For months, billionaire and X owner Elon Musk has used his platform to share election conspiracy theories that could undermine faith in the outcome of the 2024 election. Last week, the political action committee (PAC) that backs Musk went a step further and launched a group on X called the Election Integrity Community. The group has nearly 50,000 members and says it is intended to be a place where users can “share possible incidents of voter fraud or irregularities they observe when voting in the 2024 election.”
In practice, it’s a cesspool of election conspiracy theories, alleging everything from unauthorized immigrants voting to candidate names misspelled on ballots. “It’s just an election denial spree,” says Paul Barrett, deputy director of the Center for Business and Human Rights at New York University, author of a recent report on how social media facilitates political violence.
Since endorsing former president and Republican candidate Donald Trump following the first assassination attempt against him in July, Musk has become one of Trump’s largest financial backers, investing more than $100 million in the US PAC since July. The PAC has also been a mainstay of the Trump campaign’s ground game in swing states. WIRED reporting found that Blitz Canvassing, a PAC contractor, was threatening canvassers in Michigan and transporting them in U-Hauls.
In early October, Musk appeared at a Trump rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, where he repeated false claims that Democrats would allow undocumented immigrants to vote illegally and encouraged Trump supporters to vote.
In January 2021, the company then known as Twitter banned Trump’s account for inciting violence during the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol. But since taking over and rebranding it as X, Musk has fired many of the people on the teams who worked to keep misinformation and disinformation off the platform. Last year, X laid off much of what remained of his election integrity team. After the news broke, Musk published in Xsaying, “Oh, you mean the ‘Election Integrity’ Team that was undermining election integrity? Yes, they are gone.”
Barrett says America PAC’s Election Integrity Community group augments the work of other election-denying groups, such as former Trump adviser Cleta Mitchell’s Election Integrity Network. “This is a parallel anti-election and anti-democracy campaign designed to sow confusion and lay the groundwork for unfounded objections to the elections after Election Day. This is happening all over the country and it is extremely dangerous,” says Barrett. “And we will see the results almost immediately when the polls close on November 5.”