After the 2020 election, then-President Donald Trump and his allies offered numerous hypotheses to explain his loss. A theory, which came to be known as “Italygate,” postulated that Italian military satellites interfered with American voting machines and switched votes from Trump to Joe Biden. Although far-fetched, several government officials looked into it: Acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller appointed American officials in Rome to ask about the theory and Mark Meadows, the chief of staff of the White House. sent by email Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen, asking him to investigate.

Like all of Trump’s other charges 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 to calculate and count ballots or ballots in their state,” TikTok user Etheria77 claimed in a video that was also cross posted at X last week, where at the time of writing it has over 4.5 million views. (TikTok removed original video.) Throughout the nine-minute video, Etheria77 suggests that Elon Musk has sent Starlink satellite internet terminals to swing states for use with vote tabulation, a task the terminals are not equipped to perform.

“There (is) absolutely zero reason why those systems were connected to the internet,” says Etheria77. “The (voting) machines have absolutely no problem counting votes as they have since the beginning of time.”

Certainly, a TikTok video filmed in the front seat of a car is not nearly the same as a concerted effort involving the sitting president. But the allegation spread so far that several news outlets felt the need to address it.

As with Italygate, this theory has no basis in fact. While Starlink terminals “have been used by election officials in some states to improve Internet connectivity at rural polling places,” Alex Demas he wrote TO Bastion“Starlink is not a tabulation system and has not been used to count or transmit votes in swing states.” The terminals have been widely used at polling stations that rely on stable Internet connections to perform tasks such as signature verification and voter registration.

The Associated Press written in October that “with a few exceptions,” voting machines are not connected to the Internet: “There are certain jurisdictions in a few states that allow ballot scanners at polling places to transmit unofficial results, using a private mobile network, after voting has ended on Election Day and the memory cards containing the vote count were removed.”

“It is not possible that Starlink was used to hack or change the outcome of the US presidential election,” said David Becker of the Center for Election Research and Innovation. said AP.

“Our choices produce huge amounts of physical evidence. A satellite system like Starlink can’t steal that,” Pamela Smith of the nonprofit Verified Voting Foundation told Demas.

In a way, Musk is an obvious man for progressives: not only did he do it spend more than $100 million helped elect Trump, but he has engaged in a lot of conspiracy theorizing. (In the last month of the campaign, Musk even promoted the long-debunked theory that Dominion voting machines changed votes in 2020.)

However, there is no evidence of any widespread electoral malfeasance, by Starlink or otherwise. But that doesn’t mean conspiracy theories haven’t run rampant.

“What began as vague, amorphous claims that ‘something doesn’t add up’ in the hours after President-elect Donald Trump won last week’s election has now crystallized into an evolving conspiracy theory involving Musk and Starlink”. cABLEThis is David Gilbert he wrote on Thursday. IN A article Last week, tech reporter Taylor Lorenz noted that “Meta’s Threads have been flooded with liberal election fraud conspiracies in recent days.”

“Why was Starlink allowed to count our votes when owner Elon Musk paid people a million dollars to vote for Donald Trump?” asked a user X, in a post which has been viewed 1.8 million times.

“Musk’s Starlink loaded votes in swing states,” political commentator and former George Washington University adjunct professor Cheri Jacobus POSTED on Threads. “Swing State Voters Have Switched to Downvoting Dems, But Is Trump in the Lead? (Unlikely).”

To be clear, this does not mean that a jumble of social media posts alleging fraud is equivalent to the situation in 2020, when the sitting president and his staff used the power and influence of the federal government to claim — without evidence — that the election had been stolen. (Unlike Trump, Harris he admitted defeat and Biden guest him to the White House as the winner of the election.)

But it does indicate that the proliferation of conspiracy theories in response to a heavy election loss is not only found on the political right. Rather, it seems that many people, regardless of their political persuasion, are susceptible to being consumed by desperate attempts to explain or rationalize an undesirable outcome.