DW debunks election fraud claims in Saxony-Anhalt vote

On Sunday, Saxony-Anhalt held an election that will reshape German politics. The far-right Alternative for Germany, or AfD, won decisively enough to position itself as a potential partner in forming the first far-right state government in the country since World War II. But in the days surrounding the vote, a parallel campaign unfolded across social media—one built entirely on false claims about ballot tampering, vote manipulation, and electoral corruption.

DW Fact Check traced several of these false narratives back to coordinated disinformation operations, many of them linked to Russian actors. The most brazen involved a one-minute video that circulated thousands of times on X and YouTube. It showed a man in white gloves unpacking ballots from red envelopes, then drawing black X marks through ballots marked for the AfD while setting aside a CDU ballot with approval. The implication was clear: election workers were destroying votes for the far-right party. But the video contained elementary mistakes that exposed it as staged. All three crossed-out ballots bore the same name. They lacked the hole punch in the top right corner required by German election law to accommodate templates for blind and visually impaired voters. The envelopes themselves were already open. The Gnida Project, a Russian disinformation watchdog, identified the video as part of Storm-1516, a unit controlled by Russia's military intelligence agency, the GRU—the same unit that had been active before Germany's 2025 federal election.

A second wave of false claims inverted the target, alleging that the CDU was committing fraud. Five nearly identical videos appeared on social media, each roughly a minute long, each posted by accounts with zero followers and almost no other activity. They borrowed the logos of established news outlets—DW, ARD, WIRED, BBC—and made fabricated allegations: that the CDU was using a database of Nazi soldier names to register fake voters, or that residents were receiving campaign messages from deceased relatives. One video falsely attributed reporting to T-Online's disinformation correspondent Lars Wienand, claiming he had uncovered evidence of CDU election rigging. Wienand told DW directly that he had reported no such thing, and that this was not the first time Russian disinformation had misused his name and image. Julia Smirnova, a disinformation expert at the Center for Monitoring, Analysis and Strategy, confirmed these posts were part of Matryoshka, also known as Operation Overload, a Russian campaign targeting German elections. DW Fact Check had previously identified more than 180 fake posts across X, Bluesky, and TikTok using the same template and tactics.

A third claim seized on a reporting error to suggest electoral illegality. A post on X with over 160,000 views, shared by a right-wing journalist, accused officials in Halle of beginning to count absentee ballots before 6 p.m., when voting officially ends. The post included a screenshot of a ZEIT online liveblog entry from 3:15 p.m. stating that counting had begun. But ZEIT had made a mistake in its initial reporting. The newspaper's reporter clarified to DW that the blog post had been describing preparatory tasks—opening envelopes—not the actual counting of ballots. German election law permits ballots to be opened in advance to speed up the counting process once voting ends. ZEIT corrected the error with a transparency note explaining the distinction between preparation and counting. The false claim, however, had already spread widely.

What emerges from this pattern is not a single coordinated attack but a sustained operation designed to undermine confidence in the election itself. The false videos, the spoofed news outlets, the impersonated journalists, the misrepresented screenshots—each piece was designed to land in social media feeds and be shared by people who saw them as evidence of corruption. The reach of these posts was largely inauthentic, driven by bot networks and coordinated accounts rather than organic engagement. Yet they succeeded in creating a narrative that the election was rigged, that the institutions managing it were corrupt, and that the results could not be trusted. As Germany moves toward federal elections, fact-checkers and disinformation researchers continue documenting these operations, watching for the same tactics to resurface.