Google hits back at Musk over election interference claim

WASHINGTON: Google has responded to allegations of election interference after social media users, including billionaire Elon Musk, accused the tech company of deliberately making it easier to vote for Vice President Kamala Harris than for former president Donald Trump.

Users on X noticed that when they googled “where can I vote for Harris?” the search engine provided them with a map to their nearest polling station.

However, when they searched “where can I vote for Trump?” no such map emerged, with the results simply yielding news articles about the 2024 election.

On Tuesday, Elon Musk brought attention to this discrepancy, reposting another X user’s post onto his own profile.

“I just tried this myself and Google still shows you where to vote for Harris, but not Trump, even when anonymous,” the billionaire added in a now deleted post.

Google took to X to explain that results came up inconsistently between the two searches because Harris was also the name of a county in Texas.

“The “where to vote” panel is triggering for some specific searches bc Harris is also the name of a county in TX,” wrote @NewsFromGoogle. “Happens for “Vance” too bc it’s also the name of a county. Fix is coming. Note very few people actually search for voting places this way.”

“Thanks for the clarification,” Musk wrote in response. Some users noted that searches for “where can I vote for Kamala?” also did not yield results with the map.