(Ben Sellers, Headline USA) Earlier this month, leftist secretaries of state pounced at the opportunity to attack Trump-backing billionaire Elon Musk over allegations that his artificial intelligence chatbot had errantly suggested that Vice President Kamala Harris would not make the ballot in several states.
Curiously enough, the complaint appeared to ignore three major battleground states where the law still stipulates that President Joe Biden will appear on the ballot as the Democrat candidate, according to a leading conservative think-tank, which suggested that claims of Harris being eligible to appear in all 50 states may be the real disinformation.
Grok—which is available only to subscribers of the premium versions of X—debuted last year and was touted by Musk as a “rebellious” AI chatbot that would answer “spicy questions that are rejected by most other AI systems.”
However, not all of its responses may be entirely accurate.
Top election officials from Michigan, Minnesota, New Mexico, Pennsylvania and Washington sent a letter to Musk on Aug. 5 complaining that the chatbot had produced false information about state ballot deadlines shortly after President Joe Biden dropped out of the 2024 presidential race.
According to the letter, Grok had indicated that the deadline for replacing Biden had already passed in nine states states where it had not: Alabama, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, New Mexico, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas and Washington.
“In all nine states the opposite is true: The ballots are not closed, and upcoming ballot deadlines would allow for changes to candidates listed on the ballot,” the secretaries wrote.
Following the fix, the chatbot now says, “For accurate and up-to-date information about the 2024 U.S. Elections, please visit Vote.gov” before listing responses to election-related questions.
“We appreciate X’s action to improve their platform and hope they continue to make improvements that will ensure their users have access to accurate information from trusted sources in this critical election year,” the secretaries of state wrote.
Even while Biden was in the race, ballot eligibility in Ohio, Alabama and Washington was a source of concern since all three initially had ballot deadlines that took effect prior to last week’s Democrat convention in Chicago.
In each case, however, the state legislature or the secretary of state worked to resolve the loophole and ensure that the Democrat nominee would be on the ballot.
That nominee, of course, proved not to be Biden but rather Harris, his former running mate, after party elites forced the incumbent president out of the race.
To play it safe, Democrats conducted a virtual nominating process that took place prior to Harris’s ceremonial nomination and acceptance speech at last week’s convention.
Yet, despite the focus on states where Harris is now assured her spot on the ballot, major questions remain as to whether she will be eligible to appear in at least three other crucial swing states.
According to the Heritage Oversight Project, an election-integrity watchdog launched by prominent conservative think-tank the Heritage Foundation, the deadline for removing Biden from the ballot has already long since passed in Georgia, Wisconsin and Nevada.
This is big. It's likely already too late to remove Joe Biden from the ballot.
WISCONSIN — It's already too late to remove Joe Biden from the ballot.
NEVADA—After tonight, the fourth Friday in June, it will be too late to remove Joe Biden.
GEORGIA—Only a few weeks remain…
— Charlie Kirk (@charliekirk11) June 28, 2024
Some have argued that the question may be moot since Harris absorbed Biden’s campaign into her own.
Under such circumstances, the Electoral College, which has been oft-reviled by the Left, may prove to be its savior.
The political parties’ “nominees for president and vice president are not the candidates who are elected on November 5th, the people running for presidential elector are,” explained Joel Watson Jr., Louisiana’s deputy secretary of state for communications, in a July article by the Iowa Capital Dispatch.
Those electors, like the ones pledged to Biden during the primary, would then exercise their discretion to cast a vote for Harris instead of Biden when they convene in December.
Additionally, the article, citing information from 39 state news bureaus, disputed the Heritage Oversight Project’s deadline claims and instead listed September deadlines for Georgia (9/17), Nevada (9/3) and Wisconsin (9/3) to finalize their ballots.
Yet, Mike Howell, the executive director of the Oversight Project, told Headline USA in an email that its researchers “were not mistaken at all” about their read on the state laws.
Democrats are “not out of the woods yet … and I’m wondering why no one with standing is suing,” Howell said.
“The DNC and Biden claimed that Biden was already the nominee before he was taken out, Howell added. “So now they have two nominees, without formally withdrawing and substi[tu]ting one of them, and I’m not sure why Secretaries of State are okay with that process.”
EDUCATIONAL REMINDER: the @DNC has TWO nominees for President right now, w/o having properly substituted or withdrawn the first one.
They jumped the gun and formally named Biden the nominee while coup was ongoing. Then they nominated Harris by Zoom post-coup to beat deadlines. https://t.co/EJ6fpEip6j
— Mike Howell (@MHowellTweets) August 27, 2024
Howell took credit for having forced the DNC’s pre-convention virtual-roll-call vote due to the prior threat of a lawsuit.
We have been preparing for this moment for months
Many in the media tried discrediting us
Who is laughing now?
No more “make it up as you go” elections
Stay tuned… https://t.co/eODcN7DpQP
— Oversight Project (@OversightPR) July 21, 2024
“The DNC admitted that it was a major legal problem so they moved up the DNC nomination process to a Zoom roll call vote in early [A]ugust without any citizen actually voting for Kamala Harris,” Howell said. “This is admitted in writing by the DNC and they reference us as the reason.”
As far as the three battleground states where Harris may be ineligible, it is not yet clear whether election officials will seek to swap out the nominee to accommodate Democrats—and avert a messy legal battle—or whether Republicans will press forward with any preemptive challenges.
Howell noted that a lawsuit from the Heritage Foundation inevitably would be dismissed due to its lack of standing, meaning it would likely fall on the Republican National Committee and the Trump campaign, or on a group of concerned voters in the state, to pursue litigation.
Complicating the matter may be the issue of whether plaintiffs could advance a case before the ballots were cast, or if it would be necessary to wait until after the grievance already had occurred—setting the stage for no-holds-barred courtroom brawls like the ones in 2020.
Not surprisingly, the Harris campaign has already secured a legion of lawyers, overseen yet again by prominent election-stealer Marc Elias.
Headline USA reached out to RNC co-chair Michael Whatley to inquire as to whether it had such a lawsuit planned; as well as to Gabriel Sterling, the chief operating officer for the Georgia secretary of state’s office, to inquire whether Republican Secretary Brad Raffensperger would adhere to the law or seek a workaround to accommodate Harris.
Neither had responded as of Thursday morning.
Ben Sellers is the editor of Headline USA. Follow him at twitter.com/realbensellers. The Associated Press contributed to this report.
