Georgia’s top election official on Thursday night blamed “likely foreign interference” for a video that is quickly racking up views on social media and purports to show a newly-arrived Haitian migrant claiming he voted for Kamala Harris just six months after arriving in the United States. 

The video is “targeted disinformation,” Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said, as he specifically called on Elon Musk, the billionaire Donald Trump supporter, to take down the video. Raffensperger said his office is working with federal officials to investigate the video, which had more than half a million views on Musk’s social media platform X as of Thursday night.

In a press release, Raffensperger said that “we ask Elon Musk and the leadership of other social media platforms to take this down,” adding: “This is obviously fake and part of a disinformation effort. Likely it is a production of Russian troll farms.”

Raffensperger said federal law enforcement officials at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency are investigating the video. 

Last week, U.S. intelligence officials blamed Russia for a fake video designed to smear Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz. 

During the 2024 election cycle, Musk has emerged as one of Trump’s top boosters, pouring roughly $119 million into a Super PAC, called America PAC, to promote the former president. Musk has frequently shared unfounded claims of anti-Trump election fraud, and this week he requested that users submit instances of “election integrity issues” to the “X Election Integrity Community,” a channel that features America PAC’s branding.

While Musk hasn’t personally shared the new video flagged by Raffensperger, the video has been shared in multiple posts featured in the X Election Integrity Community.

The video depicts a young Black male claiming he is from Haiti and came to the U.S. “six months ago.”

“We are voting Kamala Harris,” the male says in the video. “Yesterday we voted in Gwinnett County and today we’re voting in Fulton County.”

The male and another male in the video then display six Georgia IDs, at least three of them duplicates, apparently as proof that they’d acquired the documents required to vote. 

After Trump lost in Georgia in 2020, he and his allies attempted to overturn the election results in the state — leading to criminal charges for Trump and 18 others. In the years since, Trump and the MAGA movement have worked diligently to cement his election lies into policy in the state, packing election boards at the state and county level with election deniers.  

In both counties mentioned in the fake video — Gwinnett and Fulton — election officials have questioned the results of 2020’s election and backed rules passed by the new MAGA majority on the Georgia State Election Board that were designed to give county election officials authority to arbitrarily refuse to certify election results.

Those rules, and another designed to slow counting of votes, were recently found by judges to be “unconstitutional” and will not be in place for Tuesday’s election. 

Election board members in the two counties did not immediately respond to a request for comment. 

The fake video, which began circulating as early as 1 p.m. on Thursday, has more than 500,000 views in various posts on X. The disinformation video comes amid Trump and his VP candidate J.D. Vance’s vicious smear campaign against Haitian migrants living in Springfield, Ohio; they have baselessly claimed the migrants are eating neighbors’ cats and dogs. Trump has threatened to deport them, even though most of them are living in the U.S. legally.

It is illegal, and extremely rare, for noncitizens to vote in federal elections. Republicans have nonetheless frequently claimed that Democrats are allowing migrants into the U.S. so they can gain their votes, and the GOP intends to use claims about noncitizens voting — however unfounded — to call the 2024 election results into question if Harris wins or has the lead.

Not long before Raffensperger’s press release, a screenshot of the video was shared on the Facebook page of Georgia’s most prominent election denial network, VoterGA.

“He needs to go to jail,” wrote a woman in the forum, referring to the male in the video.

Musk’s call to use X as a forum for sharing claims of election fraud has been heeded by users, including Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.). Last week, Greene took to X to claim that voting machines in her district had “switched votes.” 

Local election officials and Raffensperger’s office quickly debunked the claim, saying that the voter’s printed ballot did not match up with her selections on the machine because the woman had made mistakes herself. 

Greene has gone on to continue to claim that machines are flipping votes, posting a video on X Thursday night that purported to show one such instance in Arkansas.

The World’s Largest Outdoor Cocktail Party gets underway this weekend as No. 2 Georgia faces off against SEC rival Florida on Saturday. Let’s check in with the latest prediction for the game from an expert football model that projects scores and picks winners.

Georgia improved to 4-1 in SEC play two weeks ago in a signature victory at Texas that salvaged the team’s playoff hopes but there are tougher tests ahead before the selection committee sorts it all out.

Florida moved to 4-3 on the year with a 2-2 mark in conference games after knocking off rival Kentucky and is a respectable 34th nationally in passing output with 264 yards per game, averaging almost 31 points per game heading into the most brutal portion of any schedule in college football this season, playing 4 ranked opponents over the final 5 weeks of the year.

What do the analytical models suggest for when the Bulldogs and Gators renew their rivalry this weekend?

For that, let’s turn to the SP+ prediction model to get a preview of how Georgia and Florida compare in this Week 10 college football rivalry game.

As expected, the models are favoring the Bulldogs over the Gators, but in a closely-fought game.

SP+ predicts that Georgia will defeat Florida by a projected score of 34 to 22 and will win the matchup by an expected margin of 12.5 points.

The model gives the Bulldogs a strong 78 percent chance of outright victory over the Gators.

SP+ is a “tempo- and opponent-adjusted measure of college football efficiency” that attempts to predict game outcomes by measuring “the most sustainable and predictable aspects of football.”

How good is it this season? So far, the SP+ model is 239-221-5 against the spread with a 51.9 win percentage after going 28-27-1 (50.9%) last weekend.

Georgia is a 14.5 point favorite against Florida, according to the updated lines posted at FanDuel Sportsbook.

FanDuel set the total at 51.5 points for the game (Over -110, Under -110).

And it lists the moneyline odds for Georgia at -630 and for Florida at +460 to win outright.

If you’re using this prediction to bet on the game, you should take …

If you do, you’ll be in the minority of bettors, who expect the Bulldogs will dominate the Gators, according to the latest spread consensus picks for the game.

Georgia is getting 64 percent of bets to win the game and cover the big spread.

The other 36 percent of wagers project Florida will either win outright in an upset, or more likely, will keep the score to 2 touchdowns or fewer in a prospective loss.

Georgia has played some closer games this season, coming out 11.3 points ahead of its opponents this season when averaging out the scoring margins in wins and losses.

Florida has fared 2.2 points better than its opponents on average in 2024.

Those figures have grown closer over the last three games, however.

Georgia has been 14.3 points better than the competition over that span, and Florida has improved to being 11 points better than opponents over that time.

Georgia is averaging 30.5 points per game this season, compared to Florida at 28.5 points per game on average.

Defensively, the Bulldogs are surrendering 19.2 points per game and the Gators are allowing 26.3 points per game on average.

Most other analytical models also suggest the Bulldogs will take down the Gators this week.

That includes the College Football Power Index, a computer prediction model that uses data points from both teams to simulate games 20,000 times to pick winners.

Georgia came out ahead in the majority 79.9 percent of the computer’s most recent simulations of the matchup.

That leaves Florida as the presumptive winner in the remaining 20.1 percent of sims.

How does that translate into a margin of victory? The index forecasts that the Gators will take the points this week.

Georgia is projected to be 12.4 points better than Florida on the same field in both teams’ current composition, according to the model’s latest forecast.

Georgia is first among SEC teams with an 84.5 percent chance to qualify for the College Football Playoff, according to the FPI’s metrics.

That model projects the Bulldogs will win 10 games this season.

Florida could struggle getting to bowl eligibility, according to the index’s calculations entering this weekend.

The Gators are projected to win 5.7 games and have a 54.7 percent chance to become eligible for a bowl game.

When: Sat., Nov. 2
Time: 3:30 p.m. Eastern
TV: ABC network

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Game odds refresh periodically and are subject to change.

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Officials in Georgia said a partial recount confirmed the ruling party had won its disputed election, with Washington and Brussels demanding an investigation.

However, the pro-western opposition said Saturday’s parliamentary vote had been “stolen” by the ruling Georgian Dream party and it refused to recognise the results, plunging the Caucasus country into uncertainty.

The pro-European president, Salome Zourabichvili, who is at loggerheads with the governing party, has declared the election results “illegitimate”, alleging there was a “Russian special operation” to undermine the vote –which the Kremlin has denied.

The central election commission told AFP on Thursday that a recount at about 12% of polling stations, involving 14% of the vote, “didn’t lead to a significant change to previously announced official results”.

“Final tallies only slightly changed at some 9% of recounted polling stations,” a spokesperson said.

Tens of thousands of people thronged the streets on Monday to protest against the alleged fraud.

International observers, the EU and the US have criticised electoral irregularities and demanded a full investigation. Georgia is an EU candidate.

Georgia’s interior ministry said two people had been arrested after alleged ballot stuffing at a provincial polling station, while prosecutors said they had opened 47 criminal cases over alleged electoral violations.

On Wednesday, Georgian prosecutors said they had summoned Zourabichvili for questioning, because she “is believed to possess evidence regarding possible falsification”. The figurehead president refused to comply, saying plenty of evidence of electoral fraud was available and prosecutors should focus on their investigation and “stop political score-settling with the president”.

Opposition parties said they would not enter the new “illegitimate” parliament, and demanded fresh elections.

The International Society for Fair Elections and Democracy, a Georgian NGO, said in a report released on Thursday that the results “regardless of the outcome, could not be seen as truly reflecting the preferences of Georgian voters”. The group said it had documented “serious (electoral) violations”, including “intimidation, ballot stuffing, multiple voting, unprecedented levels of voter bribery and expulsion of observers from polling stations”.

A group of Georgia’s leading election monitors said earlier that they had uncovered evidence of a complex scheme of large-scale electoral fraud that had swayed results in favour of the ruling party.

Before the elections, Brussels cautioned that they would be a crucial test for Tbilisi’s fledgling democracy and would determine its chances of joining the bloc.

The European Commission said in a report published on Wednesday it could not recommend opening membership talks “unless Georgia reverts the current course of action which jeopardises its EU path”.

Critics of the increasingly conservative Georgian Dream party accuse it of derailing efforts to join the EU and of bringing the former Soviet country back into the Kremlin’s orbit.

The EU halted Tbilisi’s accession process after Georgian Dream passed a law this year on “foreign influence” that opponents said mirrored repressive Russian legislation, and which has prompted weeks of large-scale street protests.

The prime minister, Irakli Kobakhidze, insisted the elections were “entirely fair, free, competitive and clean” and that EU integration was his government’s “top priority”.

Near-final election results showed Georgian Dream won 53.9% of the vote, compared with 37.7% for an opposition coalition.