Kanye West tweet showed mock election data, not results

Rapper and independent presidential candidate Kanye West tweeted bogus election results that he said showed he’s ahead of President Donald Trump and Democratic nominee Joe Biden in the presidential race.

The numbers West shared, supposedly showing early results out of Kentucky, were not real. They were mock election data that The Associated Press provides to customers as part of routine testing ahead of elections. Testing data is randomly generated and not based on any predetermined scenarios.

West on Tuesday evening tweeted a screenshot of the fictional numbers from Kentucky NBC affiliate’s LEX 18 News, which showed West had 40,000 votes in Kentucky and was ahead of Trump and Biden. The testing data showed that West was in third place behind the Libertarian Party’s Jo Jorgensen and Brock Pierce, who is running as an independent candidate. The false tweet had over 11,000 retweets.

“GET THE WEST WING READY !!! ... this is how I felt when I saw that Kentucky pole result,” West later tweeted, with a video of him showing off the false results on his phone.

“YE 2020 AFTER ALL? Kanye West is leading Joe Biden and Donald Trump in Kentucky precinct voting polls,” read a post from a Twitter account belonging to a site that calls itself a source of hip-hop news.