On a Sunday evening in Virginia, Henrico County Registrar Mark Coakley waited for the start of the Cowboys-Steelers NFL game, which was delayed due to inclement weather.

Coakley was scanning X, formerly known as Twitter, when he came across a post from the platform's billionaire owner Elon Musk, who is a vocal Trump supporter. Musk had reposted a tweet from 2023 that falsely claimed that “election integrity leaders in Virginia” had found fraudulent votes in Henrico County in the 2020 election.

“Is this accurate @CommunityNotes?” Musk posted in conjunction with the tweet, activating X's Community Notes feature, which allows users to fact-check a tweet themselves.

Coakley, the county's top election official, rushed to respond. On Monday morning, Henrico County's X account refuted the premise of Musk's posts in a five-post thread.

“They were uninformed tweets,” Coakley recalled in an interview with ABC News. “The media called, friends called me.”

The challenge for Coakley: While Musk's initial post received 27.7 million views, Coakley's response received fewer than 100,000 views. It's a contemporary take on the old saying that a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still surfacing.

As Musk continued to spread false and misleading election information on X, he was increasingly confronted by election officials on his own platform. But their reach typically pales in comparison to Musk's 200 million followers.

“It’s just not a fair fight,” said Larry Norden, an election expert at the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonprofit think tank.

In Philadelphia, Musk posted a tweet pointing out that 5,200 voters had registered with the same address. “This is crazy,” Musk commented.

Seth Bluestein, a Philadelphia County commissioner, responded hours later, tweeting, “The post you shared spreads disinformation.”

But while Musk's initial tweet garnered nearly 10 million views, Bluestein's response garnered fewer than 10,000 views.

Even some Republican officials have confronted Musk on X. Stephen Richer, the GOP reporter in Maricopa County, Arizona, has regularly argued with Musk online about alleged election misinformation targeting the state – and has even offered to contact Musk personally.

“In every previous post you have written about the Arizona election (all of which were wrong, but you never corrected them), I have offered my office to you (and anyone) who wants concrete answers as a point of contact to these questions “Richer told Musk in a September post.

Sam Woolley, a disinformation researcher at the University of Pittsburgh, said Musk has treated X as his own “bully pulpit” to support Trump and denigrate the electoral system since taking control of the company in 2022.

“This is certainly the case of a very powerful individual using not only his ownership of the platform, but also his ability to control extensive engagement on the platform for his own benefit and the benefit of his political allies,” Woolley said.

Not only are the disinformation narratives spread by Musk “destructive to democracy,” Norden said, but the time and energy required to refute them could even undermine election officials’ ability to do their other election-related work.

“It’s distracting,” Norden said. “We're putting a huge burden on election officials, and if they have to respond to someone spreading their own content on their own network to spread lies on top of that, it distracts from the essential work they need to do.” This is worrying.”

Musk did not respond to a request for comment from ABC News.

Despite the enormous online reach of the world's richest man, at least one election official has managed to reach it: Jocelyn Benson, the secretary of state in Michigan.

After Musk suggested on X that there were more registered voters than eligible voters in the state, Benson shot back.

“Let’s be clear: @elonmusk is spreading dangerous disinformation,” Benson wrote. “Here are the facts: There are no more voters than citizens in Michigan. There are 7.2 million active registered voters and 7.9 voting age citizens in our state.”

Musk's first retweet was viewed around 32 million times.

But Benson's response topped it all, getting 33.5 million.