Billionaire Elon Musk promoted debunked conspiracy theories about election fraud Thursday at the first of a series of planned campaign events across Pennsylvania meant to rally support for former President Donald Trump’s campaign.
At a town hall hosted at a high school outside Philadelphia, Musk referred to the false conspiracy theory that Dominion Voting Systems was part of a plot to rig U.S. elections in recent years.
“When you have mail-in ballots and no proof of citizenship, it’s almost impossible to prove cheating,” he said, responding to an audience member’s question about election fraud. “Statistically there are some very strange things that happen that are statistically incredibly unlikely. There’s always this question of, say, the Dominion voting machines. It is weird that, I think, they were used in Philadelphia and in Maricopa County [in Arizona] but not in a lot of other places. Doesn’t that seem like a heck of a coincidence?”
“The last thing I would do is trust a computer program,” he said, promoting the idea that U.S. elections should use only paper ballots. The Brennan Center for Justice, a progressive nonprofit law and public policy institute, has found that 98% of votes in the general election are expected to be cast on paper ballots.
In a statement, a Dominion spokesperson disputed numerous aspects of Musk’s comments.
“Fact: Dominion does not serve Philadelphia County. Fact: Dominion’s voting systems are already based on voter verified paper ballots. Fact: Hand counts and audits of such paper ballots have repeatedly proven that Dominion machines produce accurate results. These are not matters of opinion. They are verifiable facts,” the spokesperson wrote in an email.
The company has broadly rejected any claims that it has participated in efforts to manipulate elections. Last year, it struck a $787.5 million settlement with Fox News in its defamation lawsuit against the media outlet over such claims….