Several people submitted this article to our site for rating in the past 24 hours. It is from The Economic Times, a sub-source of the Times of India. The headline is “Kamala Harris won the U.S. elections: Bombshell report claims voting machines were tampered with before 2024.” It got some traction on social media, but not a ton. Enough that multiple people submitted it to us, but it wasn’t so viral that the major fact-check orgs immediately wrote articles debunking it (understandable–they are super busy these days!). 

We rated it as false and hyper-partisan left, and below you can read our analysts’ notes explaining why. But here are a few tips on how you could determine that yourself quickly for similar situations where there isn’t a readily available fact-check article.

These are red flags to look out for so you don’t have to spend a ton of time to arrive at a high degree of certainty. 

Do you have reasons to doubt the veracity of the claim? 

Here, yes! There are several red flags that should make you doubt the veracity–these are common to false stories:

• It would be “big, if true,” but you haven’t seen it reported in other major reputable outlets (if there were truly any substance, wouldn’t every news outlet be on this? And no, they didn’t all secretly meet to hide this from you.)
• You have prior knowledge that indicates this may be false
• It appeals to you very positively emotionally (i.e., it would make a Harris supporter very hopeful if it were true; people might really want it to be true)

When you see one or more of these reasons to doubt, you have to go looking for verification via lateral reading. But even before we get to lateral reading, you can find other red flags just in this article.

The article contains poor & non-standard journalism practices.

Here, we have a few:

• No byline. It is by “Global Desk.” A reporter on a big story puts their name on it.
• No links to external evidence. These are big claims that claim to cite other websites, reports, studies, and cases, yet none of them are linked for you to find.
• Unfamiliar sources are used for citations/corroboration. The (non-linked) sources that are mentioned are an investigative piece from “Daily Boulder” and a watchdog group called “SMART Elections.” 

At this point, you should be even more skeptical. These should make you start looking stuff up. But there are yet more red flags just in this article!

The headline doesn’t match the article!

The headline claims that Kamala Harris won the election. That’s repeated in the first sentence. But if you read the whole article, it at most asserts that there is some evidence of some discrepancies, and it does not make the argument that the supposed discrepancies in total would have flipped any states, let alone enough states for Harris to win. 

In this case, you should feel confident enough to conclude this is likely false based on noticing and critically thinking about these many red flags. 

To be even more certain, you could search phrases like “Kamala Harris won election voting machine tampering” or “2024 election machine tampering” and notice the lack of corroborating results. You could search for the Daily Boulder article and notice it is a highly partisan site with no bylines on any of its articles. You could look up SMART Elections and examine their claims more. All of this takes time, though, especially because when you get to the SMART Elections site, there are a lot of claims and stats and citations to wade through, and those can seem initially more compelling, but they don’t ultimately support a claim of Harris winning the election, or even prove that there was tampering of voting machines.

Our analysts have done more of that digging for you, so if you want to check out their notes for why they conclusively rated this false, you can see those below: 

Ad Fontes Analyst Notes:

The headline and first sentence of the article both state: “Kamala Harris won the U.S elections: Bombshell report claims voting machines were tampered with before 2024.”  

This first part is completely unsupported by all available evidence, including what is provided in the article, so it is considered to be false.  

The basis for the second part of the statement comes from the fact that the changes to voting machines by Pro V&V “were made with no public notice, no formal testing, and no third-party oversight.” This is not tampering, and the article provides no evidence that what Pro V&V did was inappropriate, so the second part is at best misleading.

The only states listed where Pro V&V is the federally accredited lab responsible for certifying voting machines are Pennsylvania, Florida, New Jersey, and California (and New York given the lawsuit involving Rockland County). I could find no other list stating what other states for which Pro V&V was responsible for certifying voting machines. Out of these five states, Kamala Harris won three (NJ, CA, and NY). Of the remaining two only PA was a swing state, and no reputable poll considered FL realistic for Harris. Therefore, if Harris had won PA that still would not have been enough for her to beat Donald Trump in the electoral college.

A heading asks: “Were votes miscounted or ignored in key counties?”  The only supporting argument for this claim comes from perceived voting irregularities in Rockland County, New York (NY is a state that Harris won). These supposed voting irregularities have already been debunked. The fact the only evidence provided comes from a state Harris won makes the claims in this article seem all the more outlandish.

Another heading asks: “Who is behind Pro V&V, and why is there no oversight?” The article states that “once the controversy began to gain traction, Pro V&V’s website went dark, leaving only a phone number and a generic email address. No public logs. No documentation. No comment.” There is no evidence the website went dark and what “public logs” or “documentation” or “comment” should be on their website? This is conspiratorial.

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Headline is a huge problem: Kamala Harris won the U.S elections: Bombshell report claims voting machines were tampered with before 2024. The colon after elections does not do enough to clarify that it is getting this from a report. But, even worse, there is also no one “report” that claims Kamala won, either.

The Economic Times is based on this Daily Boulder article … which is a combination of this blog post about Pro V&V … and this press release/blog from SMART elections. The Daily Boulder includes this in the headline: “Did Kamala Harris Actually Win?” and ends with the opinion: “And Kamala Harris may have actually won.”

Both Dissent in Bloom and SMART Elections mention Harris twice, only in reference to vote totals in Rockland County. So, the Economic Times headline is inaccurate.

Now, let’s look at other problems.

The beginning of the article focuses on Pro V&V based on the Dissent in Bloom blog post. It asserts this about their certification of changes to ES&S voting machines:

“Instead of labeling these as major changes, Pro V&V classified them as ‘de minimis,’ a term typically reserved for insignificant tweaks. This classification allowed them to bypass public scrutiny and avoid triggering full-scale testing or certification processes.”

This is just an opinion from Dissent in Bloom, reported as fact by Economic Times. Dissent in Bloom says this:

“These changes? I do not believe they qualify as ‘minimum’ and the rules generally do not allow this. Software changes are not supposed to be considered minor. But Pro V&V Since they were filed as de minimis they were not subject to any independent external oversight, testing, and lacked any public-facing explanation.”

Economic Times says this:

“Who is behind Pro V&V, and why is there no oversight? At the center of the controversy is Jack Cobb, the director of Pro V&V. While he doesn’t appear in the headlines, his lab certifies the machines that millions of Americans use to vote. According to the report, once the controversy began to gain traction, Pro V&V’s website went dark, leaving only a phone number and a generic email address. No public logs. No documentation. No comment.”

Again, this is based on conspiracy talk from Dissent in Bloom. The Pro V&V website did not go “dark.” They have the same phone number on their website that they’ve had since at least 2015. How is it drastically different from how it looked in the past? What public logs, documentation, or comments should be on their public website?

Daily Boulder/Dissent in Bloom act like Jack Cobb is some kind of mystery man that no one knows about, but here he is in public talking about certifying voting machines in the Philippines. That’s what his company does.

The article also goes into SMART Election claims based on a lawsuit that Diane Sare filed with Rockland County claiming anomalies with the election results. 

The Economic Times says:

“The lawsuit claims that a private company quietly changed voting machines in over 40% of U.S. counties—and no one knew until after the votes were counted.”

This is not true. The lawsuit just claims anomalies, it does not assert anything like that about voting machines. Further, the idea of anomalies in Rockland County has been addressed before.

The article includes a conspiracy that Musk changed the votes:

“Adding fuel to the fire, Elon Musk, who vocally supported Trump, posted cryptic tweets during the 2024 cycle, including: ‘Anything can be hacked.’

Later, Musk stated:

“Without me, Trump would have lost the election.”

Trump himself added to the speculation, telling supporters:

“He [Musk] knows those computers better than anybody. All those computers. Those vote-counting computers. And we ended up winning Pennsylvania like in a landslide.”

Vanessa Otero is a former patent attorney in the Denver, Colorado, area with a B.A. in English from UCLA and a J.D. from the University of Denver. She is the original creator of the Media Bias Chart (October 2016), and founded Ad Fontes Media in February of 2018 to fulfill the need revealed by the popularity of the chart — the need for a map to help people navigate the complex media landscape, and for comprehensive content analysis of media sources themselves. Vanessa regularly speaks on the topic of media bias and polarization to a variety of audiences.