Getty Images | Nathan Stirk
Texas Secretary of State Jane Nelson yesterday issued a statement debunking claims of widespread voter fraud that were amplified by X owner Elon Musk on the social network formerly named Twitter. Election officials in two other states also disputed the “extremely false” information shared by Musk.
Musk is generally a big fan of Texas, but on Tuesday he shared a post by the account “End Wokeness” that claimed, “The number of voters registering without a photo ID is SKYROCKETING in 3 key swing states: Arizona, Texas, and Pennsylvania.” The account claimed there were 1.25 million such registrations in Texas since the beginning of 2024, over 580,000 in Pennsylvania, and over 220,000 in Arizona.
“Extremely concerning,” Musk wrote in a retweet re-X. The End Wokeness post shared by Musk suggested that “illegals” are registering to vote in large numbers by using Social Security numbers that can be obtained for work authorizations. The End Wokeness post has been viewed 63 million times so far, and Musk’s re-post has been viewed 58.2 million times.
Nelson’s statement on the Texas government’s website called the claim “totally inaccurate.” For one thing, the real number of voter registrations is a small fraction of the number claimed in the post shared by Musk, the secretary of state wrote:
It is totally inaccurate that 1.2 million voters have registered to vote in Texas without a photo ID this year. The truth is our voter rolls have increased by 57,711 voters since the beginning of 2024. This is less than the number of people registered in the same timeframe in 2022 (about 65,000) and in 2020 (about 104,000).
“Extremely false”
The Texas Secretary of State office reports having 17,948,242 registered voters for the March 2024 elections, a gain of just under 189,000 voters since November 2023. The total gain over the past 24 months is a little over 764,000.
Pennsylvania’s data shows the state has 8.7 million registered voters and 87,440 voter registrations so far in 2024. Most of those were applications for party changes, while the other 39,877 were new-voter registrations.
Arizona’s total number of registered voters has been declining. While Arizona had 4.28 million registered voters in 2020 and 4.14 million in 2022, the state’s tally in March 2024 was 4,096,260.
Musk’s “Extremely concerning” post got a reply from Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer, who called it “extremely false.”
“We haven’t even had that many new registrants TOTAL in 2024 in Arizona,” stated Richer, an elected official and Republican who has been active in calling out election misinformation on X. “And we have fewer than 35,000 registrants (out of 4.1 million registered voters in Arizona) who haven’t provided documented proof of citizenship.”
Musk’s platform has faced plenty of criticism over its moderation of misinformation on elections and other topics. After reports of deep cuts to X’s election integrity team in September 2023, Musk claimed the ex-X employees were “undermining election integrity.”
