DW Debunks Viral Video Claiming AfD Ballots Destroyed in Berlin Election

Three days before Berliners cast ballots in state and district elections, a video began spreading across social media that purported to show a man methodically destroying postal votes marked for the Alternative for Germany, the far-right party known as the AfD. He opened envelopes with a carpet knife, the footage suggested, while leaving ballots for the governing CDU untouched. By mid-September, one post alone had accumulated 327,000 views. Across more than a dozen similar posts, the video had reached 3.2 million people, each caption framing it as evidence of electoral sabotage in Germany.

When Deutsche Welle's fact-checking team examined the footage closely, they found the ballot paper itself looked plausible at first—its layout and candidate names matched the official design for the Spandau 2 constituency in western Berlin, which is publicly available. But the more they looked, the more the details fell apart. Stephan Bröchler, Berlin's state returning officer, told DW that the documents in the video are not authentic election materials. The envelopes shown do not match the official ones used for this election. The way they are sealed appears suspicious. The signed voter declaration that must accompany every postal ballot is missing entirely—without it, any mail-in vote would be invalid. The video shows only a single ballot paper emerging from three successive envelopes, which would be statistically unusual. And in the background, large grey bins allegedly holding postal ballots are marked with a stylized Berlin bear, a feature Bröchler said the city's election authorities have never used.

Bröchler's conclusion was unambiguous: "It can be ruled out that any actual Berlin election documents are involved. The video is clearly intended to discredit postal voting." The inconsistencies were not subtle oversights. They were the fingerprints of a fabrication.

The pattern of how the video spread raised its own red flags. One account that shared the footage had previously been linked by the Lithuania-based research organization Debunk to the so-called "Sprinter" network—a collection of X accounts identified as showing signs of coordinated, inauthentic activity, including unusually high posting volumes, frequent account renaming, and evidence of purchased followers. Debunk said the network had been used to amplify pro-Kremlin narratives. When DW examined more than fifteen other accounts sharing the video, almost all of them exhibited at least one suspicious characteristic: rapid follower growth, frequent username changes, or limited evidence of normal user engagement. One account, which presented itself as an independent media company based in West Asia, had accumulated more than 43,000 followers despite being created only in April 2026—and had changed its username nine times in that span. These patterns do not prove the accounts are coordinated or that all engagement was artificially generated, but they suggest the video's apparent reach should not be mistaken for organic public discussion.

This was not the first time such a video had circulated. Ahead of Saxony-Anhalt's election in early September, DW fact-checked another video claiming to show AfD postal ballots being destroyed. That claim was also false. The ballots in that footage all carried the same name on the voter declaration, the envelopes had already been opened, and the ballots lacked the hole punch required for voting templates designed for blind and visually impaired voters. DW has investigated and debunked numerous other false claims targeting Germany's postal voting system in recent months.

Julia Smirnova, a researcher at the Berlin-based Center for Monitoring, Analysis and Strategy who investigates influence operations, told DW that the similarities between the videos, combined with the distribution pattern of the new footage, indicate it is "highly likely" part of the Storm-1516 influence operation. German security authorities and researchers have attributed Storm-1516 to Russia. The operation has previously deployed fabricated videos, forged documents, and purported eyewitness accounts to spread false narratives about elections and other political issues. In February 2025, Germany's Interior Ministry said it had indications that two fake videos alleging manipulation of AfD ballots were connected to the Storm-1516 campaign, citing similarities in their content and distribution.

As Berlin prepared to vote on September 20, the video remained in circulation—a piece of digital debris designed to corrode confidence in the electoral process itself. The technical flaws were there for anyone willing to look. The suspicious accounts were visible. But the operation's logic was simpler: flood the zone with doubt, and some of it will stick.