Fake videos alleging widespread election fraud in Germany are ultimately tied to a pro-Russian influence network, which shared posts online ahead of two key elections in Berlin and Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania.
The footage purported to show postal ballots for the AfD being destroyed or the party being omitted from ballot papers altogether.
However, the videos, which garnered hundreds of thousands of views on X, clearly differed from official voting materials.
Some videos were amplified by accounts known to spread pro-Russian theories and resembled false election-fraud content previously linked to Storm-1516, an influence network attributed to Russia by German intelligence.
Fake Berlin postal votes
One of the videos appears to show a man opening postal-voting documents in Berlin and cutting up ballots marked for the AfD.
This was shared by Alina Lipp, a pro-Russian German blogger placed under EU sanctions in May 2025. The EU has accused her of spreading disinformation regarding Russia's war against Ukraine and of participating in coordinated information manipulation in support of the Kremlin.
She claimed on X there was no evidence the video was fake, with her post gaining more than 630,000 views.
However, German election-monitoring website Wahlrecht.de found clues that the three purported postal-voting packages were fraudulent.
To begin with, they did not contain the polling cards that voters need to return with their ballots. In addition, neither the outer electoral envelopes nor the internal ballot envelopes were sealed.
According to Wahlrecht, the packages were missing the separate ballot papers used to elect Berlin's district councils, while the papers for the Berlin House of Representatives were folded differently from genuine ballots, indicating it was not real.
AfD removed from fabricated ballots
A second video, shared across multiple accounts, claims to show postal ballots in the state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania without the AfD.
In one video, a male narrator claims to be a pensioner from Rostock who received a suspicious ballot that did not include the party as an option in the list of parties.
This footage was subsequently shared by multiple accounts on X, with some explicitly describing it as election fraud. Similar posts purported to show ballots from three different constituencies: 9, 11 and 33.
The names of the other candidates on the supposed constituency 11 ballot match those on the official sample ballot. However, the row containing the AfD had been removed from the version displayed in the video.
Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania's state election chief, Christian Boden, confirmed to German news agency dpa that the AfD appeared on the genuine postal ballots.
Election officials responsible for the other constituencies shown in the posts also confirmed that the AfD was included on their ballot papers. According to Boden, the forgeries had been closely modelled on official sample ballots, with the fields containing the AfD simply deleted.
Familiar Russian disinformation tactics
Claims of election irregularities and fraud are not new: fake videos also emerged before Germany's 2025 federal election.
One of these falsely claimed the AfD was missing from ballot papers in the city of Leipzig, whilst the other appeared to show ballots being destroyed.
German authorities said the earlier videos appeared to form part of a targeted pro-Russian disinformation campaign associated with Storm-1516, which has used staged witnesses, fabricated videos and websites designed to resemble legitimate news organisations to introduce false claims into political debate.
The latest videos repeat similar election fraud narratives and closely resemble the earlier videos, with researchers linking them to the Storm-1516 campaign.
In December 2025, Germany's Federal Intelligence Service described Russia as the "central actor" behind Storm-1516.
The AfD ultimately finished first in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, taking 38.2 per cent of the vote.
The false narrative casts the AfD and its supporters as victims of manipulation.
The party supports closer relations with Moscow and lifting sanctions on Russian energy, while opposing Germany's continued military support for Ukraine. There is no evidence that the party is behind this social media campaign.
