The chairman of the board of elections in Montgomery County, Pa., was well acquainted with the regular attendees at his monthly meetings who peddled old, debunked voting conspiracy theories.
But something changed after April 4, the chairman, Neil Makhija, explained in an interview. That was the day Elon Musk retweeted a false claim that as many as 2 million noncitizens had been registered to vote in Texas, Arizona and Pennsylvania.
Suddenly, the same people were coming to the meetings with a new, unsubstantiated theory of voter fraud that appeared to align with Musk’s latest post: They were convinced that droves of noncitizens were voting illegally in their suburban Philadelphia county of nearly a million people.
For Makhija, a Democrat who is also a member of the county board of commissioners, it was a lesson in the influence of Musk, the South Africa-born billionaire CEO of Tesla and SpaceX. In the two years since he bought Twitter, now X, Musk has transformed it into a primary source of false election rumors, both by spreading them on his own account, which has 197 million followers, and lowering some of the site’s guardrails around misinformation.
“You have one of the richest men in the world putting out this idea that the elections are fraudulent and the results are questionable,” Makhija said. “X has obviously become a platform for misinformation and disinformation. Because we know it’s not true.”
Musk’s online utterances don’t stay online. His false and misleading election posts add to the deluge of inaccurate information plaguing voting officials across the country. Election officials say his posts about supposed voter fraud often coincide with an increase in baseless requests to purge voter rolls and heighten their worry over violent threats. Experts say Musk is uniquely dangerous as a purveyor of misinformation because his digital following stretches well beyond the political realm and into the technology and investment sectors, where his business achievements have earned him credibility.
After Musk bought Twitter, he made deep cuts in staff responsible for maintaining standards on the site, courted major conservative figures, and reoriented the platform to boost the reach of his account, which frequently spreads false statements without being subject to the kinds of fact checks that previously existed on the site. He reinstated accounts previously banned for violating the platform’s rules, including Donald Trump’s, and promised to usher in a less restrictive era.
Musk long described his politics as libertarian, but in recent years, he has become an increasingly outspoken supporter of conservative causes. He has said he supported Democrats for president between 2008 and 2020, but after the assassination attempt on Trump in July, Musk posted a photo of the Republican presidential candidate, face bloodied, with his fist in the air, and endorsed him for 2024 and welcomed him back to X with a live-streamed conversation between the two. Last week, Trump said that if elected, he would put Musk in charge of a government efficiency commission.
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This article is based on interviews with more than two dozen election officials and experts, some of whom spoke to The Washington Post on the condition of anonymity to protect themselves and their organizations in a polarized election season. Most of them said it’s difficult to prove that Musk has caused the inundation of demands from misinformed voters but that it’s clear to them the two have coincided and are related.
Musk, who bought Twitter in November 2022, has repeatedly claimed without evidence that Democrats are “importing” undocumented people to vote in the coming election, a popular 2024 iteration of the Great Replacement Theory, which holds that a global elite is replacing European-descended populations with non-White people. He has falsely asserted that electronic voting machines are unreliable and that the country should return to hand-counting ballots. And he has promoted deepfakes and other deceptive images aimed at undermining politicians he doesn’t support.
Between his purchase of Twitter and Thursday, Musk’s 52 posts or reposts about noncitizen voting — one of the main topics of false or misleading election claims he made in that time period — drew almost 700 million views, according to a Post analysis.
But something changed after April 4, the chairman, Neil Makhija, explained in an interview. That was the day Elon Musk retweeted a false claim that as many as 2 million noncitizens had been registered to vote in Texas, Arizona and Pennsylvania.
Suddenly, the same people were coming to the meetings with a new, unsubstantiated theory of voter fraud that appeared to align with Musk’s latest post: They were convinced that droves of noncitizens were voting illegally in their suburban Philadelphia county of nearly a million people.
For Makhija, a Democrat who is also a member of the county board of commissioners, it was a lesson in the influence of Musk, the South Africa-born billionaire CEO of Tesla and SpaceX. In the two years since he bought Twitter, now X, Musk has transformed it into a primary source of false election rumors, both by spreading them on his own account, which has 197 million followers, and lowering some of the site’s guardrails around misinformation.
“You have one of the richest men in the world putting out this idea that the elections are fraudulent and the results are questionable,” Makhija said. “X has obviously become a platform for misinformation and disinformation. Because we know it’s not true.”
Musk’s online utterances don’t stay online. His false and misleading election posts add to the deluge of inaccurate information plaguing voting officials across the country. Election officials say his posts about supposed voter fraud often coincide with an increase in baseless requests to purge voter rolls and heighten their worry over violent threats. Experts say Musk is uniquely dangerous as a purveyor of misinformation because his digital following stretches well beyond the political realm and into the technology and investment sectors, where his business achievements have earned him credibility.
After Musk bought Twitter, he made deep cuts in staff responsible for maintaining standards on the site, courted major conservative figures, and reoriented the platform to boost the reach of his account, which frequently spreads false statements without being subject to the kinds of fact checks that previously existed on the site. He reinstated accounts previously banned for violating the platform’s rules, including Donald Trump’s, and promised to usher in a less restrictive era.
Musk long described his politics as libertarian, but in recent years, he has become an increasingly outspoken supporter of conservative causes. He has said he supported Democrats for president between 2008 and 2020, but after the assassination attempt on Trump in July, Musk posted a photo of the Republican presidential candidate, face bloodied, with his fist in the air, and endorsed him for 2024 and welcomed him back to X with a live-streamed conversation between the two. Last week, Trump said that if elected, he would put Musk in charge of a government efficiency commission.
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This article is based on interviews with more than two dozen election officials and experts, some of whom spoke to The Washington Post on the condition of anonymity to protect themselves and their organizations in a polarized election season. Most of them said it’s difficult to prove that Musk has caused the inundation of demands from misinformed voters but that it’s clear to them the two have coincided and are related.
Musk, who bought Twitter in November 2022, has repeatedly claimed without evidence that Democrats are “importing” undocumented people to vote in the coming election, a popular 2024 iteration of the Great Replacement Theory, which holds that a global elite is replacing European-descended populations with non-White people. He has falsely asserted that electronic voting machines are unreliable and that the country should return to hand-counting ballots. And he has promoted deepfakes and other deceptive images aimed at undermining politicians he doesn’t support.
Between his purchase of Twitter and Thursday, Musk’s 52 posts or reposts about noncitizen voting — one of the main topics of false or misleading election claims he made in that time period — drew almost 700 million views, according to a Post analysis.
