Georgia official demands Elon Musk remove fake migrant voting video

GeorgiaThe country’s top election official on Thursday night blamed “likely foreign interference” for a video that is quickly generating a lot of attention on social media and purports to show a newly arrived Haitian migrant claiming to have died just six months after arriving in the United States voted for Kamala Harris. States.

The video is “targeted disinformation”, according to the Minister of Foreign Affairs Brad Raffensperger said, as he specifically invoked Elon Muskthe billionaire Donald Trump supporter, to remove the video. Raffensperger said his office is working with federal officials to investigate the video, which was viewed more than half a million times on Musk’s social media platform X as of Thursday evening.

In a press release, Raffensperger said that “we are asking Elon Musk and the leadership of other social media platforms to remove this,” adding, “This is clearly fake and part of a disinformation effort. It is probably a production of Russian troll farms.”

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

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

During the 2024 elections Over the past cycle, Musk has emerged as one of Trump’s key boosters, pouring roughly $119 million into a Super PAC called America PAC to promote the former president. Musk has regularly shared baseless claims of anti-Trump election fraud, and this week he asked users to submit cases of “election integrity issues” to the “X Election Integrity Community,” a channel branded America PAC.

Although Musk did not personally share the new video, flagged by Raffensperger, the video has been shared in multiple posts in the X Election Integrity Community.

The video shows a young black man claiming he is from Haiti and came to the US “six months ago.”

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

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

After Trump lost in Georgia in 2020, he and his allies tried to overturn the election results in the state — leading to criminal charges for Trump and 18 others. In the years that followed, Trump and the MAGA movement have worked diligently to entrench his election lies in state policy, with state and county election boards filled with election deniers.

In both counties mentioned in the fake video – Gwinnett and Fulton – election officials have questioned the outcome of the 2020 election and supported rules ignored the new MAGA majority in the Georgia State Election Board, which were intended to give county election officials the power to arbitrarily refuse to certify election results.

These rules, and another designed to delay the counting of votes, were recently deemed “unconstitutional” by judges and will not be in effect in Tuesday’s elections.

Election board members in the two counties did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The fake video, which began circulating as early as 1 p.m. on Thursday, has been viewed more than 500,000 times across posts on Ohio living; they have unfounded claim the migrants eat the neighbors’ cats and dogs. Trump has threatened to deport themeven though most of them live legally in the US.

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It is illegal and extremely rare for non-citizens to vote in federal elections. Nevertheless, Republicans have often claimed that Democrats are allowing migrants into the US so they can win their votes. plans to use claims about non-citizen voting – however baseless – to question the 2024 election results if Harris wins or is in charge.

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

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

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

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

Greene continues to claim that machines flip votes and a video on X Thursday evening that claimed to show such a specimen in Arkansas.