Elon Musk is accused of outright spreading election disinformation and being a thorn in the side of election officials who are working double time to try to tamp down the outpouring of unsubstantiated claims of meddling and alleged voter fraud. Some officials even took steps like sending personal notes to the CEO adze and XWHO Donald Trump claimed in July following an assassination attempt at a rally in Butler, Pa.

“I had my friends hand deliver things to him,” Maricopa County, Ariz., Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer. said CNN. Richer, a Republican, has been criticized by conservatives for defending the outcome of the 2020 election that Trump lost.

But so far, the efforts of Richer’s colleagues have fallen short. “We pulled out more stops than most people have to try to put accurate information in front of (Musk),” Richer said. “It was not successful.”

Musk provided false information about election security, including insisting that Americans vote in person and on paper, citing a conspiracy debunked that the voting machines changed the votes, in Philadelphia town hall event on October 18. Musk has historically voted by mail, and his super PAC, America PAC, a encouraged voting by mail.

His social media platform X also failed to cancel the election lies. A report from the Center to Combat Digital Hate (CCDH) found on Wednesday that Community Notes’ X feature “failed to counter false claims” about the election, with 209 of 283 (74%) posts analyzed not displaying notes correcting false information .

Election officials were prepared to fight misinformation in this election after Trump’s fervent efforts to challenge the outcome of the 2020 presidential race, but the sheer volume of misinformation online — and the lack of technology to combat it — has proven frustrating for some.

“Flaging things as disinformation and disinformation is no longer useful on Twitter, especially when Elon Musk himself is cooking up disinformation and misinformation about the election,” said Democrat Barb Byrum, Ingham, Mich., county clerk. wealth. “We can report a threat, but nothing happens.”

X, as well as America PAC and one of Musk’s lawyers, did not respond wealthrequests for his comments.

Headaches for election officials

The effort to counter election fraud has been an uphill battle, officials said. Since August, Musk’s false election claims it got 1.2 billion views on X, according to CCDH analysis.

“The truth is that disinformation and disinformation will travel around the world and grow many legs long before I can sit down at my desk and have 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 X, Musk retweeted and restated an unsubstantiated claim by Trump-aligned America First Legal that filed a lawsuit sued 15 Arizona counties for allegedly refusing to remove undocumented immigrants from voter rolls. Richer replied on X in September, saying he had previously offered the office as a resource to Musk to correct previous claims the CEO had made about the Arizona election.

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

But there is a downside for officials trying to combat false claims on social media. Trying to put out the fires of misinformation is a poor allocation of time and energy by officials concerned with continuing to hold an election just days away, said Larry Norden of the New York Law School’s Brennan Center for Justice.

“I distract,” Norden said ABC. “We’re putting a huge burden on election officials, and on top of that, having to answer to a guy who’s boosting his own content on his own network to spread lies, distracts them from the essential work they have to do. . That’s disturbing.”

This story was originally presented on Fortune.com