Election Day misinformation is running rampant in Elon Musk's "Election Integrity Community" on X.Matt Rourke/AP
If you look at Elon Musk’s so-called “Election Integrity Community” on X—a crowd-sourced feed of right-wing keyboard warriors turned self-appointed poll watchers—you will have the impression that our voting system is full of pro-Democratic fraud, making a Kamala Harris victory is inevitable.
The feed, which describes itself as a place to “share potential incidents of voter fraud or irregularities you see while voting,” is a project of Musk’s pro-Trump America PAC, which the tech billionaire reportedly pumped with at least $75 million. It’s full of misleading or straight-up inaccurate posts—many of which have not been fact-checked by X’s community note system—that appear meant to stoke Election Day paranoia in Trump’s favor. And its reach is significant: Since I first wrote about it two weeks ago, the day after it launched, the “Election Integrity Community” has grown from about 10,000 members to more than 62,000—and counting.
A few Election Day posts claim to show a ballot that has a stray dot marked in the Harris box. One post says it’s a Kentucky ballot; another says it’s from Pennsylvania. “This tiny dot will confuse the scanner and either flip the vote or nullify it,” the post claiming to show a Pennsylvania ballot says. But as the nonpartisan fact-checking website PolitiFact notes, this claim is false—and the same image has been circulating widely across social media, where users have also claimed the same image shows a ballot from other states, including Ohio and Alabama. After Libs of TikTok, the far-right account with 3.6 million followers, shared the post on X on Sunday, claiming it showed an invalid ballot in Kentucky, the Kentucky State Board of Elections shut down the rumors. “As no one has presented a pre-marked ballot to election administrators or law enforcement,
the claim that at least one ballot may have had a pre-printed mark in Kentucky, currently only exists in the vacuum of social media,” the board said. But in the X feed, this context is nowhere to be found.
Several other posts appear to highlight legitimate—but isolated—issues at or near polling sites as indications of a broader conspiracy to prevent people from voting. Perhaps most disturbingly, many users are dismissing the bomb scares at Georgia polling sites—which Georgia Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger blamed on Russia—as an inside job designed to siphon votes from Trump. “There was no bomb threat,” one member of the feed claimed, with no evidence. “They did that to steal votes guaranteed.” Another user says: “I think Russia is spelled @GaSecofState,” tagging Raffensperger’s X handle. (Raffensperger’s office could not immediately be reached for comment.)
In a few other posts, users cast doubt on a gas leak that reportedly occurred at a polling place in Northville, Michigan, leading city officials to direct voters to another polling place about a mile away. In others, users claim power outages in California were “planned” to prevent people from voting; in actuality, the utility company behind them, Pacific Gas and Electric, said they were planned to decrease the acute risk of wildfires in light of high winds and a low humidity forecast, which could affect power lines, and that the company had been working with election officials for over a month to minimize potential disruptions. The company added that it stationed temporary generators at five polling locations.
In other posts, users call a software malfunction that prevented some voters from scanning their ballots at a polling place in Cambria County, Pennsylvania, “election interference” and a “voter fraud scheme”; what they don’t say is that a local election official has assured residents that “all votes will be counted,” that voters can fill out paper ballots to deposit to a locked box, and that a court order has extended polling hours in the county from 8 to 10 p.m. tonight.
The lies and chaos circulating in the feed seem to be the point: Musk has done pretty much everything in his power to elect Trump, including paying pro-Trump voters millions of dollars and sharing election-related conspiracy theories on his platform, where they have racked up billions of views, as I have reported. The irony, though, is that X’s “civic integrity” policy forbids “manipulating or interfering in elections or other civic processes” by posting false or misleading information or doing anything that could “lead to offline violence during an election.” (And lest you forget, my colleague David Corn just spoke to voters at a Trump rally in Pennsylvania on Monday who said a Trump loss would lead to “civil war” worse than January 6—and that they would take part.)
WATCH: Trump's most loyal fans say they'll refuse to accept a loss—no matter what. At one of his final rallies, Trump supporters predict a civil war and an uprising "10 times worse” than January 6.@DavidCornDC reports on what could be Trump's final rally 👇 pic.twitter.com/ea5j2NSiXV
— Mother Jones (@MotherJones) November 5, 2024
“Any attempt to undermine the integrity of civic participation undermines our core tenets of freedom of expression,” the X policy states, “and as a result, we will apply labels to violative posts informing users that the content is misleading.” But as recent research from the Center for Countering Digital Hate (which Musk has also attacked) indicates, X’s “community notes” system—meant to be a form of crowd-sourced fact-checking—has not actually addressed the majority of false and misleading claims about the US elections circulating on the platform.
X did not immediately respond to questions about the lack of community notes on the posts in the feed, and under Musk’s ownership generally does not respond to journalists.
Josh Richman, communications director for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit organization focused on defending civil liberties online, said in a statement provided to Mother Jones: “With tempers and fears peaking, this is not the time to be getting your election information from any social media platform, and certainly not from one whose owner has expressed a clear partisan motivation. Voters who want real, fact-based information about how the election is being conducted should consult the webpages of their state and county elections officials, or of a nonpartisan nonprofit such as Verified Voting.”
All this should serve as a reminder: Musk is not a journalist, his platform is not a reputable news source, and his “Election Integrity Community” is anything but.
