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Florida’s Coronavirus Death Totals Had Unexplained Gap in Days Before Election: Report

On Oct. 24, weeks out from the presidential election, Florida officials appear to have manipulated the numbers to make the situation appear less dire than it was.

The South Florida Sun Sentinel has noticed an extremely strange anomaly in the state’s coronavirus-related death figures. On Oct. 24, weeks out from the presidential election, Florida officials appear to have manipulated the numbers to make the situation appear less dire than it was. On that date, the newspaper reports that the state stopped including the backlog of unrecorded fatalities, leading to smaller death totals in the days when Floridians started heading to the polls for early voting. Officials only started including the number in the overall totals again on Nov. 17, weeks after the vote. It’s not clear why the anomaly happened, and state officials refused to explain it to the newspaper. Whatever the reason, the change gave the public misleadingly favorable death trends in the crucial days before the election.