When Elon Musk took over Twitter, researchers and election officials feared a widespread spread of disinformation that would lead to threats and intimidation and undermine democracy.

Their fears have been realized – and Musk himself has emerged as one of the main driving forces behind the plans.

The tech billionaire has cast doubt on vote-counting machines and mailing ballots, both common features of American elections. He has repeatedly claimed that there is rampant non-citizen voting, a common Republican talking point in this election.

Musk, the super-rich owner of Tesla and other tech companies, will interview Donald Trump on Monday, where they will surely find common ground on these election conspiracies. Musk is an outspoken supporter of the former US president and current Republican candidate. He has reinstated the Twitter/X accounts of people who were banned under the platform’s previous ownership and dismantled the platform’s fact-checking and safety features. Trump’s X account, which was suspended after the January 6 riot, has also been reinstated, though Trump has not actively returned to the platform.

“Electronic voting machines and anything sent by mail are too risky. We need to mandate paper ballots and in-person voting only,” he wrote on X in July.

Maricopa County Clerk Stephen Richer responded, asking if he could give Musk a tour of the large Arizona county’s facilities and walk him through the vote-by-mail process.

“You can go into all the rooms. You can look at all the equipment. You can ask any questions you want. We’d like to show you the security measures that are already in place, and I think they’re very good,” Richer said.

It wasn’t the only time Richer tried to correct election misinformation shared by Musk. He previously tried to clear up misunderstandings about Arizona voter data and proof-of-citizenship rules.

Social media platforms have generally taken a less aggressive stance on fact-checking about election fraud, following a sustained campaign by Republican lawmakers and their allies to crack down on the way information was flagged by elected officials and researchers and the way platforms responded to it.

“I think X really stands out as a place where that change has been striking, and the fact that it’s coming from the very top down shows how big a problem it is,” said Mekela Panditharatne, senior counsel for the Brennan Center’s elections and government program.

Musk shared a video using an AI-generated voice for Kamala Harris, prompting concerns that it could fool some people into thinking it was real. Musk and the video’s creator defended it as a parody.

He has also written multiple times that non-citizens vote in U.S. elections, which is illegal except in a few local elections. There are few cases in which non-citizens vote or even register to vote. In late July, he shared a video of Elizabeth Warren in which she talked about a path to citizenship for the millions of undocumented people living in the U.S. “Like I said, they’re importing voters,” he said, a nod to the theory of “great replacement.”

Grok, the platform’s artificial intelligence chatbot that Musk has billed as an “anti-woke” antidote to left-leaning chatbots, has been spreading false information that voting deadlines had passed in nine states, meaning the vice president could not get on the ballot in those states, which is untrue. Secretaries of state are urging Musk to fix the problem for the chatbot, which lacks election information protections that other chatbots, such as ChatGPT, do.

“It’s important for social media companies, particularly those with global reach, to correct their own mistakes, like the Grok AI chatbot that simply mishandled the rules,” Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon told the Washington Post. “Speaking up now will hopefully reduce the risk that a social media company will refuse or delay correcting its own mistakes between now and the November election.”

Off-platform, a political action committee Musk founded is mining personal information from voters in key states in what initially appears to users as a voter registration portal, CNBC reported. America Pac, a pro-Trump group backed by Musk’s vast wealth, is targeting voters in swing states. The data scraping is now under investigation by at least two states.

Despite his endless claims of election fraud, Musk told The Atlantic this month that he would accept the results of the 2024 election — with one caveat.

“If there are questions about the integrity of the election, they should be properly investigated and not dismissed out of hand or unreasonably questioned,” he said. “If, after reviewing the election results, it turns out that Kamala wins, then that victory should be recognized and not contested.”