The House Oversight Committee says a purported US Postal Service whistleblower who alleged a supervisor in Erie, Pennsylvania, was tampering with ballots recanted his testimony to postal service investigators.
The purported whistleblower, a USPS employee, had claimed a supervisor instructed postal service workers to postmark ballots that arrived at the Post Office after Election Day with an Election Day postmark.
The committee said in a tweet that, according to the USPS Inspector General, the employee, Richard Hopkins, had signed a sworn affidavit, but that following an interview Friday Hopkins recanted his allegations on Monday.
The allegations have been touted by top Republicans as evidence of voter fraud.
Following the tweet and a published story by the Washington Post, Hopkins refuted that he has recanted in an online video. Hopkins made his allegations through Project Veritas, which has a long track record of creating doctored and unethical videos, often conning people into participating, or secretly recording them, sometimes illegally.
The IG declined to comment on an ongoing investigation. The committee declined to comment beyond its tweets.
Even if his claims were true, Erie County Election Board Chairman Carl Anderson III told CNN that of the 135 mail-in ballots the county received between Nov. 4 and Nov. 6, only two were postmarked by the Erie Post Office.
“In other words, what was the scheme to fraud?” he asked. “Two ballots? Of the 135? It’s ridiculous.”
A source with knowledge of the situation tells CNN the post office had implemented local turnaround where local ballots are kept at post offices — they do not go through regular mail sorting — so that they can be delivered to the local board of election the same, or next day.
It is something that post offices across the US had done during the election.
When mail carriers picked up ballots in the week before, and on Election Day, the source says they brought it to a supervisor, which were then delivered to the Erie County Board of Elections. The source says that postal employees at the Erie County Post Office were never told to backdate ballots, at any time.
The 133 other mail-in ballots had been postmarked at USPS facilities in: Pittsburgh; Wheeling, West Virginia; Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, Washington, DC; Tacoma, Washington; Suburban Chicago and St. Petersburg, Florida.
Hopkins did not respond to a request for comment.
See the committee’s tweets: