On a recent Sunday evening in Virginia, Henrico County Clerk Mark Coakley waited for the start of the Cowboys-Steelers NFL game, which was postponed due to bad weather.

Coakley was scanning X, formerly known as Twitter, when he came across a message from the platform’s billionaire owner Elon Musk, an outspoken Trump supporter. Musk had reposted a 2023 tweet that falsely claimed that “Virginia election integrity leaders” had found fraudulent votes in Henrico County from the 2020 election.

“Is this accurate @CommunityNotes?” Musk posted this message in conjunction with the tweet and enabled X’s Community Notes feature, which allows users to self-check a tweet.

Coakley, the county’s top elections official, rushed to respond. On Monday morning, Henrico County’s X account debunked the premise of Musk’s posts in a five-post thread.

“They were uninformed tweets,” Coakley recalled in an interview with ABC News. “The media called, friends called me.”

The challenge for Coakley: While Musk’s first post has been viewed 27.7 million times, Coakley’s response has fewer than 100,000 views. It’s a contemporary twist on the old adage that a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still pulling its boots.

As Musk continues to promote false and misleading election information about X, election officials have increasingly confronted him on his own platform. But their reach generally pales in comparison to Musk’s 200 million followers.

“It’s just not a fair fight,” said Larry Norden, a voting expert at the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonprofit think tank.

In Philadelphia, Musk posted another tweet suggesting that 5,200 voters had registered with the same address. “This is insane,” said Musk.

Seth Bluestein, a Philadelphia County commissioner, responded hours later, tweeting: “The message you shared spreads misinformation.”

But while Musk’s first tweet was viewed nearly 10 million times, Bluestein’s response received fewer than 10,000 views.

Even some Republican officials have called Musk out on X. Stephen Richer, the GOP recorder in Maricopa County, Arizona, has frequently feuded with Musk online over alleged election misinformation targeting the state — and has even offered to contact Musk personally.

“On every previous post you’ve made about the Arizona election (all of which were wrong, but you never corrected them), I offered my office as a resource for you (and anyone else) who wants real answers to these questions,” Richer told Musk in a message in September.

Sam Woolley, a disinformation researcher at the University of Pittsburgh, said Musk has treated X as his own “bully pulpit” to support Trump and denigrate the election system since taking control of the company in 2022.

“This is certainly a case of a very powerful individual using not only his ownership of the platform, but also his ability to control vast swaths of engagement on the platform for his own benefit and for the benefit of his political allies,” he said. Woolley.

Not only are the disinformation narratives promoted by Musk “corrosive to democracy,” Norden said, but the time and energy required to refute them could even undermine the ability of election officials to carry out their other election-related work .

“It’s distracting,” Norden said. “We are putting enormous pressure on election officials, and if they have to respond to a man who is promoting his own content on his own network to spread lies, it distracts from the vital work they have to do. . That’s disturbing.”

Musk did not respond to a request for comment from ABC News.

Despite the vast online reach of the world’s richest man, at least one election official has managed to match it: Jocelyn Benson, the Michigan secretary of state.

After Musk suggested on X that there are more registered voters in the state than eligible voters, Benson fired back.

“Let’s be clear: @elonmusk is spreading dangerous misinformation,” Benson wrote. “These are the facts: There are no more voters than citizens in Michigan. There are 7.2 million active registered voters and 7.9 eligible voters in our state.”

Musk’s first retweet was viewed about 32 million times.

But Benson’s response surpassed it, getting 33.5 million.