Fact Check: NBC KornackiCam Result Does NOT Prove Fraud -- Talarico Briefly Shown With 91.9% of Tarrant County Votes
Does a result briefly showing James Talarico with over 91.9% of the votes in the U.S. Senate race in Tarrant County, Texas, during KornackiCam on NBC prove fraud? No, that's not true: The discrepancy appears to be a data entry error involving a missing digit in Ken Paxton's vote count that was immediately questioned on air and revised a few minutes later. There's no evidence that the incorrect numbers were part of any intentional effort to manipulate the election results.
The claim appeared in a post (archived here ) by the @thealexpkeaton account on the Patriots Win forum on Nov. 5, 2026. It read:
WHEN THE STEAL IS TOO OBVIOUS AND YOU SCRAMBLE TO FIX IT!
This is what the post looked like on Patriots Win at the time of writing:
Image source: post by @thealexpkeaton on Patriots Win.
The accuracy of the screenshot of the post in the Patriots Win forum is confirmed by a video (archived here ) of the Election Night coverage by NBC News on YouTube on Nov. 3, 2026, starting around 3:15:00.
The first image appears around the 3:15:19 mark. It's meant to show the tally from Tarrant County with 49% of the vote. The graphic shows Talarico with 91.9% or 345,834 votes and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton with 6% or 22,403 votes. NBC analyst Steve Kornacki immediately questioned the numbers, saying:
Can we put a pin in this and just get some clarity here? ... This seems out of whack. Sometimes that happens ... Sometimes there can be sort of data entry errors, these sorts of things.
A few minutes later, Kornacki said they were taking back the Tarrant County number:
That was so crazy... We're going to revise it. So, forget you ever saw that.
At about 3:18:55, NBC reposted its revised Tarrant County tally, which showed Talarico with the same 345,834 votes, but with 59.8% of the vote. Paxton's numbers changed by exactly 202,000 votes from the original 22,403, giving him 224,403 or 38.8%.
Someone appears to have dropped a digit when entering Paxton's vote total. Instead of entering 224,403, someone entered the much smaller number, 22,403. Only one 4 was entered after the first two 2s, rather than two 4s.
Lead Stories reached out to NBC News for clarification about what happened during the live coverage, but no immediate response was received.
