At Trump's rally in Butler, PA, Musk jumped up and down onstage and repeated election falsehoods.Jen Golbeck/AP
On Saturday, Elon Musk furthered an ongoing effort in support of Donald Trump: He went onstage to sow misinformation about the integrity of American elections.
At the former president’s campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania—in the same location where Trump narrowly survived an assassination attempt in July—Musk awkwardly took to the stage in a Black MAGA hat and a t-shirt that said “OCCUPY MARS,” jumping up and down on his way to the podium. The right-wing owner of X then falsely told the crowd that “the other side” wants “to take away your right to vote, effectively.”
Musk offered no evidence to back up that claim. (The Republican Party has in fact worked for a long time to disenfranchise voters and rig the voting system in its favor.) He lambasted a new California law that bans local governments from requiring people to present identification to vote. “I still can’t believe that’s real,” Musk said of that law and other voter ID policies in more than a dozen other states. “How are you supposed to have a good, proper election if there’s no ID? It’s just meaningless,” he claimed.
That is highly misleading: As the National Conference of State Legislatures has made clear, states without voter ID laws use other methods, such as signatures on file, to verify voters’ identities. Meanwhile, research shows that strict ID laws do not impact voter fraud—which is very rare in US elections to begin with. What impact such laws do have is reducing turnout among minority voters and deterring them from voting.
This is far from the first time Musk has spread these kinds of falsehoods. As I reported back in August, research from the Center for Countering Digital Hate found that Musk frequently spread false claims that voting is vulnerable to fraud and that Democrats are “importing voters” through illegal immigration—claims that, along with a deepfake of Vice President Kamala Harris that Musk re-posted, racked up a staggering 1.2 billion views.
Musk also repeated in a lengthy screed last week false claims about Democrats recruiting undocumented people to vote. But as my colleague Isabela Dias has reported:
Noncitizen voting is a non-issue, despite Republicans’ best efforts to make it one… a study by the Brennan Center for Justice found that in the 2016 election, election officials in 42 jurisdictions overseeing the tabulation of 23.5 million votes only referred about 30 cases of ‘suspected noncitizen voting’ for investigation or prosecution—or 0.0001 percent of votes.
Musk also repeated his baseless claims on Saturday that Democrats are censuring speech. “Free speech is the bedrock of democracy. And if people don’t know what’s going on, if they don’t know the truth, how can you make an informed vote?” he said. “You must have free speech in order to have democracy.”
Musk’s stated concerns about free speech and truth seem especially strange given that the CCDH report found that Musk’s own social media platform is an engine of disinformation. In August, five secretaries of state warned Musk about Grok, the AI-powered search assistant available to premium X subscribers, after it disseminated false information about Harris being ineligible to appear on the ballots in multiple states.
