Democrats have war-gamed potential Election Day chaos that includes armed groups attacking polling places after being manipulated by Elon Musk, according to Rep. Jim Himes (D-CT) in remarks to the left-wing news site MeidasTouch published Friday.
Himes threatened X social media site owner Musk, saying, “I’m looking at you here, Elon Musk…We’re watching very closely.”
Himes speculated that Musk could manipulate algorithms to spread rumors about illegal aliens voting that would provoke armed groups to attack polling places, giving President Donald Trump the opportunity to bring in federal law enforcement.
Himes, who has served in Congress since 2009, is the ranking member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.
Himes said the group that ran the war game included Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD), Rep. Joe Morelle (D-NY), lawyers, and nonprofit groups.
Himes noted Musk has spent hundreds of millions of dollars to support Republicans this election and owns X. Himes said Musk or others could spread false rumors or manipulate algorithms to stir up chaos and violence.
Transcript:
Jamie and I, again with Joe Morelle and others, and lawyers and as he said nonprofits, we’ve, we’ve, we’ve wargamed a lot of these scenarios and one of these scenarios, and I’m looking at you here Elon Musk because you know, he in particular has been a massive financial player in this election. Hundreds of millions of dollars of his own fortune has gone into supporting Republican candidates. And of course he controls a major social media platform uh, X, what used to be Twitter.
And one of the scenarios we gamed out is that one of these lords of, uh, of technology decides in the middle of the day to start propagating misinformation to, and again there’s a thousand scenarios here none of which are particularly happy to contemplate, but one of them is that Elon Musk and I don’t mean to, you know, say he’s the one who’s going to do this, but he certainly has the power to alter those algor, algorithms or to tell a story that is false, you know, to say that reports in Michigan are that massive numbers of the undocumented are voting in the election. And in that moment, this is an opportunity to manipulate people. And if a whole bunch of guys with guns in Michigan see a bunch of social media posts that suggest falsely that, you know, the undocumented are, are, are voting in Detroit, the you know, what’s to stop them from jumping into trucks armed and showing up at polling places?
Now local police are overwhelmed and you know, heaven forbid there’s some sort of violence and the local police are overwhelmed. What do you think the president’s going to do? Well, he’s going to send in federal uh, law enforcement.
So, um again, um I, I, I don’t want to suggest that that is absolutely the scenario that is going to happen, but you can’t be too suspicious or prepared. And so, you know, we have been in contact with um, uh, these many leaders who do not have the benefit of the doubt these days to say, you know, we’re watching very closely. There are, more importantly, there are lawyers who are watching very uh, closely about whether you take any steps that are either aggressive against uh, the proper functioning of our democracy or negligent.”
