by Dick Hall-Sizemore

They won’t let it go. On Oct. 6, Elon Musk reposted a tweet from November 2023 claiming that there was election fraud in Henrico County in the 2020 election. According to the tweet, “election integrity leaders” had discovered that, in ten Henrico precincts, more people voted than there were registered voters in those precincts. Based on this work, an “expert” concluded that there were 15,572 fraudulent votes in Henrico alone.

How could this have happened without election officials or party observers somewhere along the line noticing? For example, how could 1,260 people vote in the Spottswood precinct when there were only 1,120 registered voters in that precinct, and nobody notice the discrepancy? The answer is that it did not happen.

A local community newspaper, the Henrico Citizen, contacted the county registrar for an explanation. To get the numbers they did, the “election integrity leaders” somehow aggregated the number of persons voting in person in each precinct with the number of absentee votes per precinct. The result was that more than 100 percent of the registered voters voted in some precincts.

Mark Coakley, the Henrico County registrar, explained it would be impossible to do that accurately. “Statewide, these early voters completed a generic absentee ballot. These ballots did not include the voters’ precinct information…. For the 2020 general election, Henrico County’s absentee ballots were counted as a lump sum, and not by precinct, since it was not possible to identify the precincts on the absentee ballots. The same was true for all jurisdictions in Virginia.”

After 2020, the law was changed to require that precinct information be included on absentee ballots.

So, two “election integrity leaders” make up some numbers, an “expert” picks up on them and tweets about it, and, eventually, a year later, Elon Musk, without checking on the legitimacy of the data, reposts it. Elon Musk has 21.6 million followers. As of 7:45 p.m. on Oct. 6, there had been almost 18,000 reposts of Musk’s repost. The Henrico Citizen has a following of maybe a few thousand readers. That is how misinformation and lies get accepted as fact.