Some social media customers declare to have discovered an reason for Vice President Kamala Harris’s 2024 election loss. They are saying billionaire Elon Musk’s Starlink era manipulated votes to profit President-elect Donald Trump.
Starlink is an web supplier that makes use of satellites to handover connectivity; it’s a subsidiary of Musk’s industrial spaceflight corporate SpaceX.
“Musk’s Starlink uploaded votes in swing states,” one November 10 Strings put up stated. “Swing state voters went Dem downballot but Trump at the top? Unlikely. Starlink satellites exploding, destroying evidence.”
Starlink made headlines in fresh weeks when the corporate dispensed apparatus to backup society regain web get entry to in hurricane-hit subjects. To a few society, that proceed was once further evidence of the conspiracy.
“The Russians have access to Starlink terminals and therefore the satellites. The Russians are known hackers,” stated some other November 10 Strings put up. “Elon Musk and the US gov. sent Starlink terminals to Florida, Georgia, North and South Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky, Virginia and West Virginia due to the hurricanes.”
Alternative Strings customers summarised the unsubstantiated claims: “People are saying Elon Musk used Starlink to steal the US Election for Donald Trump.”
Those posts had been flagged as a part of Meta’s efforts to struggle fraudelant information and incorrect information on its Information Feed. (Learn extra about PolitiFact’s partnership with Meta, which owns Fb, Instagram and Strings.)
Election safety professionals and shape and native election officers rebutted the claims, announcing the 2024 presidential election was once store and there’s incorrect proof of Starlink-related fraud.
“Starlink is suspected by conspiracy theorists not because of what it does, but because Elon Musk owns it,” Mike Rothschild, a journalist, creator and conspiracy idea knowledgeable, stated.
This conspiracy idea circulated on Strings amid a bigger tide of election denial claims from liberals that mimic Republicans’ fraudelant claims about 2020 election fraud.
“Conspiracy theories about lost elections being stolen are a natural way to cope with an unexpected outcome,” Rothschild stated, including that it’s impressive to “leave conspiracism behind and embrace reality”.
Election infrastructure is store
Jen Easterly, director of the federal Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Safety Company, reported on November 6 that the company had “no evidence of any malicious activity that had a material impact on the security or integrity of our election infrastructure”.
Officers from swing states that won Starlink era later the September and October hurricanes additionally stated Starlink era may no longer were worn to profit Trump.
North Carolina’s tabulators and ballot-marking units are by no means attached to the web, Patrick Gannon, the North Carolina Shape Board of Elections spokesperson, stated. Shape legislation prohibits connecting such apparatus to the web, he added.
“Satellite-based internet devices were not used to tabulate or upload vote counts in North Carolina,” Gannon stated. “In addition, our tabulated results are encrypted from source to destination preventing results being modified in transit. We have no evidence of any alteration of votes by anyone.”
The alternative six swing states – Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin – have indistinguishable election safety protocols to assure balloting apparatus is rarely attached to the web all the way through poll tabulation.
Although Starlink had one way or the other been worn to change the vote rely, there are techniques designed to catch tabulation discrepancies, together with risk-limiting audits, canvassing and certification of the election effects, stated Michael Specter, a Georgia Institute of Generation worker lecturer specialising in election safety.
“None of these are foolproof, but each makes it significantly less likely that an attack would be successful,” Specter stated.
Extensively talking, balloting machines aren’t attached to the web, professionals stated. In some states, poll tabulators are in brief attached to the web to transmit effects when polls similar. And in lots of playgrounds, alternative election infrastructure, akin to pollbooks with lists of virtual voter registration data, has web connectivity.
We discovered tiny proof Starlink is extensively worn all the way through elections. Even in Asheville, North Carolina’s Buncombe County, some of the playgrounds toughest crash through Typhoon Helene, election officers instructed PolitiFact that Starlink was once no longer worn for any election purposes.
Genya Coulter, senior election analyst for the OSET Institute, a nonprofit workforce fascinated about correct, store and clear elections, stated she knew Starlink era were worn to backup election infrastructure in a single playground: Tulare County, California. Trump gained Tulare County with about 60 p.c of the vote.
“Most of the rural part of the county has little to no access to broadband, and Starlink was used to have the electronic pollbooks connected to a county voter database,” Coulter stated. Pollbooks are lists of virtual voter registration data.
Vote tabulators weren’t attached to Starlink satellite tv for pc web, she stated, including that the county had about 28,000 in-person citizens.
Referring to claims about Russian hackers swaying election results, Coulter stated she was once “less worried about Russian hackers affecting vote totals and significantly more concerned” with the deluge of flawed election data that Russian-linked teams dispensed on-line earlier than the election and the bomb blackmails focused on election infrastructure that officers stated had been “of Russian origin”.
What about experiences of a Starlink satellite tv for pc fireball?
On November 10, a Starlink satellite tv for pc reentered Earth’s environment heading southeast from Washington to Texas and exploded.
Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist and science knowledge gadget workforce chief at NASA’s Chandra X-ray Heart, stated there’s not anything distinguished about that.
“This is not a case of suddenly deciding to retire this satellite within the past week,” McDowell stated. “Such reentries have been happening almost daily for the past few years, they just are at random times and random places in the world so not often over the US at night where Americans can see it.”
In line with US Area Pressure knowledge, SpaceX got rid of this actual satellite tv for pc from operation on August 2, at which level the satellite tv for pc began decreasing its orbit, McDowell stated. SpaceX rejected the satellite tv for pc on October 13, McDowell added.
Stargazers in southwest United States reported perceptible fireballs within the early morning hours of November 10. McDowell stated that’s commonplace: Throughout satellite tv for pc reentry and breakup, eyewitnesses can from time to time see fireballs shifting slowly around the sky.
Why Democrats gained Senate races generation Trump gained the presidency
Probably the most posts that floated the Starlink conspiracy idea pointed to Democratic successes in some down-ballot races as proof that one thing was once off within the Trump-Harris effects. Despite the fact that there’s a robust correlation between votes forged for president and senator, it’s no longer ironclad. Citizens are distant to select applicants from other events for various workplaces, and a few fraction of citizens do.
Price ticket-splitting – when citizens make a choice a Democrat for one workplace and a Republican for some other – has develop into much less regular in fresh election cycles as political polarisation has larger. However the observe hasn’t disappeared solely.
Incumbency can backup applicants win re-election. For example, two swing states had Democratic incumbents accumulation their Senate seats: Tammy 1st earl baldwin of bewdley in Wisconsin and Jacky Rosen in Nevada. Their achievements in workplace and citizens’ familiarity would possibly have helped those applicants.
Controversy, or a shortage thereof, too can have an effect on applicants’ campaigns. In Arizona, for instance, Republican Kari Puddle got here to citizens’ consideration in 2022 when she misplaced a gubernatorial race constructed closely on claims that elections are fraudulent, together with the 2020 presidential race that Biden gained. This month, she misplaced to Democratic Consultant Ruben Gallego, a retired US Marine and a Latino, in a marketing campaign month wherein Latino citizens had been pivotal inside the voters.
Specter, the lecturer, stated split-ticket balloting “does not provide sufficient evidence that any malfeasance has occurred”.
Our ruling
Strings posts stated Musk’s Starlink era manipulated votes within the 2024 election to profit Trump.
Federal and shape election officers rebutted claims of 2024 election fraud, together with claims that Starlink manipulated the vote counts.
Vote casting machines aren’t generally attached to the web and longstanding techniques assure votes are relatively and correctly tabulated.
We discovered just one example – in California, no longer a swing shape – of Starlink era being worn to backup election infrastructure, akin to having the digital pollbooks attached to a county voter database.
We price those claims Pants on Hearth!
PolitiFact Researcher Caryn Baird and PolitiFact North Carolina Scribbler Paul Specht contributed to this file.