Fact Check

Van Full of 'Illegals' Shows up to Vote Clinton at Six Polling Places

Fake "voter fraud" stories showed up early and often during 2016's general election.

Published Nov. 8, 2016

Claim:
A van full of "illegals" traveled from voting booth to voting booth in Arizona in order to vote (illegally) for Hillary Clinton.

The 2016 general election has been rife with stories about voter fraud, most of which contained no shreds of truth.  ("Voter fraud" is defined as the "intentional corruption of the electoral process by voters," and is so rare as to be virtually nonexistent, whereas "voter suppression" is the attempt to sway or coerce people into not voting at all, whether through force or trickery, and is far more widespread.)

A shocking story about alleged voter fraud that appeared on the web site TheLastLineOfDefense.org in November 2016 was no exception to the pattern of spurious voter fraud stories:

Democrats want you to think voter fraud is a myth, but that’s because the Democrat Party benefits so much from it. In July, Election Justice USA, for example, reported that without Clinton’s team committing egregious acts of voter fraud, Sanders would have been the man to lose to Donald Trump in the national election. Instead, we have Pantsuits McCriminal, and what happened Friday is absolute proof that she will do literally anything to win.

Fox 10 Phoenix reports that nine illegal immigrants complete with fake identification and voter registration cards, and stolen social security numbers, voted at around 9 am a Desert Wind Middle School in Pinal County. At 10:30, the very same white van carrying the very same illegals was spotted at Santa Rosa Elementary School and they voted there as well. Just two hours later, the same group showed up at the Global Water Center to cast their vote.

By this point, poll workers had been notified and one of those Poll Watchers liberals hate so much pretended to take a poll and asked them whom they had voted for. In broken English, one man who identified himself as Jose Gutierrez said “I am voting for Hillary Clinton many times.”

This story is completely false, containing no truth whatsoever.  First, Fox 10 Phoenix reported no such thing, and the link added to give a veneer of veracity to the story simply points to KSAZ's main site.

It's also curious that poll workers who spotted the same van of people going from place to place voting in a concerted and open effort to defraud voters would not have immediately called authorities; instead, they only asked those suspicious persons whom they had voted for. Since you need identification in Arizona in order to vote, which is then cross-checked in person at each individual, pre-assigned polling place, the "van of illegals" would had to have jumped through quite a lot of hoops in order to be able to forge its occupants' documents and go on a merry voting spree across the state (and after all that effort they foolishly blew their cover by driving all over the place in the same large white van).

The article also did not offer any proof that this van (the photograph of which was actually recycled from a previous hoax story) was full of people in the U.S. without the proper papers, instead alluding to their names and their accents as "proof" that the group consisted of "illegals," and thereby implying that anyone with a Spanish-sounding name and an accent could not possibly be a United States citizen.

But none of that really matters anyway, because TheLastLineOfDefense.org is a fake news site that doesn't publish any factual stories. The site's disclaimer, buried at the bottom of its "About" page, states:

DISCLAIMER: The Resistance may include information from sources that may or may not be reliable and facts that don’t necessarily exist. All articles should be considered satirical and any and all quotes attributed to actual people complete and total baloney.

This seemingly innocuous photograph is popular among conspiracy theorists and hoax news purveyors. It has appeared in many stories illustrating purported examples of voter fraud, human trafficking, or hordes of undocumented people sweeping past border security and into upscale United States neighborhoods at the behest of the Obama administration. While we haven't been able to find where this image originated, it has been online for at least a year and definitively does not illustrate a vanload of people on a wild voting fraud spree in the 2016 presidential election.

Brooke Binkowski is a former editor for Snopes.