Elon Musk reposts false Virginia voter fraud tweet

The big picture: The repost on Sunday night is among the latest in a slew of posts from Musk about unsubstantiated election fraud claims.

• This one, from November 2023, said that "election integrity leaders in Virginia" found multiple Henrico precincts in 2020 had voter turnouts that were over 100%.
• Those debunked fraud claims were first put together by Seth Keshel, who has infamously spent years trying to prove President Biden didn't win in 2020 (he did).
• Musk, who has endorsed Trump, asked "Is this accurate @CommunityNotes?" referencing X's crowdsourcing tool where people themselves can fact-check a tweet.

Zoom in: Henrico's official account responded Monday afternoon with a five-post thread explaining why it isn't, starting with "Hi, Elon."

• The claims hinge on Keshel finding precinct-level results with the absentee ballots included for each precinct.
• Henrico said that's impossible because Virginia's 2020 election was the first that allowed "no excuse, in-person absentee voting."
• And statewide, "those voters used generic ballots that didn't include precinct info." So they were counted by locality — as in, for all of Henrico — not by precinct.

Yes, but: False claims often spread faster than efforts to correct them.

• Musk's tweet, for example, has over 25 million views and more than 20,000 retweets compared to Henrico's 77,000 views and 201 retweets as of Tuesday morning.

The intrigue: Eight of the 10 Henrico precincts falsely called out in the post for having over 100% voter turnout voted for Trump in 2020, per VPAP.

Musk did not respond to Axios' request for comment through X's media team Tuesday morning.

Go deeper:

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• Elon Musk uses @america X handle to boost Trump