🗞️ Story file #1126
FBI agents express concern over potential orders to seize voting equipment
Oct 29, 10 AM ET to Oct 30, 6 AM ET
- 8outlets carried it
- 🫏8 · 0 · 0🐘left · center · right
- 20 hourson the front pages
- 8front pages at once, at its peak
- 7people retold it online
📰 read it at:
Alternet 
HuffPost 
MSNBC 
Raw Story 
The Daily Beast 
Mediaite 
New York Times 
The Independent
👣 How this story traveled: from the front pages that broke it, out through TV, radio and the shows, into what people retold and what fact-checkers examined, and on into the saga it is part of. Everything here is matched to the story by our tools, so a link can be wrong; the trackers' pages say how each is made.
- Oct 29, 10 AM ETfirst on a front page: The Independent
- Oct 29, 12 PM ETpeak: on 8 front pages
- Oct 30, 4 AM ETretold online by 7 people
📰 Spread
the front pages that ran it, hour by hour
💬 Quoted
- “worried”1
phrases its headlines put in quotation marks; the bar is how many outlets did
📌 Linked by aggregators
2 Drudge Report · Political Wire
aggregators linking to it from their front page (they don't count as outlets covering it)
✏️ 2 outlets ran more than one headline on it (reworded, or a follow-up)
- HuffPost (2 wordings): “FBI Agents Say They’re Worried About Being Ordered To Seize Midterm Ballots: MS NOW” → “FBI Agents Drop Disturbing News To MS NOW About Election Interference”
- Raw Story (2 wordings): “FBI agents fear Trump will force them to throw Election Day into chaos: report” → “Frantic FBI agents fear this Trump order is their ticket to prison”
📰 Every outlet's headline 8left to right by AllSides rating
- Alternet🕒 Oct 28, 5 PM ET
FBI agents 'worried' about being tools in Trump's power grab: report
- HuffPost🕒 Oct 29, 12 PM ET
FBI Agents Say They’re Worried About Being Ordered To Seize Midterm Ballots: MS NOW
- MSNBC🕒 Oct 28, 10 PM ET
MS NOW: Some FBI agents concerned they may be ordered to seize voting machines or take actions
- Raw Story🕒 Oct 28, 7 PM ET
FBI agents fear Trump will force them to throw Election Day into chaos: report
- The Daily Beast🕒 Oct 29, 11 AM ET
FBI Agents Reveal Nightmare Election Day Fear
- Mediaite🕒 Oct 28, 7 PM ET
FBI Agents Tell MS NOW They’re Worried About Trump Ordering Them to Seize Ballots
- New York Times🕒 Oct 27, 9 PM ET
White House Has Tight Grip Over FBI in Pursuing Trump Targets, Agent Says
- The Independent🕒 Oct 29, 10 AM ET
FBI agents fear Trump team will order them to seize voting machines and ballots in election takeover: report
📡 Broadcast
TV, radio, and the shows that talked about it
🎙️ On the shows
podcasts, newsletters and streams that talked about it, by show; the bar is episodes; the disc is the show's lean by reputation
🎙️🤷 No show matched to it yet.
🕵️ Investigated, joked about
🕵️ investigative reporting on it and 🃏 satire joking about it (jokes, never counted as coverage); the bar is pieces
🧶 Retelling
what people online made of it
🧩 How it's being told
The stories under this news, from our motif index, and who told each: the shows we follow by their lean, people online, fact-checkers. A story people tell, not a claim that it's true; claims are matched to this story by our tools, so a link can be wrong.
- 🧩 Ballot security
🧶 online
↔️ its answer: Voter suppression
“FBI agents fear they may be ordered to illegally seize voting machines or ballots to disrupt election results.” - 🧩 They're going to steal it
🧶 online
“FBI agents fear they may be ordered to illegally seize voting machines or ballots to disrupt election results.”
🧶 Retold online
- FBI agents fear they may be ordered to illegally seize voting machines or ballots to disrupt election results. Oct 30: told by 7 people
🦋 Widely seen on Bluesky
🦋 a post on Bluesky · 8 likes, 4 reposts
On Folklore: the latest in full, with their motifs and who is telling them.
FBIDonald TrumpMS NOWWhite HouseFBI agents
🔎 Checking
what the fact-checkers looked into
🧐 No fact-checker has taken it on yet.
🧵 Persistence
the running story it belongs to
🌱 A story of its own so far: no saga yet.