|6 min. read An election worker reaches for an unopened ballot during sorting at the Clackamas County Elections office on Thursday, Nov. 7, 2024, in Oregon City, Ore. (Jenny Kane / AP) Some social media users allege to have found an explanation for Vice President Kamala Harris’ 2024 election loss. They say billionaire Elon Musk’s Starlink technology manipulated votes to benefit President-elect Donald Trump. Starlink is an internet provider that uses satellites to provide connectivity; it’s a subsidiary of Musk’s commercial spaceflight company SpaceX. Advertisement “Musk’s Starlink uploaded votes in swing states,” one Nov. 10 Threads post said. “Swing state voters went Dem downballot but Trump at the top? Unlikely. Starlink satellites exploding, destroying evidence.” Advertisement Starlink made headlines in recent weeks when the company distributed equipment to help people regain internet access in hurricane-hit areas. To some people, that move was further proof of the conspiracy. Breaking News (PolitiFact Staff Writer) These posts were flagged as part of Meta’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. Election security experts and state and local election officials rebutted the statements, saying the 2024 presidential election was secure and there’s no evidence of Starlink-related fraud. Advertisement “Starlink is suspected by conspiracy theorists not because of what it does, but because Elon Musk owns it,” Mike Rothschild, a journalist, author and conspiracy theory expert, said. Advertisement This conspiracy theory circulated on Threads amid a larger wave of election denial statements from liberals that mimic Republicans’ false statements about 2020 election fraud. “Conspiracy theories about lost elections being stolen are a natural way to cope with an unexpected outcome,” Rothschild said, adding that it’s important to “leave conspiracism behind and embrace reality.” Election infrastructure is secure Jen Easterly, director of the federal Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, reported Nov. 6 that the agency had “no evidence of any malicious activity that had a material impact on the security or integrity of our election infrastructure.” Advertisement Officials from swing states that received Starlink technology after the September and October hurricanes also said Starlink technology could not have been used to benefit Trump. North Carolina’s tabulators and ballot-marking devices are never connected to the internet, Patrick Gannon, the North Carolina State Board of Elections spokesperson, said. State law prohibits connecting such equipment to the internet, he said. “Satellite-based internet devices were not used to tabulate or upload vote counts in North Carolina,” Gannon said. “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 other six swing states — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — have similar election security protocols to ensure voting equipment is never connected to the internet during ballot tabulation. Advertisement Even if Starlink had somehow been used to modify the vote count, there are systems designed to catch tabulation discrepancies, including risk-limiting audits, canvassing and certification of the election results, said Michael Specter, a Georgia Institute of Technology assistant professor specializing in election security. “None of these are foolproof, but each makes it significantly less likely that an attack would be successful,” Specter said. Broadly speaking, voting machines are not connected to the internet, experts said. In some states, ballot tabulators are briefly connected to the internet to transmit results when polls close. And in many places, other election infrastructure, such as pollbooks with lists of digital voter registration records, have internet connectivity. We found little evidence Starlink is widely used during elections. Even in Asheville, North Carolina’s Buncombe County, one of the places hardest hit by Hurricane Helene, election officials told PolitiFact that Starlink was not used for any election functions. Advertisement Genya Coulter, senior election analyst for the OSET Institute, a nonprofit group focused on accurate, secure and transparent elections, said she knew Starlink technology had been used to support election infrastructure in one place: Tulare County, California. Trump won Tulare County with about 60% 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 said. Pollbooks are lists of digital voter registration records. Vote tabulators weren’t connected to Starlink satellite internet, she said, adding that the county had about 28,000 in-person voters. Regarding statements about Russian hackers swaying election outcomes, Coulter said she was “less worried about Russian hackers affecting vote totals and significantly more concerned” with the deluge of incorrect election information that Russian-linked groups distributed online before the election and the bomb threats targeting election infrastructure that officials said were “of Russian origin.” Advertisement