Video footage and images captured by viewers show the station declared Vice President Harris the winner over former President Trump.
A local ABC affiliate station in Pennsylvania apologized this week after “test results” for the Nov. 5 presidential election “mistakenly appeared” on Sunday during a broadcast.
In a statement published on its website on Sunday, WNEP-TV said the numbers showed up on the channel’s broadcast of the Formula 1 Mexico Grand Prix on Sunday evening and were not “reflective of any actual vote count.”
“Those numbers should not have appeared on the screen, and it was an error by WNEP that they did,” the channel said, adding the numbers were “randomly generated test results” that were distributed to news organizations to “make sure their equipment is working properly in advance of election night.”
The station said it regrets the error and also apologized for any confusion it may have caused.
“We have taken steps to ensure that it does not happen again,” the statement said.
A screenshot and video footage of the Sunday broadcast from WNEP showed Vice President Kamala Harris defeating former President Donald Trump. 3.2 million ballots were tallied for Harris and 2.9 million for Trump, with 100 percent reporting.
This week, social media platform X users were sharing the image and video of the results, claiming that it’s a sign there are efforts to try to fix the election.
A headline for a New York Post article published on Wednesday, meanwhile, declared that “ABC mistakenly” aired the erroneous election figures. However, there is no evidence indicating that ABC or any of its other local affiliate stations aired those numbers. The Epoch Times contacted ABC News for comment.
Under Pennsylvania state law, mail-in ballots cannot be taken out of their envelopes until 7 a.m. on Election Day, which is next Tuesday. No votes of any kind can be counted until after the polls close on 8 p.m. that day.
An aggregate of recent polls taken in Pennsylvania provided by RealClearPolitics shows Trump up 0.7 percent over Harris in the key battleground state. In 2020, the race was decided by just over 1 percentage point, with election officials certifying the state for President Joe Biden over Trump.
