Georgia official demands Elon Musk take down fake migrant vote videos

Georgia’s top election official Thursday night blamed “probable foreign interference” for a video that’s quickly gaining views on social media and purports to show a recently arrived Haitian migrant claiming he voted for Kamala Harris just six months after arriving in the United States.

The video is “targeted disinformation,” Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said as he specifically called on Elon Musk, the billionaire Donald Trump supporter, to remove the video. Raffensperger said his office is working with federal officials to investigate the video, which had more than half a million views on Musk’s social media platform X as of Thursday night.

In a press release, Raffensperger said that “we are asking Elon Musk and the management of other social media platforms to remove this,” adding, “This is patently false and part of a disinformation effort. Most likely, it is the production of Russian troll farms.” “

Raffensperger said federal law enforcement officials at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency are investigating the video.

Last week, US intelligence officials blamed Russia for a fake video designed to smear Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz.

During the 2024 election cycle, Musk has emerged as one of Trump’s top boosters, pouring about $119 million into a Super PAC, called America PAC, to promote the former president. Musk has often shared unsubstantiated claims of anti-Trump election fraud, and this week asked users to submit cases of “election integrity issues” to the “X Election Integrity Community,” a channel that features America PAC’s branding.

While Musk has not personally shared the new video flagged by Raffensperger, the video has been shared in several posts in the X Election Integrity Community.

The video depicts a young black man who claims he is from Haiti and came to the United States “six months ago.”

“We’re voting for Kamala Harris,” the man says in the video. “Yesterday we voted in Gwinnett County and today we vote in Fulton County.”

The man and another man in the video then show six Georgia IDs, at least three of them duplicates, apparently as proof that they had acquired the necessary documents to vote.

After Trump lost in Georgia in 2020, he and his allies tried to overturn the election results in the state — leading to the indictment of Trump and 18 others. In the years since, Trump and the MAGA movement have worked hard to cement his electoral lies in state politics, packing state and county election boards with voter denialists.

In both counties mentioned in the fake video — Gwinnett and Fulton — election officials have questioned the results of the 2020 election and supported rules passed by the new MAGA majority on the Georgia State Election Board that were designed to give county election officials the authority to arbitrarily deny to confirm the election results.

Those rules, and another designed to slow the counting of votes, were recently found by judges to be “unconstitutional” and will not be in place for Tuesday’s election.

Board of Elections members in the two counties did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The fake video, which started circulating already at 1 p.m. Thursday, has more than 500,000 views in various posts on X. The disinformation video comes amid Trump and his Vice President JD Vance’s vicious smear campaign against Haitian migrants living in Springfield, Ohio; they have baselessly claimed that the migrants eat neighbours’ cats and dogs. Trump has threatened to deport them, even though most of them live in the United States legally.

It is illegal, and extremely rare, for non-citizens to vote in federal elections. Nevertheless, Republicans have often argued that Democrats allow migrants to enter the United States so they can get their votes, and the GOP intends to use claims that non-citizens vote — however baseless — to call into question the outcome of the 2024 election if Harris wins or has the lead.

Not long before Raffensperger’s press release, a screenshot of the video was shared on the Facebook page of Georgia’s most prominent voter denial network, VoterGA.

“He needs to go to jail,” one woman wrote in the forum, referring to the man in the video.

Musk’s call to use X as a forum to share allegations of election fraud has been heeded by users, including Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.). Last week, Greene went to X to claim that the voting machines in her district had “switched votes”.

Local election officials and Raffensperger’s office quickly denied the claim, saying the voter’s printed ballot did not match her choice on the machine because the woman herself had made a mistake.

Greene has continued to claim that machines flip votes and post one video on X Thursday evening that purported to show such a case in Arkansas.