In October 2022, Elon Musk completed the acquisition of Twitter. He then dramatically changed the algorithm to boost his tweets. The new algorithm, according to a February 2023 REPORT from Platformer, “artificially boosted Musk’s tweets by a factor of 1,000 — a constant result that ensured his tweets ranked higher than anyone else’s in the feed.”
Musk is now using his dominant presence on the social network, which he has renamed X, to convince people that the 2024 presidential election is rigged. His efforts match the lies of Donald Trump, who recently claimed that Democrats are “allowing” undocumented immigrants to enter the country and “signing them to vote.”
Musk promoted a post by @EndWokeness, a popular account promoting fanatical conspiracy theories, claiming to have discovered “data” showing that hundreds of thousands of “illegals” have registered to vote since early 2024. Musk shared @EndWokeness’s post with his 170 million followers and called him “extremely disturbing.”
According to X, thanks to Musk’s promotion, over 100 million people have seen the claims in the post. The only problem is that the whole thing is bunk.
For starters, “illegals” can’t get a social security number. Most people who have social security numbers are citizens. In some cases, noncitizens can obtain a social security number—usually in conjunction with a work authorization—but only if they are legally present in the United States. The idea that using a Social Security number to register to vote is evidence of undocumented status makes no sense.
Help America Vote Verification (HAVV) is part of a process that allows people to register to vote by providing their Social Security number, name and date of birth. This information is then forwarded by the state Department of Motor Vehicles to the Social Security Administration, which checks to make sure the information is valid and that the individual is not deceased.
Critically, each “transaction” using the HAVV process does not equate to a newly registered voter. In November 2010 REPORT by the Social Security Administration’s Office of Inspector General “found that 2.4 million (32 percent) of the 7.7 million HAVV transactions submitted by 25 states associated with the same voter data were resubmitted 10 or more times.” In 2008, according to the report, “Ohio submitted the same voter information 1,778 times during the year for a 77-year-old man who died in December 2005.” Then, in 2009, “Ohio continued to submit this applicant’s information 13,824 times.” On one day in 2008, Illinois submitted the same voter to HAVV 342 times.
This helps explain why the numbers cited by @EndWokeness dramatically exceed the total number of newly registered voters in 2024 in every state. According to Texas Secretary of State Jane Nelsonas of April 3, “the voter list has increased by 57,711 voters since the beginning of 2024.” This represents all newly registered voters – not just the much smaller number who registered to vote without a driver’s license. There are similar discrepancies in Arizona and Pennsylvania.
Even if a noncitizen were able to register without a driver’s license in Texas, Pennsylvania, or Arizona, that would not allow them to vote. All three states are asking voters identification present which determines their citizenship and state residence. (In Pennsylvania, this is required only when voting for the first time.) The whole conspiracy theory is incoherent.
Musk is trying to convince people that non-citizen voting is a serious threat to democracy. The truth is, it almost never happens. A study by the Brennan Center for Justice that evaluated 23.5 million ballots in 12 states in 2016 found 30 incidents of suspected noncitizen voting. 0.0001% of the 2016 vote in those jurisdictions. A 2022 audit Georgia voter rolls found about 1,600 noncitizens trying to register to vote over a 25-year period, and no noncitizens were allowed to register or vote.
The issue of non-citizen voting is related to The racist theory of the Great Replacementpopular with white supremacists, falsely claiming that Democrats are allowing non-citizens to enter the country illegally as part of a plot to seize political power. Musk has repeatedly ADOPTED The Great Substitution Theory in X.
In March, Musk accused Biden for committing “treason” by chartering flights full of undocumented immigrants to register them to vote. Flights did not exist.
Musk touts X’s Community Notes feature as a way to identify misinformation. Community Notes allow users to report misinformation and write a correction. In certain cases, the Community Note is attached to the post itself.
But Musk’s post about HAVV and his other false claims contains no publicly available Community Notes. That’s because Musk designed Community Notes to make it virtually impossible to fact-check his posts.
Musk has a cult following of X’s who subscribe to his reactionary politics and defend his claimsno matter how strange. Community notes are only displayed publicly if there is a consensus among people who usually disagree. That is, even if thousands of people agree that Musk is lying, a Community Note will not appear unless Musk’s loyal supporters also agree that it should appear. Here’s how X describes his approach:
To find notes that are useful to the widest possible group of people, Community Notes takes into account not only the number of contributors who rated a note as helpful or unhelpful, but also whether the people who rated it it seems to come from different angles.
Community Notes evaluates “different perspectives” based entirely on how people have rated notes in the past… If people who usually disagree in their ratings agree that a particular note is useful, it’s probably a good indication that annotation is useful to people from different points of view.
The practical impact of this policy is that very few Community Notes appear publicly, especially not on Elon Musk’s political posts.
