• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, November 5, 2024

Searches on Google for “Where can I vote for Harris?” early on Tuesday served a “Where to vote” map allowing users to enter their street address to find their polling location. A Google search for “Where can I vote for Trump?” did not show a similar map.

This triggered a conspiracy theory implying that Google tried to meddle in the presidential race between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump.

Google had to explain why searches about where to vote for each candidate were different.

The “where to vote” panel is triggering for some specific searches because Harris is also the name of a county in Texas, Google wrote in a post on the social media site X. This also occurs in searches for “Vance” because it is also the name of a county.

Google said developers are in the process of fixing the glitch, and that very few people actually search for voting places this way.

DogeDesigner on X posted that Google and Microsoft are top Democratic donors. The post noted that “Google is the biggest corporate donor to the Democratic Party.”

Alphabet, Google's parent, gave nearly $15 million in federal contributions to Democrats during the 2023-24 election cycle.

That's nothing compared to Elon Musk's SpaceX, which gave $132 million to elect Republicans and GOP allies.