Elon Musk is accused of rampantly spreading election misinformation, and it has been a thorn in the side of election officials working double-time to try to mitigate the spew of unfounded claims about meddling and alleged voter fraud. Some officials have even gone to measures like dispatching personal notes to the CEO of Tesla and X, who endorsed Donald Trump in July following an assassination attempt on the former president at a rally in Butler, Pa.
“I’ve had my friends hand-deliver stuff to him,” Stephen Richer, the Maricopa County, Ariz., recorder, told CNN. Richer, a Republican, has come under fire from conservatives for defending the 2020 election outcome that Trump lost.
But so far, the efforts of Richer’s colleagues have fallen short. “We’ve pulled out more stops than most people have available to try to put accurate information in front of [Musk],” Richer said. “It has been unsuccessful.”
Musk cast false information about election security, including insisting Americans vote in-person and on paper, citing a debunked conspiracy theory that ballot machines switched votes, at a Philadelphia town hall event on Oct. 18. Musk historically has voted by mail, and his super PAC, America PAC, has encouraged mail-in voting.
His social media platform X has also failed to quash election lies. A report from Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) on Wednesday found X’s Community Notes feature “failed to counter false” claims about the election, with 209 of 283 (74%) analyzed posts not showing notes correcting false information.
Election officials were prepared to fight misinformation this election after Trump’s fervent efforts to dispute the outcome of the 2020 presidential race, but the sheer volume of online misinformation—and lack of tech to combat it—has proved frustrating for some.
“Flagging things as mis- and disinformation is not helpful anymore on Twitter, especially when you have Elon Musk himself pushing mis- and disinformation about elections,” Democrat Barb Byrum, the Ingham, Mich., county clerk, told Fortune. “We can report a threat, but nothing happens.”
X, as well as America PAC and one of Musk’s attorneys, did not respond to Fortune’s requests for comment.
Headaches for election officials
The effort to counter election lies has been an uphill battle, officials said. As of August, Musk’s false election claims gained 1.2 billion views on X, according to the CCDH analysis.
“The truth of the matter is that mis- and disinformation will travel around the world and grow many legs long before I’m able to sit down at my desk and have a sip of coffee,” Byrum said.
Officials like Richer have taken to the platform to have a direct dialogue with Musk. In a post on X, Musk reposted and reaffirmed an unsubstantiated claim by the Trump-aligned America First Legal, which introduced a lawsuit suing 15 Arizona counties for allegedly refusing to remove undocumented migrants from voter rolls. Richer responded on X in September, saying he’s previously offered his office as a resource to Musk to correct previous claims the CEO has made about Arizona elections.
“Sadly, these lawsuits are no longer interested in actually winning,” he said. “They’re just PR stunts that masquerade as lawsuits.”
But there’s a downside to officials trying to combat false claims over social media. Trying to put out misinformation fires is a poor allocation of time and energy from officials concerned with continuing to organize an election just days away, said Larry Norden of New York University School of Law’s Brennan Center for Justice.
“It’s distracting,” Norden told ABC. “We are putting a huge load on election officials, and if, on top of that, they have to respond to a guy who boosts his own content on his own network to spread lies, it’s distracting from the essential work that they need to do. That is troubling.”
