Michigan secretary of state calls Elon Musk's voting claim 'dangerous disinformation'

Source: The Guardian

Tue 22 Oct 2024 10.37 EDT
Last modified on Tue 22 Oct 2024 17.11 EDT


Michigan’s top elections official defended the state’s elections after repeated attacks on X from Elon Musk, who spread false claims about inactive voters. Jocelyn Benson, the Democratic secretary of state in Michigan, corrected Musk multiple times in recent days and called his comments on voter list maintenance “dangerous disinformation”.

Musk first reposted a video about inactive voters who remain on Michigan’s rolls, saying: “Michigan has more registered voters than eligible citizens!?”

Musk has a penchant for sharing false, misleading or incomplete information about elections and voting processes. Elections officials have reached out to him to attempt to correct the misinformation on multiple occasions, which has not quelled his tweets on the topic. He has emerged as a major spreader of rightwing conspiracies about voting in advance of the November election, and he is spending many millions of his dollars to help elect Donald Trump.

Benson responded to Musk this week, noting that there were not more voters than citizens in Michigan – the state has 7.9 million people of voting age and 7.2 million active registered voters. Musk was “pushing a misleading number that includes 1.2m inactive records slated for removal in accordance with the law”, she said.

Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/oct/22/elon-musk-michigan-election-misinformation