awards all of California’s 55 electoral votes to Trump. California has been won by Democrats in every presidential race since 1992, including 2020.

We previously debunked similar posts that said the U.S. Army raided Spanish election software company Scytl in Germany and seized its servers. Some versions claimed the servers had ties to Dominion.

Scytl said in a statement that the U.S. military hasn’t and couldn’t have seized any of its equipment, because it doesn’t have offices in Germany. The Army also denied to the Associated Press that such an event took place. 

The company has delivered election modernization projects for U.S. elections since 2008, but none involve tallying votes, according to its website. The services include online initiatives like election worker training, electronic ballot delivery and real-time, visual representation of votes. 

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In a statement rejecting the claims, Scytl said that its technologies for the U.S. are hosted and managed domestically by a Tampa-based subsidiary, SOE Software, and that it does not provide any voting machines in the U.S. or online voting services for U.S. elections.

Chris Krebs, the former director of the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, who was fired by President Trump after he rejected claims of widespread voter fraud, took to Twitter to debunk the claim before leaving the agency. 

"Election-related servers WERE NOT recently seized in Europe by the US Army contrary to #disinfo rapidly spreading across social media," Krebs wrote.

Scytl and Dominion share no ties, according to statements from both companies.

A Facebook post shares an electoral map that shows Trump beating Biden with 410 electoral votes, and says that people in Germany saw these real results before "Dominion’s servers were seized."

The map is not legitimate and was aired by a U.S. pro-Trump cable network. There’s also no evidence of a U.S.-election related raid or server seizure in Germany.

We rate this Pants on Fire!

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