The local news reports that never aired

Tomorrow — Tuesday, November 3 — Americans vote in the midterm elections. In the two weeks before it, a different kind of campaign material has been moving through the feeds: local television news reports that never aired. A Maine station supposedly reporting that a Senate candidate threatened his own staff with an axe. A Cleveland station supposedly reporting sexual-assault accusations against another candidate. A screenshot supposedly showing the President declaring the election already won. Each fake wears the furniture of the real thing — a station's branding, a familiar anchor's face, a screenshot's like counts. What follows is what the stations, the archives and the detection tools actually show.

The Maine clip appeared on X on October 28, 2026. It purported to be a WABI-TV 5 report: multiple staffers, it said, alleged that Troy Jackson — Maine's Democratic Senate nominee, challenging Sen. Susan Collins — had threatened to “cut any insubordinate staffer in half” with his logging axe. WABI answered in writing the next day. Kim Petry, the station's vice president and general manager, stated: “WABI can confirm that the video is fabricated and appears to use a synthetic voice. It was not produced, aired, or authorized by WABI. We have contacted X to request its removal.” Lead Stories ran the clip through Hive Moderation's detection tool, which scored the audio at 99.1% “likely to have AI-generated speech.” NewsGuard determined the clip was built by dubbing new audio over genuine WABI footage; the station's actual reporting on Jackson concerned a staffer complaint that he threw a water bottle during a meeting, which his campaign said hit nobody. Searches of Google News, Yahoo News and WABI's own website turn up no report of an axe threat from any established outlet, anywhere.

Two days earlier, on October 26, the same format surfaced in Ohio: a one-minute clip dressed as a Cleveland 19 (WOIO) newscast, in which anchor Nichole Vrsansky appears to report that “four former staffers have accused Sherrod Brown of sexual assault.” NewsGuard traced the construction frame by frame. The footage is a real Cleveland 19 segment from October 21 — same anchor, same red blouse, same on-screen clock reading 12:02 — in which Vrsansky was actually reporting on an attack ad against Ohio governor candidate Dr. Amy Acton. The voiceover is the new part, and Lead Stories' Hive Moderation test scored a sample of it at 88.4% likely AI-generated speech. The station's news director, Brian Sinclair, told NewsGuard on October 26: “We have reported no such thing.” A search of WOIO's website finds no such report, and neither does any news index. One of the four real former staffers named in the clip told NewsGuard the accusation was “completely false and fake news as it pertains to me.” X suspended the pro-Russian account NewsGuard identified as an early poster of the clip by the following morning. Copies kept circulating.

Who built the fakes is an assessment, and SmokeScreen prints it as one. NewsGuard assesses both newscasts as apparent products of Storm-1516, a Russian influence operation that fabricates articles and videos impersonating legitimate media outlets — based, it says, on the clips' format and their amplification pattern on X. The Gnida Project, an anonymous research group, attributed both clips to the same operation. The pattern had already run in Texas: fabricated direct-to-camera videos in which a supposed former student accused Senate candidate James Talarico of assault — the real former student told Lead Stories the incident never happened. The Associated Press, reporting on October 28, quoted Clemson University media-forensics professor Darren Linvill: the accounts sharing the new videos had previously shared Storm-1516 material, and the videos bear the network's hallmarks. AP also reported that X removed the initial posts and suspended the accounts — and that the Russian Embassy in Washington did not immediately respond to a request for comment; in the past, it has denied interfering in U.S. elections.

The fortnight's paper fake needed no voice at all. A screenshot, dated October 26, purports to show President Trump posting on Truth Social that Republicans have won “all 50 states” and that he is “officially declaring victory for EVERY Republican candidate right now.” Full Fact's check, published October 29, is a study in absences: no post with that wording exists on Trump's account; none exists in the Trump's Truth archive that logs his posts; no credible outlet reported any such declaration. The tells are inside the image itself. Every copy Full Fact found shows exactly the same engagement numbers — 8.14k ReTruths, 36.7k likes — although a genuinely viral post would be captured at many different counts. The President's profile picture appears warped compared with the real account's. And Google's SynthID detector, run on the screenshot, returned “made or edited with AI.” The earliest example Full Fact could find was posted by an account that describes itself as a “satirical news organisation.”

The same week produced a text story with no video at all: dozens of Pennsylvania election workers, it claimed, had come forward to say that then-Governor Tom Wolf and then-Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar personally ordered them to destroy more than one hundred thousand Trump ballots in the 2020 election. Lead Stories traced it to its source: an October 26 post on a Facebook page named Jonathan Gregory, whose own page category is listed as “comedian.” The story then crossed to X and other platforms, and the comedy label did not travel with it. Lead Stories found no matching report from any established news outlet — no named worker, no document, no filing. The claim's entire paper trail is the comedian page's post.

The checks behind this story were produced inside a new piece of infrastructure worth naming: in August 2026, five North American fact-checking organizations — FactCheck.org, Lead Stories, PolitiFact, AFP Fact Check and Factchequeado — launched a first-of-its-kind joint newsletter sharing their election checks. So the record, sorted. Documented: two television stations have denied, in writing or on the record, reports that carry their names; the detection scores and the genuine source footage are published; the platforms suspended seeding accounts; and no established newsroom holds a matching report for any of these claims. Claimed: the Storm-1516 attribution — a specific, evidence-based assessment by named researchers, printed here as an assessment, not a verdict. Unknown: who rendered each file, and how many voters saw the fakes before the takedowns. There is a simple field test, and both stations gave it: a real local-news report lives on the station's own site. If a “report” exists only as a reposted clip, it is not a report. It is a costume. Election Day is tomorrow. The receipts are below.