Georgia election official appeals to Elon Musk over foreign disinformation on X

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Georgia’s top election official has appealed to Elon Musk to remove “targeted disinformation” about voter fraud in the state from X, claiming a viral post on the social media platform was likely an attempt at foreign interference in the US presidential election.

Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state, said on Thursday his office had been alerted to a video circulating on the platform “purporting to show a Haitian immigrant with multiple Georgia IDs claiming to have voted multiple times”.

The short clip features a man apparently seated in the back of a moving vehicle saying he had voted for vice-president Kamala Harris in Gwinnett County, north-east of Atlanta, and was planning to vote again in Fulton County. The camera then pans to a hand holding four Georgia driving licences.

Haitian immigrants were also the subject of a false conspiracy theory about pet abductions, which spread online and was repeated by Donald Trump and his running mate JD Vance.

In a statement, Raffensperger said the video was “obviously fake” and “an example of targeted disinformation we’ve seen this election”. He added that the post, which has been viewed several hundred thousand times on X, was likely “a production of Russian troll farms”.

“We ask Elon Musk and the leadership of other social media platforms to take this down,” Raffensperger said.

Raffensperger, a Republican, drew national attention for refusing Trump’s demand to “find 11,780 votes” that would overturn the state’s election result in 2020. That effort is now the subject of a criminal case against Trump and 18 other defendants, including Rudy Giuliani, under Georgia’s anti-racketeering law.

More than 3.6mn people have already voted in Georgia, which allows for two weeks of early voting prior to election day. Recent polls have given Trump a slender lead in the swing state but still within the margin of error.

Raffensperger, who was re-elected in the 2022 midterm elections, has sought over the past few months to convince voters in the state that its polls are secure amid an influx of election deniers at various levels of the local administration.

He has also countered claims from Trump allies that Georgia’s voter rolls contain a significant number of non-citizens. Raffensperger’s office this month reported it had identified just 20 non-citizens out of 8.2mn registered voters in the state.

Musk has repeatedly used his platform on X to claim that Democrats have been “importing” immigrants to vote for them.

This month, the billionaire featured a post from his America Pac group that purported to show a 401 per cent increase in Georgia’s migrant population. “Voter importation at an unprecedented scale!” Musk claimed.