Musk’s Starlink Was Not Connected to Vote Tabulation, Contrary to Online Claims – FactCheck.org

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Quick Take

Elon Musk’s Starlink system helped provide internet access to communities affected by the recent hurricanes. But online posts spread baseless claims that Starlink “uploaded votes in swing states” and helped Donald Trump win the election. Experts said voting machines are not connected to the internet during tabulation; one state election official called the claims “utter garbage.”

Full Story

President-elect Donald Trump won the presidential race propelled by victories in all seven swing states. Trump not only won the electoral college, but he is ahead of Vice President Kamala Harris in the popular vote by about 2.6 million votes, as of Nov. 18.

In a statement days after the election, Jen Easterly, director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, or CISA, wrote, “As we have said repeatedly, our election infrastructure has never been more secure and the election community never better prepared to deliver safe, secure, free, and fair elections for the American people. … Importantly, we have no evidence of any malicious activity that had a material impact on the security or integrity of our election infrastructure.”

Nevertheless, baseless accusations of 2024 election interference have spread on social media. Most recently, claims from partisan users are targeting Elon Musk’s Starlink system, a division of SpaceX that provides satellite-based broadband internet.

Musk, CEO of SpaceX, endorsed Trump, who announced on Nov. 12 that Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, a 2024 Republican presidential candidate, would lead what Trump is calling the Department of Government Efficiency. Trump said the new department would “provide advice and guidance from outside of Government,” CNN reported.

The social media posts have falsely claimed that Musk, Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin conspired to rig the election in Trump’s favor by using Starlink to systematically switch votes across swing states. We debunked a similar conspiracy theory that a secret supercomputer and accompanying software program were used to switch votes from Trump to President-elect Joe Biden in 2020. Federal and state officials, as well as experts who study election security, flatly rejected such claims at the time.

One of the recent posts asked, “Why was Starlink involved in any way with the election tabulation?”

A second social media user misleadingly wrote, “The Russians have access to Starlink terminals and therefore the satellites. The Russians are known hackers. 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.”

Another social media user said, “Trump cheats at everything in life. Putin interfered in [the] past 3 elections. Musk & Trump talk to Putin a lot. Musk’s Starlink uploaded votes in swing states. Swing state voters went Dem downballot but Trump at the top? Unlikely. Starlink satellites exploding, destroying evidence.”

Starlink did deploy satellite systems to provide internet access to communities affected by Hurricanes Helene and Milton. But that emergency response effort had nothing to do with the tabulation of ballots in the election.

No Evidence of Systematic Vote Switching

Voting machines are not connected to the internet during voting tabulation, experts explained.

Cait Conley, senior adviser to the CISA director, told us in an email: “There are a number of reasons why the nation’s election infrastructure has never been more secure. First, the machines Americans use to vote are not connected to the internet.”

Ted Allen, an associate professor of integrated systems engineering at the Ohio State University and an expert with the MIT Election Data and Science Lab, said in an email, “It is my understanding that there is no involvement of Starlink in vote tallying in any U.S. county, even for overseas military voters. There was a time when the process was different for some states many years ago, before Starlink existed.”

In Georgia, state law explicitly prohibits voting machines from connecting to the internet. In response to the social media posts, Mike Hassinger, a spokesperson for the Georgia secretary of state, told us, “This conspiracy is utter garbage and 100% false. No Georgia election tabulation is connected to the internet, ever, not by Starlink or anything else. Starlink equipment was not deployed for or used in any way in connection [to] the 2024 general election.”

North Carolina law also expressly forbids internet connectivity in its voting machines. Patrick Gannon, a spokesperson for the North Carolina State Board of Elections, told us, “We have no evidence of any alteration of votes by anyone. We ask, again, that people stop spreading false information about elections.”

“Satellite-based internet devices were not used to tabulate or upload vote counts in North Carolina,” Gannon explained. “Our tabulated results are encrypted from source to destination preventing results being modified in transit. Additionally, tabulators and ballot-marking devices are never connected to the internet.”

The Wisconsin Elections Commission released a statement addressing the social media claims on Nov. 14, reassuring the public that Starlink “was not used to alter … official or unofficial election results” in the state. According to the commission’s website, “During the hours in which ballots are cast by voters, there are zero tabulators in Wisconsin with network connectivity enabled.”

The battleground states of Arizona, Michigan, Nevada and Pennsylvania have established comparable procedures.

There are a few exceptions in limited circumstances, the Associated Press has reported. “There are some jurisdictions in a few states that allow for ballot scanners in polling locations to transmit unofficial results, using a mobile private network, after voting has ended on Election Day and the memory cards containing the vote tallies have been removed,” the AP said in an Oct. 9 story. But experts have said that practice is risky and “should be prohibited,” the AP reported.

Additional checks and security measures further prevent the possibility of fraud throughout the election process. Conley told us, “Election officials have put in place multiple layers of safeguards to protect election systems, including pre-election testing of equipment, cybersecurity protections, physical access controls, and post-election auditing.” 

“Over 97 percent of registered voters – including voters in every swing state – cast a ballot in jurisdictions where they received a paper record that they themselves could verify,” Conley said. Paper records also enable states to conduct post-election audits of tabulated results.

“Each state runs elections differently – different processes, different equipment – and it’s this diverse and decentralized nature of our nation’s election infrastructure that creates tremendous resilience and ensures no single point of failure,” Conley said.

As for claims about “Starlink satellites exploding,” decommissioned Starlink satellites are designed to burn up during reentry in an effort to promote space sustainability and safety. The recently spotted fireball in the southwestern U.S. was likely a decommissioned Starlink spacecraft. Starlink satellite reentries occur nearly every day, Jonathan McDowell, a science data system group leader at NASA’s Chandra X-ray Center, told PolitiFact.

And contrary to some of the social media posts, the practice of voting for candidates of opposing political parties in the same election, often called split-ticket voting, is not proof of election interference.

Barry Burden, director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told us for a story in November 2020, “Even in an era of strong partisanship, some voters split their tickets.”

This isn’t evidence of votes being switched by Starlink or any nefarious actor.

Editor’s note: FactCheck.org is one of several organizations working with Facebook to debunk misinformation shared on social media. Our previous stories can be found here. Facebook has no control over our editorial content.

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