Pres. Trump claim that “phony ballots” were printed without his name on it is not entirely true

At a campaign rally in Erie, Pennsylvania on October 20th, President Donald Trump mentioned without specifics that “they have the phony fake ballots all over the place.”  He continued, “How about the ones that were printed without my name on it, right? They had everything on it. They had every race, they had everything. You had the Senate, you had everything, they forgot to put me down.”  We rate this claim as mostly false. There was one instance in Los Angeles where a small percentage of mail ballots omitted the presidential race entirely. That meant that it wasn’t only Trump’s name that was missing, but also Democratic nominee Joe Biden.

As reported by Amy Sherman at Politifact…

On Oct. 5, Los Angeles elections officials learned that a small percentage of mail ballots omitted the presidential race entirely. That meant that it wasn’t only Trump’s name that was missing, but also Democratic nominee Joe Biden.

The faulty ballots were mailed to a single precinct of just over 2,100 voters out of a total of more than 5.6 million registered voters in the county, according to an Oct. 5 statement by the Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk. The affected voters in Woodland Hills were contacted via roboball and email and the county sent them new ballots.

As of Oct. 21, there were no additional reports of ballots elsewhere omitting the presidential race, Mike Sanchez, a spokesperson for the elections office, told us. His office attributed the faulty ballots to a printing error.

The voters who were sent a corrected ballot will only be allowed to vote once. The return envelopes have a bar code with the identification for each voter so that election officials can log in that the person cast a ballot, preventing a second ballot from the same voter being counted.