While speaking at a town hall in the swing state of Pennsylvania Thursday, tech CEO Elon Musk repeated false conspiracy theories claiming that voting machines rig elections — an assertion that has been repeatedly debunked since it was pushed in the wake of the 2020 election by those seeking to overturn former President Donald Trump’s loss.
“I’m a technologist, I know a lot about computers,” Musk told the crowd during the event. “And I’m like, the last thing I would do is trust a computer program, because it’s just too easy to hack.”
Musk, who owns the social media platform X, has emerged as one of the Trump’s fiercest supporters, appearing with him at a rally earlier this month and pouring $75 million into his PAC — making Musk one of the largest political spenders of the 2024 cycle.
More recently, Musk has embarked on a speaking tour around Pennsylvania.
While on the stage Thursday night, Musk specifically mentioned the voting machine company Dominion — which last year sued Fox News for defamation over false claims that it engaged in a vote-rigging conspiracy, then agreed to a landmark $787 million settlement with the network.
In his comments, Musk named Dominion while linking voting machines to losses for Republicans in Philadelphia and Arizona, saying, “There’s always a sort of question of like, say, the Dominion voting machines. It is weird that the, you know, I think they’re used in Philadelphia and in Maricopa County, but not in a lot of other places.”
“Doesn’t that seem like a heck of a coincidence?” Musk said, while calling for states around the country to “only do paper ballots, hand-counted.”
Elon Musk, Chief Executive Officer of SpaceX and Tesla and owner of X looks on during the Milken Conference 2024 Global Conference Sessions at The Beverly Hilton in Beverly Hills, Calif., May 6, 2024.
David Swanson/Reuters/FILE
In the wake of the 2020 election, Dominion filed multiple defamation lawsuits against several supporters of Trump and some media outlets who falsely accused the company of changing votes in the election.
In a ruling in Dominion’s defamation case against Fox News, which settled in 2023, the judge overseeing the case wrote, “The evidence developed in this civil proceeding demonstrates that [it is] CRYSTAL clear that none of the statements relating to Dominion about the 2020 election are true.”
In a statement released following Musk’s comment this week, Dominion pointed out the inaccuracies in Musk’s comments, including the fact they don’t operate in Philadelphia and that most jurisdictions do use paper ballots.
“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,” a Dominion spokesperson said.
On the website of Maricopa County, officials also stated that voting machines in the 2020 election were accurate, writing that a hand count after the election “found zero variances between hand count results and the Dominion tabulation equipment.”
Musk’s comments this week come after Dominion earlier this month said the company is close paying attention to those who continue to spread false information about them, and that they are “fully prepared to defend our company.”
“We are closely monitoring claims around the 2024 election. We strongly encourage people to rely upon verified, credible sources of election information — sources who can fully explain the many layers of physical, operational, and technical safeguards that exist to protect the integrity of our elections, including voting with paper ballots that can be audited and recounted,” Dominion said in a statement in early October, before Musk made his comments.
“Beyond that, we remain fully prepared to defend our company and our customers against lies and to seek accountability from those who spread them,” Dominion said.
According to the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonprofit think tank, “nearly all voters now live in jurisdictions with voting systems that have a paper record of every vote.”
The center said that around 98% of all votes will be cast on systems with a paper record in 2024 — up from 93% in 2020.
During his remarks Thursday, Musk added that people on the Democrats’ side have made it “impossible to actually prove that there’s cheating.”
After the 2020 election, the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency said it had determined that the election was “the most secure in American history.”
“There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised,” the agency said.
ABC News’ Soo Rin Kim contributed to this report.