Georgia’s top election official on Thursday night blamed “likely foreign interference” for a video that is quickly gaining traction on social media and purports to show a newly arrived Haitian migrant claiming he was killed just six months after arriving in the United States. Kamala Harris voted. .

The video is “targeted disinformation,” Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said, specifically calling on billionaire Donald Trump’s supporter Elon Musk to remove the video. Raffensperger said his office is working with federal officials to investigate the video, which was viewed more than half a million times on Musk’s social media platform X as of Thursday evening.

In a press release, Raffensperger said that “we are asking Elon Musk and the leadership of other social media platforms to remove this,” adding, “This is clearly fake and part of a disinformation effort. It is probably a production of Russian troll farms.”

Raffensperger said federal law enforcement officials from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency are investigating the video.

Last week, U.S. intelligence officials blamed Russia for a fake video intended to smear Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz.

During the 2024 election cycle, Musk has emerged as one of Trump’s biggest boosters. He has poured about $119 million into a Super PAC called America PAC to promote the former president. Musk has regularly shared baseless claims of anti-Trump election fraud, and this week he asked users to submit cases of “election integrity issues” to the “X Election Integrity Community,” a channel branded America PAC.

Although Musk did not personally share the new video, flagged by Raffensperger, the video has been shared in multiple posts in the X Election Integrity Community.

The video shows a young black man claiming he is from Haiti and came to the US “six months ago.”

“We are voting for Kamala Harris,” the man says in the video. “Yesterday we voted in Gwinnett County and today we vote in Fulton County.”

The man and another man in the video then show six Georgia IDs, at least three of which are duplicates, apparently as proof that they had obtained the documents needed to vote.

After Trump lost in Georgia in 2020, he and his allies tried to overturn the election results in the state — leading to criminal charges for Trump and 18 others. In the years since, Trump and the MAGA movement have worked hard to entrench his election lies in state policy, leaving election boards at the state and county levels full of election deniers.

In both counties mentioned in the fake video — Gwinnett and Fulton — election officials have questioned the results of the 2020 election and supported rules adopted by the new MAGA majority on the Georgia State Election Board that were intended to give county election officials the authority to arbitrarily refuse to certify election results.

These rules, and another designed to delay the counting of votes, were recently deemed “unconstitutional” by judges and will not be in effect in Tuesday’s elections.

Election board members in the two counties did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The fake video, which began circulating as early as 1 p.m. on Thursday, has been viewed more than 500,000 times across posts on Ohio living; they have baselessly claimed that the migrants are eating their neighbors’ cats and dogs. Trump has threatened to deport them, even though most of them live legally in the US.

It is illegal and extremely rare for non-citizens to vote in federal elections. Nevertheless, Republicans have often claimed that Democrats are allowing migrants into the US so they can win their votes, and the Republican Party plans to use claims about non-citizen voting – however baseless – to influence the 2024 election results to cast doubt if Harris wins or is in charge.

Not long before Raffensperger’s press release, a screenshot of the video was shared on the Facebook page of Georgia’s most prominent election denial network, VoterGA.

“He needs to go to jail,” one woman wrote on the forum, referring to the man in the video.

Musk’s call to use X as a forum for sharing election fraud claims has been heeded by users including Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.). Last week, Greene went to X to claim that voting machines in her district had “switched votes.”

Local election officials and Raffensperger’s office quickly debunked the claim, saying the voter’s printed ballot did not match her selections on the machine because the woman herself had made mistakes.

Greene continues to claim that machines flip votes and posted a video Thursday evening claiming to show such a case in Arkansas.