In a recent episode of ABC’s talk show “The View,” co-host Sunny Hostin put down the cellphone she had been looking at and said, “It’s my son.”
“Who, by the way, wanted to make sure that his absentee ballot was — that I did that, and I had trouble, actually, voting for him absentee ballot today and that made me very concerned,” Hostin said.
Another co-host asked what happened and Hostin said, “I was told to put it in an orange bag on the floor and the orange bag looked to me like a Target bag or something and I said, “Isn’t there a formal election box that says ‘absentee ballots’ or something like that?,” and then she said, ‘Let me check,’ and then found it.”
A Nov. 8 Instagram post sharing the clip raised the specter that Hostin was admitting to committing voter fraud.
“Sunny admits she voted absentee in place of her son and whines that she had trouble doing it,” text above the video says.
The post’s caption asks a question, and then asks for money: “Did Sunny Hostin commit voter fraud on behalf of her son? Tell us below and support our fundraiser to help us expose voter fraud and the media’s ongoing election interference.”
What Hostin described isn’t voter fraud.
This post was flagged as part of Facebook’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram.)
Hostin lives with her family in Westchester County, New York, where the law specifies that voters can designate someone on their absentee ballot application to “pick up and deliver your ballot.”
A representative for Hostin told Reuters and The Associated Press that she and her son followed the law and that “she was the designated person he assigned to drop off his completed absentee ballot.”
We rate claims that Hostin admitted to vote fraud Pants on Fire!
