Top election official says colleagues gave Elon Musk ‘hand-delivered’ notes to stop him from spreading disinformation

Elon Musk has been accused of rampantly spreading election misinformation, and it’s a thorn in the side of election officials who are working doubly hard to soften the wave of baseless claims of interference and alleged voter fraud. Some officials have even taken measures such as sending personal notes to the CEO of Tesla And XWHO supported Donald Trump in July after an assassination attempt at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.

“I had my friends deliver stuff to him,” Maricopa County, Ariz., Recorder Stephen Richer. told CNN. Richer, a Republican, has come under fire from conservatives for defending the 2020 election results that Trump lost.

But so far, Richer’s colleagues’ efforts have fallen short. “We’ve made more efforts than most people have available to try to present accurate information to Musk,” Richer said. “It didn’t work out.”

Musk spread false information about the security of the election, including by insisting that Americans vote in person and by paper, stating: conspiracy debunked Those voting machines switched votes, in Philadelphia event at the town hall on October 18. Historically, Musk has voted by mail, and his super PAC, America PAC, has done so as well encouraged voting by post.

His social media platform X has also failed to quash election lies. A report from the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) found on Wednesday that corrected information.

Election officials were prepared to combat disinformation this election after Trump’s fervent efforts to cast doubt on the outcome of the 2020 presidential race, but the sheer volume of online disinformation — and the lack of technology to combat it — is frustrating some turned out.

“Marking things as misinformation and disinformation is no longer useful on Twitter, especially when Elon Musk himself is pushing election misinformation and disinformation,” Democrat Barb Byrum, county clerk from Ingham, Michigan, told me. Fortune. “We can report a threat, but nothing happens.”

X, as well as America PAC and one of Musk’s lawyers, did not respond Fortune‘s requests for comment.

Headache for election officials

Efforts to counter election lies have been an uphill battle, officials said. Since August, there have been false election claims from Musk received 1.2 billion views on X, according to the CCDH analysis.

“The truth is that misinformation and disinformation will travel around the world and grow many legs long before I can sit down at my desk and take a sip of coffee,” Byrum said.

Officials like Richer have taken to the platform to have a direct dialogue with Musk. In a post on introduced a lawsuit suing 15 Arizona counties for allegedly refusing to remove undocumented immigrants from the voter rolls. Rijker responded on X in September, saying he previously offered his office as a tool for Musk to correct the CEO’s previous claims about the Arizona election.

“Unfortunately, these lawsuits are no longer interested in actually winning,” he said. “They’re just PR stunts masquerading as lawsuits.”

But there is a downside to officials trying to combat false claims on social media. Trying to put out fires of disinformation is a poor allocation of time and energy for officials working to organize an election within days, said Larry Norden of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law.

“It’s distracting,” Norden told ABC. “We are putting a huge burden on election officials, and if they have to respond to someone who is promoting their own content on their own network to spread lies, it distracts from the essential work they have to do. . That’s disturbing.”

This story originally ran Fortune.com