Elon Musk Is Crowdsourcing Election Denialism

Twitter's "Election Integrity Community" is collecting the bullshit for Trump's future lawsuits

Greetings from Washington, D.C.

We’re just a few hours away from seeing the first results in (all together now) the most consequential election in American history.

I’m just back from a piss-up near the White House, full of cautiously optimistic Republicans who think early results are looking good for Donald Trump to eke out a second election victory. Low advanced voting numbers from registered Democrats and high election day turnout in Republican districts tells them that things are going the right way.

Democrats are telling a very different story. They see waves of women turning out across the country, with late-deciding voters breaking for Kamala Harris by massive margins. They think this could be a bigger blue wave than anyone is expecting.

Those are wonks and hacks trying to interpret the real world, trying to figure out what regular people are doing and why. You can drive yourself mad, however, trying to splice and interpret the early numbers as we wait for the polls to close.

But for this special edition of Bug-eyed and Shameless, I want to take you away from the real world, and head instead to crazytown, U.S.A, where Elon Musk is holding court with his melee of rabid fanboys as they search for evidence that the fix is already in.

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In case you missed it in the deluge of pre-election news: Musk announced that he would not merely be an enthusiastic Trump supporter, not just a surrogate, not only the owner of a major source of pro-Trump propaganda, not just the founder and financier of one of the biggest pro-Trump Super PACs, but that he would be the man responsible for the Republican get-out-the-vote efforts in critical swing states and the captain of a massive effort to contest the election before election day even came to pass.

Through his America PAC, Musk has funnelled tens of millions of dollars into Trump’s election efforts — paying armies of poorly-trained and badly-paid election canvassers and giving away $1 million cheques to voters. If Trump wins tonight, it will be thanks in part to Musk. If he loses, Musk’s ramshackle GOTV effort will be partly to blame.

But I want to talk about an effort spearheaded by Musk and the America PAC that was always sure to be a hotbed of conspiratorial nonsense: The "Election Integrity Community,” a Twitter-based community where pro-Trump social media denizens are encouraged to report, endorse, amplify, and speculate on any and all news that carries a whiff of irregularity in the vote.

Claims in this cmmunity come with prefaces like “ATTENTION,” “BREAKING,” and ”❗️Huge if true!” A huge number carry the tell-tale blue check mark, meaning they pay Twitter $7 per month to, amongst other things, amplify their posts in the algorithm. Some of the users even have the sparkling gold check mark, signifying that they are a ‘verified organization,’ entitling them to an even higher level of access to Twitter’s millions of users. And, occasionally, these claims are even amplified by Musk himself.

In this community, users allege that someone is “purportedly operating [voting] machines wirelessly with Chinese cards” and that the election has already been tainted by “EVIL MACHINES DOING THEIR DEMONIC JOB!”

The crack electoral fraud investigators post supposed evidence (a single tweet) which proves that someone set fire to a truck full of ballots in North Carolina. Some are pointing to any and every issue at every polling location — a reality of every election — to confidently claim “the cheat is on.”

Plenty say “illegal aliens” are being encouraged to vote — one account claimed, without proof, that 35,000 non-citizens were on the voter rolls in their state, which another said that number was over 200,000. Another account tweeted some popular gossip: “I just got word from my ICE contacts that they have been told not to wear their uniforms or badges when they go to vote tomorrow. They believe the order is designed to not intimidate illegal aliens or non-citizens who ‘may’ be at the polls! Outrageous!”

Another reported that poll workers are taking ballots and “tearing them up and throwing them in he trash.” One hilariously asserted that “bus loafs” of New Yorkers are being sent to Pennsylvania to dutifully vote for Harris — a claim endorsed by conspiracy broadcaster Jack Posobiec, who wielded a video of a nondescript tour bus arriving in the state to claim “another ‘conspiracy’ proven 100% right.” Another site, known to peddle completely invented nonsense, racked up half-a-million views on a tweet claiming that a mysterious gang of “white hats” had “stopped THREE busses of Harris supporters in NYC who VOTED in NY and then boarded a bus to vote again in PA. 150 people in all detained.”

Still others are doing spreadsheet math to come up with proofs that, they say, establish fraud. “In Harris County, there are now huge discrepancies in early voters by polling location between yesterday,” one Twitter user claimed. “Major breaking news! Please share!” By mid-afternoon, another user went so far as to claim “this entire election is invalid” because they were confused by statistics reported on the Nevada elections portal.

Elon Musk is happily egging this on, doing his inane just-asking-questions shtick and amplifying everyone who tags him in their flimsy claims that big tech is rigging the vote for the Democrats.

A network of far-right media outlets have rushed to repeat these claims — some, publishing them outright; others, aggressively covering every single hiccup to help advance the narrative that something bigger is going on.

It doesn’t matter if these claims are obviously fake. Claims of “power outages all over the nation” are totally falsifiable: Yet they’re being repeated faster than anyone can correct the lie.

I could pepper you with more examples, but suffice it to say that Elon Musk has created a platform to both generate and amplify lies, innuendo, conspiracy theories, paranoia, gossip, rumour, and speculation about this election — and nothing can stop, slow, or disrupt it now.

The impact of this systemized and crowd-sourced lie generation effort probably won’t be felt today. But it may well be felt tomorrow.

We know what that will look like. Four years ago, there was a very similar effort afoot: But it was run in fringe communities, such as 4chan, and promoted via pro-Trump media sites. These claims alleged that poll workers had swapped out votes, that the Chinese shipped in ballots printed on bamboo paper, that voting machines had been rigged, that non-citizens had voted, that Trump votes had been thrown out.

In the hours, days, weeks, and months after election day 2020, those lies and falsehoods took on a life of their own. They circulated through Trump’s fanbase as they were remixed, improved, expanded-upon, and refined — soon they went into the hands of Trump’s lawyers.

These claims were entirely and completely rejected by the courts — but that didn’t stop Trump from using them as the impetus for his assault on the capital on January 6.

I wrote about this cynical and dangerous effort last year:

Today’s effort dwarfs that DIY effort to discredit the election by orders of magnitude. Some of the 2020 claims — such as the allegation that Toronto-based Dominion Voting Systems were using their machines to rig the vote for the Democrats — have even remerged today, a zombified version of the 2020 attempt to “stop the steal.”

It was all made possible by Musk’s massive platform, his efforts to rig the algorithm to favor Trump and to sow distrust, and the paranoia that reigns supreme on Twitter.

These claims are unlikely to win many new converts. But they will, at best, absolutely overwhelm any court tasked with sifting through them and, at worst, provide a sufficient evidentiary basis for a pro-Trump judge to try and challenge the results of a Harris victory.

Years of lawfare have polarized the American legal system in terrifying new ways — and it’s not just the Supreme Court. The fifth circuit court has proven itself remarkably willing to hear any and all claim made by Republicans, no matter how outside its jurisdiction or how fabulous the claim. We will see some courts seriously entertain this electoral fraud fiction, if it gets there. The work being done on Elon Musk’s hellsite are going to make that possible.

We still don’t know how the vote will go to tonight. But we do know that Elon Musk has set to the stage for a terrifying and powerful effort to reject the results if they do not go Trump’s way.

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That’s it for this special election day dispatch. Expect more tomorrow or later this week.

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