As newly elected President Donald Trump begins to fill key posts in his second administration, social media users are making false claims that the 2024 election was rigged in his favor.
One such story claims that billionaire Elon Musk facilitated alleged fraud with his internet provider Starlink by manipulating vote counting through election equipment such as vote tabulations. Starlink, a subsidiary of Musk’s SpaceX company, uses satellites to provide high-speed internet even in remote areas.
Some rural counties used the technology during the 2024 race to access their electronic polls.
Here’s a closer look at the facts.
CLAIM: Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk used his internet service provider Starlink to steal the 2024 election for newly elected President Donald Trump.
THE FACTS: These claims are baseless. Election officials, including from several swing states, told The Associated Press that their voting equipment does not use Starlink and is not even connected to the internet. According to experts, states have taken additional safeguards to ensure the count is accurate. Election officials and security services have reported no significant problems with the 2024 race.
“There is no way that Starlink was used to hack or change the outcome of the U.S. presidential election,” David Becker, founder and executive director of The Center for Election Innovation and Research, wrote in an email. “This simply did not happen and could not happen thanks to the safety measures we have in place, and these conspiracy theories echo other disinformation we have heard in recent years.”
Becker further explained that the nation’s nearly 10,000 election jurisdictions use a wide variety of voting machines that are not connected to the Internet while voting is taking place, and that almost all votes are recorded on paper ballots, which are checked by hand to confirm the results of electronic tables to confirm. .
“If anyone were to attempt to interfere with the machines to manipulate the elections, this would be detected in multiple ways, including matching the registered voters who cast their ballots with the vote count, as well as through audits,” he added.
In certain jurisdictions in a few states, ballot scanners at polling places may transmit unofficial results over a private mobile network after voting has ended on Election Day and the memory cards containing the vote tallies have been removed.
Election officials who allow this say it allows for faster reporting of unofficial election results on election night. They say paper records of ballots cast are used to authenticate results during post-election reviews, and that those documents would be crucial for a recount if one were needed. Computer security experts have said this is an unnecessary risk and should be banned.
Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency Director Jen Easterly said in a statement on Nov. 6 that CISA “has no evidence of any malicious activity that has had a material impact on the security or integrity of our election infrastructure.”
Despite a lack of evidence, many on social media suggested that Starlink could indeed have been used to steal the election.
“If Trump and Elon’s ‘little secret’ was to use Starlink in swing states to count votes and manipulate the election – then an investigation and manual recount are crucial. Now,” reads an X-post that was liked and shared about 41,700 times as of Tuesday.
Another widely shared Are we really going to turn a blind eye to what happened and let the worst people among us run the country?
Election officials in North Carolina, Georgia and Pennsylvania — three of the seven swing states Trump won — told the AP that their voting equipment has never been connected to the internet. In some cases this is required by law.
“Satellite-based internet devices were not used in North Carolina to track or upload vote counts,” said Patrick Gannon, spokesman for the North Carolina State Board of Elections. “Additionally, our table results are encrypted from source to destination, which prevents results from being changed in transit. And no, tabulators and voting machines are never connected to the internet in North Carolina.”
The Tar Heel State prohibits its voting systems from being “connected to a network” and requires any feature that allows such connection to be disabled. This includes the Internet and all other wired or wireless connections.
Gannon added that North Carolina has “no evidence of any alteration of votes by anyone” and urged people to stop spreading misinformation about elections.
Mike Hassinger, a spokesman for Georgia’s foreign minister, called the claims spread online “absolutely conspiratorial nonsense.”
“We do not use Starlink equipment in any part of our elections, and we never have,” he said. “Our election equipment is 100% air-gapped and never connected to the internet.”
The term ‘air-gapped’ refers to a security measure that isolates a secured computer network from the unsecured computer networks. This means it is impossible to use the Internet to manipulate the software that tracks Georgia’s votes or the memory cards on which they are recorded, Hassinger said. He explained that memory cards are transported by hand in secure bags with tamper-proof straps to a central election office where votes are tallied. A Chain of Custody protocol has also been established to ensure that their movements are properly documented.
Matt Heckel, a spokesman for the Pennsylvania Department of State, wrote in an email: “Counties do not use Starlink to report unofficial or official election results. No voting system in Pennsylvania has ever been connected to the internet.”
A pilot program in Arizona’s Coconino, Apache and Navajo counties intended to “improve connectivity in underserved areas” uses Starlink systems to electronically synchronize polling data, according to JP Martin, a spokesman for the Secretary of State’s office. Arizona. The state’s election equipment is air-gapped, one of several security measures.
Michigan, Nevada and Wisconsin also have strict safeguards in place to protect the integrity of their voting equipment.
Some messages circulated online referenced a local news segment in which the registrar of voters in Tulare County, California, noted that internet connectivity at the county’s polling places had improved this year thanks to Starlink. Stephanie Hill, a systems and procedures analyst for the agency, wrote in an email that “this connection is for voter check-in purposes only and is not part of our voting system in any way.” California is among the states that prohibit their voting equipment from being connected to the internet.
Trump is currently defeating Vice President Kamala Harris in Tulare County with 60% of the vote.
Pamela Smith, president and CEO of Verified Voting, agreed that the idea that Starlink was used to rig the election is absurd.
“While Starlink has provided connectivity for Electronic Polls (EPBs) in a number of jurisdictions in this election, neither Starlink nor other types of communications networks play any role in vote counting,” she wrote in an email. “Our elections produce enormous amounts of physical evidence. A satellite system like Starlink cannot steal that.”
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Find AP Fact Checks here: https://apnews.com/APFactCheck.
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