Narrative

“Ballots for one party were destroyed, or that party was left off the ballot entirely”

A claim with a built-in deadline: it must land close enough to the vote that nobody can check, and it describes something that would be trivially visible if true. Before Germany’s 2025 federal election, fabricated reports claimed the AfD had been left off postal ballots in Leipzig and that ballots had been destroyed in Hamburg. The actual ballots listed the AfD normally, and the reports were attributed to an information operation. Germany hand-counts paper ballots in the presence of party agents, which is precisely the arrangement that makes the claim checkable — and it was checked.