In September 2026, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney offered Americans $6,000 to vote against Republicans.
A rumor that Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney offered Americans $6,000 to vote against Republicans spread online in September 2026.
Users shared the rumor on multiple social media platforms. For example, a Facebook user wrote (archived) on Sept. 10: “Calling it an effort to ‘restore sanity,’ on Thursday Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney offered every adult American $6000 to vote against Republicans in the midterms.”
The story spread shortly after U.S. President Donald Trump promised $5,000 to every American adult if Republicans win majority control of the Senate and House of Representatives in the 2026 midterm elections. Some users seemed to interpret the rumor that Carney made a similar offer as true. Snopes readers contacted us to investigate its legitimacy.
To investigate the rumor’s legitimacy, we first used search engines such as DuckDuckGo and Bing. If Carney had truly offered Americans $6,000 to vote against Republicans, journalists with reputable news outlets, such as The Associated Press or The Globe and Mail, would have widely reported on it, and those search inquiries would have uncovered such evidence.
That was not the case. We did not find any credible reporting that the Canadian prime minister offered Americans money to vote against Republicans.
We identified the rumor’s original source: The Borowitz Report, a satirical outlet that produces content that parodies political news. Andy Borowitz first shared the rumor on Sept. 10, 2026. While Borowitz’s post was satire, some subsequent posts by other accounts sharing the claim were not labeled as such.
Borowitz’s About page reads:
I’ve been writing satirical news since I was eighteen. This represents either commitment to a genre or arrested development.
The New Yorker featured The Borowitz Report as a column for 25 years; Borowitz announced in 2023 that the magazine dropped his column for financial reasons.
Snopes has debunked numerous other claims stemming from The Borowitz Report. For example, in August 2026, we debunked a claim that Iran’s government announced that it would reopen the Strait of Hormuz only if Trump admitted he lost the 2020 election.
