Georgia’s prime election official on Thursday night time blamed “seemingly overseas interference” for a video that’s shortly racking up views on social media and purports to point out a newly-arrived Haitian migrant claiming he voted for Kamala Harris simply six months after arriving in the US.
The video is “focused disinformation,” Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger stated, as he particularly known as on Elon Musk, the billionaire Donald Trump supporter, to take down the video. Raffensperger stated his workplace is working with federal officers to research the video, which had greater than half 1,000,000 views on Musk’s social media platform X as of Thursday night time.
In a press launch, Raffensperger stated that “we ask Elon Musk and the management of different social media platforms to take this down,” including: “That is clearly pretend and a part of a disinformation effort. Probably it’s a manufacturing of Russian troll farms.”
Raffensperger stated federal legislation enforcement officers on the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Safety Company are investigating the video.
Final week, U.S. intelligence officers blamed Russia for a pretend video designed to smear Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz.
Through the 2024 election cycle, Musk has emerged as certainly one of Trump’s prime boosters, pouring roughly $119 million right into a Tremendous PAC, known as America PAC, to advertise the previous president. Musk has continuously shared unfounded claims of anti-Trump election fraud, and this week he requested that customers submit situations of “election integrity points” to the “X Election Integrity Group,” a channel that options America PAC’s branding.
Whereas Musk hasn’t personally shared the brand new video flagged by Raffensperger, the video has been shared in a number of posts featured within the X Election Integrity Group.
The video depicts a younger Black male claiming he’s from Haiti and got here to the U.S. “six months in the past.”
“We’re voting Kamala Harris,” the male says within the video. “Yesterday we voted in Gwinnett County and at the moment we’re voting in Fulton County.”
The male and one other male within the video then show six Georgia IDs, a minimum of three of them duplicates, apparently as proof that they’d acquired the paperwork required to vote.
After Trump misplaced in Georgia in 2020, he and his allies tried to overturn the election ends in the state — resulting in legal fees for Trump and 18 others. Within the years since, Trump and the MAGA motion have worked diligently to cement his election lies into coverage within the state, packing election boards on the state and county degree with election deniers.
In each counties talked about within the pretend video — Gwinnett and Fulton — election officers have questioned the outcomes of 2020’s election and backed rules handed by the brand new MAGA majority on the Georgia State Election Board that had been designed to offer county election officers authority to arbitrarily refuse to certify election outcomes.
These guidelines, and one other designed to sluggish counting of votes, had been lately discovered by judges to be “unconstitutional” and won’t be in place for Tuesday’s election.
Election board members within the two counties didn’t instantly reply to a request for remark.
The pretend video, which started circulating as early as 1 p.m. on Thursday, has greater than 500,000 views in numerous posts on X. The disinformation video comes amid Trump and his VP candidate J.D. Vance’s vicious smear marketing campaign towards Haitian migrants residing in Springfield, Ohio; they’ve baselessly claimed the migrants are consuming neighbors’ cats and canines. Trump has threatened to deport them, regardless that most of them reside within the U.S. legally.
It’s unlawful, and intensely uncommon, for noncitizens to vote in federal elections. Republicans have nonetheless continuously claimed that Democrats are permitting migrants into the U.S. to allow them to achieve their votes, and the GOP intends to use claims about noncitizens voting — nevertheless unfounded — to name the 2024 election outcomes into query if Harris wins or has the lead.
Not lengthy earlier than Raffensperger’s press launch, a screenshot of the video was shared on the Fb web page of Georgia’s most distinguished election denial community, VoterGA.
“He must go to jail,” wrote a girl within the discussion board, referring to the male within the video.
Musk’s name to make use of X as a discussion board for sharing claims of election fraud has been heeded by customers, together with Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.). Final week, Greene took to X to assert that voting machines in her district had “switched votes.”
Native election officers and Raffensperger’s workplace shortly debunked the declare, saying that the voter’s printed poll didn’t match up together with her picks on the machine as a result of the lady had made errors herself.
Greene has gone on to proceed to assert that machines are flipping votes, posting a video on X Thursday night that purported to point out one such occasion in Arkansas.
