After the 2020 election, then-President Donald Trump and his allies floated numerous hypotheses to explain his loss. One theory, which came to be known as “Italygate,” posited that Italian military satellites had interfered with American voting machines and switched votes from Trump to Joe Biden. Though far-fetched, multiple government agents looked into it: Acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller called U.S. officials in Rome to ask about the theory, and then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows emailed Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen, asking him to investigate.
Like all of Trump’s other allegations about voter fraud in 2020, Italygate had no basis in reality. But just one election cycle later, on the opposite side of the aisle, a very similar conspiracy is taking shape.
“Swing states were able to use Starlink in order to tally up and to count ballot votes, or voting ballots, in their state,” claimed TikTok user Etheria77 in a video that was also cross-posted to X last week, where as of this writing it has more than 4.5 million views. (TikTok removed the original video.) Over the course of the nine-minute video, Etheria77 posits that Elon Musk sent Starlink satellite internet terminals to swing states for use with vote tabulation, a task the terminals are not equipped to perform.
“There [are] absolutely zero reasons as to why those systems were connected to the internet,” Etheria77 says. “[Voting] machines have absolutely no problem tallying up votes like they have done since the beginning of time.”
To be sure, one 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 has spread so far and wide that multiple mainstream news outlets felt the need to address it.
As with Italygate, this theory is not based in fact. While Starlink terminals “were used by election officials in some states to improve internet connectivity at rural polling locations,” Alex Demas wrote at The Bulwark, “Starlink is not a tabulation system and was not used to count or transmit votes in the swing states.” Terminals were largely used at polling places that rely on steady internet connections to perform tasks like checking voters’ signatures and registration.
The Associated Press wrote in October that “with a few exceptions,” voting machines are not connected to the internet: “There are some jurisdictions in a few states that allow for ballot scanners in polling locations to transmit unofficial results, using a mobile private network, after voting has ended on Election Day and the memory cards containing the vote tallies have been removed.”
“It is not possible that Starlink was used to hack or change the outcome of the US presidential election,” David Becker of The Center for Election Innovation & Research told the AP.
“Our elections produce huge quantities of physical evidence. A satellite system like Starlink cannot steal that,” Pamela Smith of the nonprofit Verified Voting Foundation told Demas.
Hellbound and Down 