After the 2020 election, President Donald Trump and his allies offered numerous hypotheses to explain his defeat. A theory, known as “Italian Gate“, posited that Italian military satellites had interfered with American voting machines and switched Trump’s votes to those of Joe Biden. Although far-fetched, several government agents looked into the matter: Secretary to Acting Defense Christopher Miller called U.S. officials in Rome to ask questions about the theory, along with then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows. sent by email Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen, asking him to investigate.

Like all those of Trump other allegations Regarding election fraud in 2020, Italygate had no basis in reality. But just one election cycle later, on the other side of the aisle, a very similar conspiracy is taking shape.

“Swing States were able to use Starlink to tally and count votes, or ballots, in their state,” TikTok user Etheria77 said in a video also posted. posted on last week, where, as of this writing, it has over 4.5 million views. (TikTok deleted the original video.) During the nine-minute video, Etheria77 posits that Elon Musk sent Starlink satellite internet terminals to swing states for use with vote tabulation, a task for which the terminals are not equipped.

“There is absolutely no reason why these systems were connected to the Internet,” says Etheria77. “The (voting) machines have absolutely no problem counting votes as they have done since the dawn of time.”

Certainly, a TikTok video filmed in the front seat of a car is hardly the same as a concerted effort encompassing the sitting president. But the allegation spread so widely that several mainstream media outlets felt the need to respond.

As with Italygate, this theory is not based on fact. While Starlink terminals “were used by election officials in some states to improve internet connectivity at rural polling places,” Alex Demas wrote has The rampart“Starlink is not a tabulation system and was not used to count or transmit votes in swing states.” The terminals were widely used at polling places that rely on stable internet connections to perform tasks such as verifying signatures and registering voters.

The associated press written in October that “with a few exceptions,” voting machines are not connected to the Internet: “Some jurisdictions in a few states allow ballot scanners at polling places to transmit unofficial results, using a private mobile network , after voting ended on Election Day and the memory cards containing the vote tallies were deleted. »

“It is not possible that Starlink was used to hack or change the outcome of the US presidential election,” said David Becker of the Center for Election Innovation & Research. told the AP.

“Our elections produce enormous amounts of physical evidence. A satellite system like Starlink can’t steal it,” Pamela Smith of the nonprofit Verified Voting Foundation told Demas.

In one sense, Musk is an obvious bogeyman for progressives: not only has he spend more than $100 million to help elect Trump, but he has engaged in numerous conspiracy theories himself. (During the final month of the campaign, Musk even promoted the long-disproven theory that Dominion voting machines switched votes in 2020.)

Yet no evidence remains of any widespread election malfeasance, on the part of Starlink or otherwise. But that doesn’t mean conspiracy theories haven’t run amok.

“What began as vague, amorphous assertions that ‘something is wrong’ in the hours following President-elect Donald Trump’s victory last week has now crystallized into an evolving conspiracy theory involving Musk and Starlink”, CABLEby David Gilbert wrote Thursday. In a article Last week, tech journalist Taylor Lorenz noted that “over the past few days, Meta’s Threads has been flooded with liberal voter fraud conspiracies. »

“Why was Starlink allowed to count our votes when its owner, Elon Musk, paid people a million dollars to vote for Donald Trump?” » asked a user job this has been viewed 1.8 million times.

“Musk’s Starlink uploaded votes in swing states,” political commentator and former George Washington University assistant professor Cheri Jacobus job on the discussions. “Swing State voters voted against Democrats but Trump at the top? (Unlikely).”

To be clear, this is not to say that a mix of social media posts alleging fraud is equivalent to the situation in 2020, when the sitting president and his team used the power and influence of the federal government to allege – without proof – that the election had been stolen. (Unlike Trump, Harris conceded defeat and Biden guest to the White House as the winner of the election.)

But it indicates that the spread of conspiracy theories in response to a bruising election defeat is not limited to the political right. Rather, it seems that many people, regardless of their political beliefs, are likely to be misled by desperate attempts to explain or rationalize an undesirable outcome.