Elon Musk shares “extremely false” allegation of voting fraud by “illegals”
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.”
End Wokeness didn’t use voter registration data
End Wokeness cited data from the Social Security Administration (SSA), which helps states comply with the Help America Vote Act of 2002. Under the federal law, “States are required to verify the driver’s license number against the state MVA [Motor Vehicle Administration] database,” the SSA website says. “Only in situations where no driver’s license exists should the states verify the last four digits of the new voter registrant’s Social Security Number (SSN). The State submits the last digits of the SSN, name, and date of birth to the MVA for verification with SSA. In addition, SSA is required to report whether its records indicate that the registrant is deceased.”
Nelson said the SSA data for Texas is incorrect and that her office is trying to get it fixed. But the numbers on the SSA’s Help America Vote Act website, whether accurate or not, don’t represent individual voter registrations.
The data instead shows “transactions,” defined as the number of verification requests. The SSA reports each state’s number of requests to verify a registrant’s Social Security number, the number of matches, the number of non-matches, and the number of transactions that weren’t processed because the submitted data was missing required information or not formatted correctly.
The claim spread by Musk seems to hinge on the idea that registrations involving the SSA’s 20-year-old Help America Vote Act verification system are fraudulent. Nelson explained how the process actually works:
When Texans register to vote, they must provide a driver license number or a Social Security number. When an individual registers to vote with just a SSN, the state verifies that the SSN is authentic.
While federal law allows individuals to register to vote without a photo ID, Texans must actually show proof of ID to vote. The 1.2 million figure comes from the Social Security Administration’s (SSA) website, which is supposed to report the number of times states have asked to verify an individual’s social security number. The SSA number is clearly incorrect, and we are working now to determine why there is such a large discrepancy.
According to Rolling Stone, a Pennsylvania Department of State spokesperson said the “data cited in the social media post represents only the raw number of transactions that Pennsylvania counties sent for SSN verification. The data does not represent the numbers of newly registered voters, and any representation that they do is false.”
SSA numbers no substitute for real voter tallies
According to our calculations, Texas’ weekly numbers from the SSA database so far in 2024 add up to 1,475,842 total verification requests and 1,207,142 matches. We contacted the Social Security Administration about the data today and will update this article if we get a response.
The SSA’s Texas numbers were a bit odd even before the last three months of data that End Wokeness focused on. From January 2011 to the present, Texas accounted for nearly 23.9 million voter verification requests out of 81.8 million nationwide, and for 17.3 million matches out of a nationwide total of 56.6 million.
Texas residents account for about 9 percent of the US population. California has a higher population than Texas but is reported to have made a comparatively paltry 8.9 million verification requests in the SSA system since January 2011.
It’s possible the variance in SSA numbers may be partly explained by how each state’s computer systems interact with the SSA verification tool, but we’re just speculating at this point. In any case, voter numbers found easily on each state’s website show that the number of verification requests reported by the SSA are no substitute for actual voter registration data.
