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Elon Musk promoted several debunked conspiracy theories about the 2020 election during his first solo town hall Thursday in Pennsylvania, as he urged voters in the battleground state to support former President Donald Trump.
Asked by a member of the audience gathered at the event in the Philadelphia suburbs about supposed “cheating” in 2020, Musk delivered a somewhat rambling response filled with basic inaccuracies and blatantly false claims about US elections.
“When you have mail-in ballots and no, no sort of proof of citizenship, it becomes almost impossible to prove cheating, is the issue,” Musk falsely claimed.
Voter fraud is rare, but when it does happen, it is usually caught thanks to the layers of safeguards built into voting processes, according to nonpartisan election experts.
Musk’s comments on stage in front of Pennsylvania voters were consistent with much of the billionaire’s factually challenged commentary on his social media platform X, where he regularly promotes debunked pro-Trump conspiracy theories.
“There’s some very strange things that happen that, that are statistically incredibly unlikely,” Musk continued. “So, there’s always a question of, like, say, the Dominion voting machines. It is weird that, I think, they’re used in Philadelphia and in Maricopa County, but not a lot of other places. Doesn’t that seem like a heck of a coincidence?”
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Dominion Voting Systems, the company falsely accused by Trump, his lawyer Rudy Giuliani, and others of rigging the 2020 election, was famously paid $787 million by Fox News to settle a defamation lawsuit related to its repeated airing of false claims.
In a statement, a Dominion spokesperson pushed back against Musk’s claims Thursday night.
“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 company said.
Musk’s suggestion that there were systematic irregularities in Arizona and Pennsylvania in 2020 are false. Democratic and Republican officials from both states have repeatedly said that the results, showing President Joe Biden defeated Trump, were accurate and verified.
Regardless, Dominion machines were used in 2020 in Maricopa County, Arizona, home to the state’s largest city, Phoenix. But Musk inaccurately claimed Dominion software was also used in Philadelphia. The city used machines from ES&S, according to Verified Voting, which tracks which voting equipment used in counties across the country.
“These statements simply aren’t factual,” an ES&S spokesperson told CNN, responding to Musk’s claims of election irregularities.
At the event, Musk also repeated a fallacy that Trump often brings up at his own rallies, urging the US to fully transition to “paper ballots.”
“We should only do paper ballots, hand counted,” Musk said. “That’s it. I’m a technologist. I know a lot about computers, and I’m like, the last thing I would do is trust the computer program.”
As CNN previously reported, more than 98% of US voters live in jurisdictions that already have fully auditable paper trials. Nonetheless, Trump routinely says that the country needs to start using paper ballots.
