Criminal....

Elon Musk urges people to share signs of voter fraud on X

Disinformation experts find that Election Day posts are a prime source for voter fraud conspiracy theories.

Alfred Ng

As voters head to the polls, Elon Musk has begun encouraging people to post any signs of voter fraud on X — potentially setting the stage for Election Day chaos on social media.

At a rally in Pittsburgh on Sunday, the tech entrepreneur answered an audience question about concerns with voting machines by sowing doubt about their reliability, and then telling the crowd to post any issues they encounter online, including on his platform X, the social network formerly known as Twitter.

“Be very loud about it if you have any concerns,” Musk said at the rally. “The brighter the light we shine on any voting issues, the less likely there is to be cheating.”

On Monday night, his political action committee — the America PAC, which supports Trump — launched an online group inviting users to “share potential incidents of voter fraud or irregularities you see while voting in the 2024 election.”

Disinformation experts find that Election Day posts are a prime source for voter fraud conspiracy theories, building on legitimate issues that polling sites often encounter like long lines, clerical errors with voting machines, or just plain user error.

“The danger right now is that there are people that are looking to blow up any kind of glitch and use it to confirm narratives that they are trying to sell about the elections not being trustworthy,” said Lawrence Norden, the senior director of the Brennan Center for Justice’s elections and government program.

His organization cited cases about printing issues affecting voting machines in Arizona and a technical glitch in Detroit sparking claims of widespread voter fraud in the 2022 midterms.

Over the last year, as Musk has more openly embraced Donald Trump, he has also posted several conspiracy theories related to election fraud on his social media feed, such as the claim that Democrats were bringing in immigrants to boost their votes.

He promoted debunked voter fraud claims at a rally near Philadelphia last week, alleging that it was “almost impossible” to find evidence of cheating with mail-in ballots, and raising questions about voting machines.

In past elections, platforms like Meta and X would flag false information about voter fraud or provide context around the posts to taper off the spread of misinformation. But with Musk in control of X, that safeguard may be gone, Norden said.

“He is a source of election misinformation himself, he has tens of millions of followers, he is boosting that content. What worries me is that the platform will be doing that for what we will inevitably see on Election Day,” Norden said.