Ignore Musk's giant checks -- and his effort to sow election doubts

Elon Musk’s daily giveaway of million-dollar checks to swing-state voters is generating the buzz he no doubt hoped for. But Mr. Musk’s oversize checks are distracting from a less-visible campaign the world’s richest man is conducting: laying the groundwork to cast doubt on the election results if his favored candidate, former president Donald Trump, loses.

Campaigning solo for Mr. Trump on Sunday afternoon, Mr. Musk urged a capacity crowd of about 1,200 at a Pittsburgh theater to post about suspected election irregularities. “Be very loud about it if you have any concerns,” he said at the end of a two-hour town hall event. He didn’t say anything about them being substantiated. A woman had asked whether Mr. Musk is confident that fighting (nonexistent) widespread election fraud is a battle that can be won. “I don’t know what’s real and what’s not real,” Mr. Musk said.

That’s not stopping the billionaire from amplifying often easily disprovable falsehoods to adherents who see him as a visionary. He used in-person rallies across Pennsylvania over the weekend to peddle lies about the integrity of the election. Even though no voting machines in the United States are directly connected to the internet, Mr. Musk repeatedly claimed that they can be easily hacked and that artificial intelligence makes it simpler to do so. “We should not allow voting machines of any kind,” he said in Pittsburgh. “We want paper ballots, in person, with I.D.” In fact, every battleground state in the presidential race already has fully auditable paper trails.

“It’s a pretty good indicator that if someone uses the word ‘disinformation’ a lot, they are the ones creating the disinformation,” Mr. Musk said. On Monday, he also shared a meme that falsely claimed “Barack Hussein Obama repealed the Smith-Mundt act” in 2012 to allow the federal government to issue propaganda to U.S. citizens. A study from the Center for Countering Digital Hate found that 50 of Mr. Musk’s false or misleading claims about the election during the first seven months of this year were debunked by independent fact-checkers but still generated some 1.2 billion views.

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