No, this map doesn’t delegitimize the New York governor’s race

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul was re-elected, beating Republican candidate Lee Zeldin with 52.4% of the vote, according to unofficial results. 

But a recent Instagram post alleges that Hochul’s win resulted from wrongdoing. 

A video in the post shows a map of election results from the New York gubernatorial race. The map shows that about 99% of the votes were in. When the person filming the video hovers over some counties that are red, the same figures appear. 

The video shows Zeldin with 34,311 votes in Clinton County, or 63.10% of the vote, and Hochul with 20,064 votes, or 36.9%. Those same figures appear in every county the narrator puts his cursor: Hamilton County, Oneida County, Chenango County, Ontario County, Monroe County, Chemung County and Rockland County.

"This is fraud," reads a description of the video in one Instagram post. "New York and California perfected election theft." 

This post was flagged as part of Facebook’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram.)

In the video, the map shows that it was last updated the evening of Nov. 8 and it includes a logo for Decision Desk HQ, a company that collects and reports election night results. We messaged the company about the Instagram post but didn’t immediately hear back. 

However, when we reviewed the map on the Decision Desk HQ site Nov. 11, it wasn’t showing identical vote counts in every Republican county. When we looked, it said it was last updated at 1 p.m. Nov. 11, when it showed that an estimated 85% of votes were in. 

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In Clinton County, the map showed Zeldin with 15,289 votes, or 56.97%, and Hochul with 11,548 votes, or 43%. In Hamilton County, Zeldin had 2,048 votes to Hochul’s 830. In Oneida, he had 48,966 to Hochul’s 24,713. In Chenango, 11,729 to 4,867, and so on. 

These numbers are identical to a breakdown of how each county voted in the governor’s race on the New York State Board of Elections website showing unofficial election results.

Zeldin initially refused to concede because he said there were too many uncounted ballots and he expected Hochul’s lead to narrow. But he congratulated Hochul on her win the morning after Election Day, saying, "There’s no way that we would have been able to get this close to 50% without being able to successfully connect with so many people who have in the past voted Democrat."

We don’t know why the map in the video in the Instagram post shows identical vote counts for the candidates in multiple counties, but that didn’t reflect the race’s true results and it’s not evidence of fraud. 

We rate that claim False.