What specific statements did Charlie Kirk make about mail‑in voting and 'ballot harvesting' in 2020, with original tweets and transcripts?
Executive summary
Charlie Kirk repeatedly warned in 2020 that mail‑in voting and “ballot harvesting” threatened election integrity, combining social‑media posts and public remarks that mixed factual claims, misinterpreted data and charged Democratic operatives with exploiting pandemic changes; Twitter temporarily locked his account after one tweet that mischaracterized a ProPublica report about Pennsylvania mail applications [1] [2]. Video and transcript excerpts from conservative gatherings show Kirk linking campus closures to a loss of what he called “ballot harvesting opportunities,” language reporters cited as part of a broader Turning Point messaging push questioning mail voting [3] [4] [5].
1. The now‑removed tweet about “372,000 mail‑in ballots” and Twitter’s enforcement
In mid‑October 2020 Kirk posted a tweet that said, in effect, “Pennsylvania has just rejected 372,000 mail‑in ballots,” a claim Twitter flagged as misleading and that the platform used to lock his account under rules against posting false information about voting, with Newsweek and The Independent reporting the text and the lock notification; reporters noted the figure actually referred to rejected applications, not completed ballots, per the underlying ProPublica reporting Kirk cited [1] [2].
2. How Kirk framed the ProPublica data and the factual gap
Kirk’s tweet presented the ProPublica number as evidence of mass rejection of completed mail ballots rather than mail‑in ballot applications — a distinction highlighted in contemporaneous reporting and cited as the reason Twitter deemed the post misleading; outlets documented that Kirk’s wording conflated rejected applications with rejected ballots, a factual misinterpretation central to Twitter’s action [1] [2].
3. Public speeches and the “ballot harvesting” claim
At private and public conservative gatherings in 2020 Kirk linked campus shutdowns to a reduction in what he called “ballot harvesting opportunities,” telling an audience that Democrats had “done a really foolish thing by shutting down all these campuses…It's gonna remove ballot harvesting opportunities and all their voter fraud that they usually do on college campuses,” language captured in video and later reported by The Hill and compiled by outlets such as Wikipedia and The Independent [4] [3] [1]. Reporters framed that remark as part of a strategy by some on the right to suggest that mail voting plus collection of ballots would be used to benefit Democrats [4] [5].
4. The broader Turning Point messaging and context
Independent reporting and later critiques described Turning Point Action’s 2020 messaging as advancing claims that Democrats were using mail balloting to “steal” the election and downplaying COVID risks, with Kirk as a prominent voice in that push; Mother Jones and other outlets documented a coordinated set of communications and flagged the substance of those claims as propagating doubts about mail voting [5]. Video shown to reporters also captured other conservative figures discussing limiting mail voting and encouraging collection of absentee ballots — a context in which Kirk’s remarks were delivered [4].
5. Follow‑up, fact‑checks and the emerging pattern
Fact‑checking outlets maintained a skeptical record on multiple Kirk statements through 2020 and afterward, cataloging instances where his public claims about voting and ballots were rated false or misleading; PolitiFact’s list of fact‑checks and news reports about the October 2020 Twitter lock illustrate that journalists and platforms repeatedly found material problems in how Kirk framed voting data [6] [2]. Separately, later public tweets by Kirk in subsequent years showed a shift from warning about ballot harvesting to openly discussing building aggressive legal ballot‑collection operations — a development reported in 2022 that underscores the continuity of his engagement with the topic [7].
6. What the available sources do — and do not — show
The contemporary record in mainstream reporting contains direct quotes and the text of the flagged tweet, video transcripts of Kirk’s campus‑shutdown/ballot‑harvesting remarks, platform enforcement notices and later analysis of Turning Point messaging; those sources do not provide an exhaustive archive of every Kirk tweet or private statement on the subject in 2020, and they do not supply original screenshots of every post, meaning this account relies on the published quotes and reporting cited above [1] [2] [4] [5] [3].