Election Day misinformation is running rampant in Elon Musk's "Election Integrity Community" on X.
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........