Over the past few months, Elon Musk has seemingly done everything in his power to get former President Donald Trump reelected.
On Monday, he debuted another effort: X added a purported “Election Integrity Community”—a feed where users of the site can add instances “of voter fraud or irregularities you see while voting in the 2024 election.” America PAC—the political action committee Musk founded and reportedly sent $75 million—is behind the move. By Tuesday afternoon, the “Election Integrity Community” had 10,000 members.
The crowdsourced space appears meant to replace X’s actual team of people employed to ensure election integrity, which Musk said he disbanded last year. But the channel has already been filled with misinformation.
“Everyone needs to watch the movie 2000 Mules to understand what happened in 2020 and be better prepared for it,” one member posted Monday. The discredited film by right-wing commentator Dinesh D’Souza, 2,000 Mules is the movie that Trump falsely claimed showed widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election. It has since been recalled by its distributor.
Several posters in the X community also have shared a video from NBC Boston alleging ballot fraud—which, as the “community note” points out, is actually from a local election in the city of Lawrence, Massachusetts last November, and led to two people being indicted on voter fraud charges.
Another video circulating in the community purports to show a poll worker destroying a ballot filled out for Trump—but as fact-checks from Reuters and Politifact explain, the video was made as a joke four years ago by someone who admitted they were not actually an election worker.
As Mother Jones has previously reported, Musk’s other moves have included making legally dubious payments to pro-Trump voters in swing states and sharing anti-Democrat disinformation on X, the platform he owns.
The new channel may sound harmless enough—righteous, even. The problem is that voter fraud is rare—and, as I reported yesterday, the right is using unjustified fears about undocumented immigrants and dead people voting to rile up their base to closely monitor polls in ways that could lead to violence on Election Day.
It’s unclear if Musk’s new initiative has any formal connections to the Republican National Committee’s so-called election integrity initiative, which has recruited 200,000 pro-Trump poll watchers to “establish the battlefield” to challenge the election results should Trump lose, as the New Yorker recently reported. A GOP spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment from Mother Jones about whether the party was aware of or connected to Musk’s effort, and X no longer responds to journalists’ questions under Musk’s ownership.
One irony of the new “election integrity” channel is that research has shown Musk and his platform are massive purveyors of election-related disinformation. For example, Grok, the AI-powered search assistant available to premium subscribers on X, falsely told users that Harris declared her candidacy too late to appear on ballots in nine states after President Biden dropped out, prompting five secretaries of state to demand Musk “immediately implement changes” to the tool.
The goal of the new community appears to be helping elect Trump—and reverse-engineering allegations of fraud. One member said the quiet part out loud in a post early Tuesday morning: “Congratulations in advance, Trump.”
