What is circulating

On November 4, 2026, Patrick Colbeck of the Election Crime Bureau posted an alert claiming that an alert poll worker in Michigan had detected a Wi-Fi signal before the polls closed that appeared to be connected to a foreign Wi-Fi device inside a tabulator. The post did not name the polling place, the tabulator, the poll worker, or the device, and it offered no photograph, log, screenshot, or other record of the supposed signal.

The claim spread the day after the November 3 midterm elections, in which Democrats retook both chambers of Congress. It arrived alongside a separate warning in the same post that remote access to tabulators could open the door to election fraud, a general argument presented without any specific evidence tied to this incident.

What the checks found

When asked about the claim, Colbeck declined to provide evidence supporting it. He also declined to identify the location or the worker behind the report. The Michigan Department of State, which administers elections under Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, rejected the claim outright: its chief communications officer, Angela Benander, called it complete nonsense and confirmed that no one had reported such an incident to the department.

No established news outlet has independently reported a matching incident, and no investigation has been announced on the basis of this post. The absence of a named place, a named witness, and any technical record leaves the claim with nothing a reader can independently test.

Why the technology claim does not fit

The post also stated that no certified tabulator configuration in use in Michigan includes an internal modem hidden within the chassis or installed on the motherboard. That point cuts against the core image in the claim: a foreign device operating from inside a tabulator. Michigan election officials have long stated that tabulators are not connected to the internet while votes are cast or counted, and that paper ballots remain available for recounts and audits.

A Wi-Fi signal detected in a building is not, by itself, evidence of a device inside a tabulator. Polling places, like other public buildings, can carry many ordinary wireless signals, and the claim offered no step showing how an observed signal was traced to a tabulator, let alone to a foreign device. Similar election-technology claims have been examined before, including the Westchester County scanner claim, where a technical fault was presented as cheating without evidence.

Our finding

The claim fails on every test that matters: the person spreading it would not supply evidence, the authority responsible for Michigan elections says it received no such report, and the technical premise conflicts with the certified configurations described in the post itself. Until evidence of a specific device, place, and incident is produced, the claim should be treated as false, not as an open question about the midterm results.