Georgia’s top election official on Thursday night blamed “likely foreign interference” for a video that is quickly racking up views on social media and purports to show a newly-arrived Haitian migrant claiming he voted for Kamala Harris just six months after arriving in the United States.
The video is “targeted disinformation,” Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said, as he specifically called on Elon Musk, the billionaire Donald Trump supporter, to take down the video. Raffensperger said his office is working with federal officials to investigate the video, which had more than half a million views on Musk’s social media platform X as of Thursday night.
In a press release, Raffensperger said that “we ask Elon Musk and the leadership of other social media platforms to take this down,” adding: “This is obviously fake and part of a disinformation effort. Likely it is a production of Russian troll farms.”
Raffensperger said federal law enforcement officials at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency are investigating the video.
Last week, U.S. intelligence officials blamed Russia for a fake video designed to smear Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz.
During the 2024 election cycle, Musk has emerged as one of Trump’s top boosters, pouring roughly $119 million into a Super PAC, called America PAC, to promote the former president. Musk has frequently shared unfounded claims of anti-Trump election fraud, and this week he requested that users submit instances of “election integrity issues” to the “X Election Integrity Community,” a channel that features America PAC’s branding.
While Musk hasn’t personally shared the new video flagged by Raffensperger, the video has been shared in multiple posts featured in the X Election Integrity Community.
The video depicts a young Black male claiming he is from Haiti and came to the U.S. “six months ago.”
“We are voting Kamala Harris,” the male says in the video. “Yesterday we voted in Gwinnett County and today we’re voting in Fulton County.”
The male and another male in the video then display six Georgia IDs, at least three of them duplicates, apparently as proof that they’d acquired the documents required to vote.
After Trump lost in Georgia in 2020, he and his allies attempted to overturn the election results in the state — leading to criminal charges for Trump and 18 others. In the years since, Trump and the MAGA movement have worked diligently to cement his election lies into policy in the state, packing election boards at the state and county level with election deniers.
In both counties mentioned in the fake video — Gwinnett and Fulton — election officials have questioned the results of 2020’s election and backed rules passed by the new MAGA majority on the Georgia State Election Board that were designed to give county election officials authority to arbitrarily refuse to certify election results.
Those rules, and another designed to slow counting of votes, were recently found by judges to be “unconstitutional” and will not be in place for Tuesday’s election.
Election board members in the two counties did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The fake video, which began circulating as early as 1 p.m. on Thursday, has more than 500,000 views in various posts on X. The disinformation video comes amid Trump and his VP candidate J.D. Vance’s vicious smear campaign against Haitian migrants living in Springfield, Ohio; they have baselessly claimed the migrants are eating neighbors’ cats and dogs. Trump has threatened to deport them, even though most of them are living in the U.S. legally.
It is illegal, and extremely rare, for noncitizens to vote in federal elections. Republicans have nonetheless frequently claimed that Democrats are allowing migrants into the U.S. so they can gain their votes, and the GOP intends to use claims about noncitizens voting — however unfounded — to call the 2024 election results into question if Harris wins or has the lead.
Not long before Raffensperger’s press release, a screenshot of the video was shared on the Facebook page of Georgia’s most prominent election denial network, VoterGA.
“He needs to go to jail,” wrote a woman in the forum, referring to the male in the video.
Musk’s call to use X as a forum for sharing claims of election fraud has been heeded by users, including Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.). Last week, Greene took to X to claim that voting machines in her district had “switched votes.”
Local election officials and Raffensperger’s office quickly debunked the claim, saying that the voter’s printed ballot did not match up with her selections on the machine because the woman had made mistakes herself.
Greene has gone on to continue to claim that machines are flipping votes, posting a video on X Thursday night that purported to show one such instance in Arkansas.
