Elon Musk Plays Disinfo Telephone: How Oregon’s Mundane Voter Roll Cleanup Is Turned Into False Claim Of ‘Fake Voters’

I made the mistake of opening up X yesterday to look something up, and the very first post that appeared in my feed was a perfect, almost pedagogical example of how the game of “disinformation telephone” gets played. Let’s walk through it, because understanding how this works is important.

The game works like this: Someone takes a factual but largely unremarkable story, gives it a slight spin, and passes it along. The next person picks it up, adds another layer of spin, and passes that along. By the time it reaches someone with a massive audience—say, the richest man in the world—the original mundane fact has been transformed into a full-blown conspiracy theory. And that final, mangled version is what millions of people see and believe.

So let’s trace this particular game of telephone from start to finish.

Oregon’s Secretary of State, Tobias Read, recently announced that the state would be purging “inactive voters” from its rolls. This is routine voter roll maintenance that happens in every state. In Oregon’s case, “inactive voters” are generally voters whose mail-in ballots were returned as undeliverable—in other words, people who moved and didn’t update their registration.

This is important: these people did not vote. They could not vote. Oregon is a mail-in ballot state. If you’re marked “inactive,” you don’t get a ballot. No ballot, no vote. The system worked exactly as designed. The state identified people who had moved, marked them inactive so they couldn’t accidentally vote from an old address, and is now cleaning up the rolls by removing those inactive entries:

About 800,000 more voters’ registration status is inactive because their mail, including ballots or official notices, from county elections offices has been returned undelivered.

Active voters get ballots; inactive voters, Read emphasizes, do not.

All of this is actually a sign of how well the system works. If you mail-in ballot bounces back, Oregon makes you ineligible to vote until you re-register with a valid address. It’s evidence not of “fake voters,” but rather a system that makes sure only valid voters are active on the voter rolls.

The reason there are so many—reportedly around 800,000—is because Oregon stopped doing this routine maintenance about a decade ago and is only now getting back to it. So you have a decade or so of accumulated returned ballots marked as inactive. You can complain that they should have been on top of this earlier, but there’s nothing nefarious here. It’s bureaucratic backlog, not fraud.

And there are reasons to keep inactive voters (marked as inactive) on the rolls: mainly for if they ever get around to reregistering to vote so they can vote in future elections.

Tom Fitton, the head of Judicial Watch, saw an opportunity. His organization had filed a lawsuit against Oregon over voter roll maintenance back in the fall of 2024, so he quickly claimed credit for the purge. But here’s the thing: that lawsuit is still ongoing and has nothing to do with this routine removal of inactive voters. Also, that lawsuit isn’t going very well as the judge dismissed most of the key claims, leaving just one left and only for one party (not Judicial Watch, who was found not to have standing).

But, nonetheless, Fitton, who loves attention, took credit for Read’s announcement:

His tweet:

HUGE: After @JudicialWatch lawsuit, Oregon Secretary of State announces he will now clean 800,000 names from voter rolls.

Notice his careful wording in his post. He doesn’t actually say his lawsuit caused the change. He just notes, temporally, that Oregon announced the cleanup after his lawsuit was filed. It’s a classic “correlation implies causation” move, designed to let his followers draw the conclusion he wants without him having to actually claim something false.

Sneaky, but still within the bounds of “technically not lying.” The story at this point is still basically accurate, just with some self-serving framing.

Then some rando X account called “Upstate Federalist” quote-tweeted Fitton’s post. And here’s where the telephone game really kicks in.

This account claimed that the purge of these inactive voters meant 20% of Oregon’s registered voters were “fake.”

Hold on. Oregon’s population is only 4.25M…. 20% of their registered voters were fake?

This is wrong on multiple levels.

First, these weren’t “fake” voters. They were real people who had previously registered to vote, then moved, and whose registration information became outdated. That’s not “fake.” That’s just… people moving.

Second, they weren’t voters at all in any meaningful sense. They were marked inactive precisely because the system identified that they had moved. Their unfilled out ballots had been returned to the state. They weren’t sent future ballots. They couldn’t vote. The system prevented them from voting.

Third, the “20%” framing is designed to make it sound like Oregon’s elections were riddled with fraud. But again: these people did not vote. The number of inactive registrations on a voter roll has nothing to do with the integrity of actual votes cast and it’s only that high because Oregon neglected to clean up the inactive list for a decade.

(For what it’s worth, some people tried to point this out to “Upstate Federalist” and he mocked them as “leftists.”)

And then Elon Musk, with his hundreds of millions of followers, saw the quote tweet of the quote tweet and amplified it, claiming “That’s a lot of fake voters…”

Except it’s not. It’s the opposite of “fake” voters. It’s Oregon’s safeguards working.

Did he click through to understand the original story? No.

Did he ask any of the countless experts who would take his call? No.

Did he ask experts on his own platform, X, to explain what was happening in Oregon? No.

Did he even ask his own AI, Grok, which actually would have told him the truth? No.

(Incredibly, despite on tons of posts it being common to see someone somewhere reply to any claim with “@grok is this true?” either those are being hidden under Elon’s posts, or none of his rabid followers care. It took many, many, many scrolls before I found one person not asking if it was true, but to explain it, and Grok, properly told him that it was about accounts that had their addresses changed, not fraud. At the time I looked at that Grok post, it had… 16 total views, including mine):

Either way, Elon just saw something that fit the narrative he’s been pushing about election fraud, and he amplified it to his massive audience as if it had to be true. The original mundane story about routine voter roll maintenance had now become, through the magic of disinfo telephone, “evidence” that Oregon had 800,000 fake voters, that they had to be forced to purge from the voter rolls.

Here’s the thing: I guarantee we’ll be hearing from MAGA folks for years that Oregon had 800,000 fake voters on the rolls. This “fact” will get cited in arguments about election integrity. It will show up in lawsuits. It will be used to justify restrictive voting laws. It will absolutely be a talking point on podcasts and Fox News.

And never, not once, will anyone confront Elon over spreading this bullshit. Nor will he admit he passed along blatant misinformation that was trivially easy to debunk if he’d spent thirty seconds checking, as I did.

This is how the information environment gets polluted. Not through some grand conspiracy, but through a series of small distortions, each building on the last, until a mundane truth becomes an inflammatory lie. And when the person at the end of the telephone chain has the largest megaphone on the planet and zero interest in accuracy, that lie reaches millions of people who will never see any correction.

The richest man in the world, with effectively unlimited resources to verify information, chose instead to just… not. Because the lie was more useful to him than the truth.

And that’s how disinfo telephone works.