Elon Musk has blasted the concept of voting by mail as “insane” but NBC News reports Musk voted by mail twice when he lived in California. (This is the first time his California voting records have been publicly reported.)
Apropos of nothing, the definition of a hypocrite, per Merriam Webster, is “a person who acts in contradiction to his or her stated beliefs.”
Musk voted by mail in November of 2016, the year Donald Trump won his first presidential term, and then mailed in his vote again in 2018. Musk’s comments are part of a larger ongoing pattern of election misinformation as the GOP ramps up for yet another election season of unfounded “voter fraud” allegations. A few days after saying how “insane” mail-in voting was, he made false claims on X that migrants were “highly likely to vote.” It’s unclear how much his rhetoric has impacted politics in Texas, but thanks to his ownership of X, Musk’s false claims reach millions of people.
The voter-fraud rhetoric also has very real-life consequences, since Texas politicians are actively investigating Latino Democrats. This week, even an 87-year-old grandmother was targeted by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton during a raid of her San Antonio home in what the League of United Latin American Citizens called voter intimidation. Another example of Musk, who is a migrant from South Africa and Canada and became a U.S. citizen in 2002, being the worst type of phony.
