Summary
Donald Trump and his team are attacking media outlets like Politico and The New York Times for reporting that his 2024 election victory over Kamala Harris was narrow, not a “landslide.”
Trump won by 1.6 points and failed to secure a majority of the popular vote, a smaller margin than Hillary Clinton’s over him in 2016.
Despite these facts, Trump and his allies continue to tout his win as “historic” and “dominant,” aiming to bolster his political mandate amid criticisms that his victory was less decisive than claimed.
There’s even rumors that votes in the swing states were fraudulent as well. A disproportionate number of “bullet ballots” in swing states alone may indicate foul going-ons. The only way to tell would be a recount, however.
Edit: Seems the info is dubious, at best. Partially straight up wrong. Oh well. A few hours of hope was nice.
I think that’s all BS. However, what is not BS is that ballots have just “vanished”, due to being challenged by the Vigilante stuff. According to Greg Pallast, investigative journalist with the BBC, there have been over 800k provisional ballots that have not been counted because they have been thrown out. He even has the exact names of people, who’s ballots have been thrown out.
If it wasn’t so dire, I’d find it extremely fascinating…
Problematic for a couple of reasons:
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You can’t just insert fake ballots, that would cause the vote count to be incorrect when compared to registered voters.
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A bullet ballot would support Trump, but have no impact on other races… races which we know Republicans won.
Looking at Pennsylvania as an example:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_United_States_presidential_election_in_Pennsylvania
Trump - 3,542,505
Harris - 3,421,088
Stein - 34,508
Oliver - 33,299
Total - 7,031,400
Trump won by 121,417Now compare that to the Senate election:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_United_States_Senate_election_in_Pennsylvania
McCormick - 3,395,785
Casey - 3,378,356
Libertarian - 89,475
Green - 66,185
Constitution - 23,586
Total - 6,953,384So 78,016 more people voted in the Presidential race than the Senate race, which is not enough to have given Trump the win if they were all bullet ballots.
You don’t have to fake ballots. You can just throw absentee ballots out, after them being challenged…which happens since 2000 (it’s apparently one of the reasons Bush won), this time however there have been over 800k ballots that have been thrown out…in swing states alone.
Considering the margins are so slim, a few 100k challenged voters here and there…and you have “We don’t need your votes, we have enough” https://youtu.be/X3hXeEiFcJM?si=-lJLqmIDZM4PewcT
That isn’t the claim though. The claim is enough “bullet ballots” (Trump only ballots) had been inserted to flip the election.
Elections don’t work that way. I was telling people the same thing in 2016 and 2020.
When people cast a vote, it’s tied to a registration. If you insert a bunch of votes, you end up with more ballots than voters.
counting machines could be compromised and doing an office space thing in targeted areas, flipping one democrat vote for every 10 counted. no one would question it. only a hand count would verify, and those aren’t usually done anymore.
Oh, absolutely agreed, but again, that’s not the accusation when it comes to bullet ballots.
THIS.
They had direct access to our voting machines during their bullshit “inquiries”.
The voting machines that ARE KNOWN to have direct access vulnerabilities.
Could the Russians and Elon access the voting machines?
Ask the “cyber ninjas” and all the other seditionists with their hands illegally on our voting machines during the whole twitlers big lie charade.
So, not to say I necessarily believe in this, but the case laid out has a lot to do with Elon’s PAC, which was collecting only names and addresses with the promise that voters would be paid x amount after taking some sort of pledge. The argument then follows, that if electronic tabulation systems were hacked and continuously connected to the Internet, the people who signed up to his list could have their vote automatically cast as a bullet ballot for Donald Trump. Supposedly, there’s a way they could do this digital ballot stuffing specifically for voters whose ballot had not shown up as cast within the voter registry past a certain point in time, so all the fraudulent ballots look like legitimate ones tied to actual people.
It’s pretty far-fetched, but just plausible enough that it’s appealing to a lot of people who were blindsided by election day’s results
Tabulation systems aren’t connected to the internet. Any manipulation has to be done on a machine by machine basis, which can still be done with physical access and USB keys, but doing that at election scale would not go un-noticed.
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Write your senators and representative and ask them to enforce section 3 of the 14th amendment and prevent an insurrectionist from holding office.
According to snopes, the claims made by the Spoonamore guy are kinda iffy, I’m afraid. :(
https://www.snopes.com/news/2024/11/21/stephen-spoonamore-letter-harris/
Oh, thanks for that link. They did go really deep into the numbers with this one. I knew the whole Starlink part of the letter made no sense given how the internet works, but I still had questions about the number of bullet ballots, which Snopes addresses as well state by state.
I read that earlier and I’m confused why it seems to matter if the vote is above the threshold for the state to flip or not to do a recount.
Take Nevada: " As for Nevada, Spoonamore contended in his letter, “NV - 43K+ 5.5%+ of Trump’s total vote. Enough to exceed recount threshold.” The Nevada government website (archived) reported that — out of 1,487,887 total ballots cast — 1,484,840 ballots contained votes for presidential candidates and 1,464,728 contained votes for U.S. Senate candidates. The mximum number of “bullet votes” is 23,159. Trump received 46,008 more votes in Nevada than Harris. "
Snopes seems to be saying that it doesn’t matter if Trump cheated and sneaked in 23k bullet votes because Kamala would have lost anyway without them. In my view, if ANY cheating occured then that’s like really bad right? Even if it didn’t flip the election?
23k is a little more than half of 43k so the percentage would drop from 5.5% down to 2.8% which is still wayyy over the usual 0.05% bullet ballots which seems very odd and makes it recount worthy. (Note: The 0.05% bullet ballots figure comes from the original article which I haven’t fact checked since idk how so if that’s wrong please correct it “In comparison, bullet ballots for Trump in Oregon, Utah and Idaho—the three states which border Arizona and Nevada, with equally fervent Trump voters—count for less than 0.05% in each state.”)
Even ignoring the math, the assertion that a statistically unlikely amount of bullet ballots means there has been fraud is kinda out there. Historically, bullet ballots are fairly common with populist candidates.
It does seem to me like a valid reason for a recount though and I believe this shit is being rugswept cuz we don’t wanna look like conspiracy theorists
I think since the total amount of bullet votes isn’t as massive as previously thought, it may only be somewhat outside of the norm, making the possible fraud less likely.
I can see where it may be best to be tactical with a demand for recount if it won’t change the outcome, as then it could make it harder to have a recount in the next election to the point where it does change the outcome. That’s just my 2 cents tho.
This has been shut down pretty well at this point.
How? If there’s new info I want to hear it but AFAIK it’s been speculated and nobody has done any digging on it.
Snopes
If there was anything to it, the Democrats would be talking about it. They have plenty of lawyers that can demand recounts in places where they suspect they could gain something. I know they’re generally incompetent, but not that incompetent.
They sure hide their competence well. Letting the biggest threat to our democracy slip through every crack in the system sure looks like a boneheaded move.
here is the linked transcript in case you’re like me and can’t stand getting information from a video
I like you. Thank you.
Thank you, I feel a little validated and less alone lol. There could be dozens of us!
Nah man it was rigged
Every election in America, no matter how shitty Republicans get, is 49%-51%.
This produces a rather odd dumbass effect where if it’s 48%-52%, people start shouting about landslides.
Except for McCain, Bob Dole, Bush Senior the second time around, and Barry Goldwater
Yeah, he is afraid that it will be exposed that he rigged this election.
It was extremely rigged wasn’t it. Fucking hell man.
I’m not one for conspiracy theories, and we don’t have any evidence to back up any sort of claims of rigging or election fraud. In fact, the various lawsuits Trump initiated in the last cycle and audits and recounts and so on provided a pretty damning pile of evidence for “not rigged”.
Republicans aren’t rigging elections themselves. There’s no tomfoolery going on with voting machines, or people voting twice, or similar. They’re “rigging” it with legal means – disenfranchising voters, suppressing turnout, financing third party candidates to peel votes away from the other side, gerrymandering districts, and using massive propaganda systems to influence who decides to vote and what they choose when they do vote.
All said, though, we can always make the system more robust, and increase both voters’ confidence in the system and allay any fears of actual rigging. But election reforms are often a “Democrat” issue, so almost any Republican will oppose meaningful reforms that don’t do one of the things above to suppress voters.
There was throwing out and refuse to count mail in ballots with out dates stamped in Pennsylvania. They did have fire bombing of ballot drop off boxes. There was phone calls from Russia. There was a media platform manipulating the news to be right wing.
While I don’t think it wouldn’t have changed anything Kamala did lose by just over 250k votes in 4 states.
I don’t get the “it won’t change the outcome” arguments. So the fuck what? If I cheat on an exam, but still fail, does that mean I shouldn’t get in trouble for cheating?
Or, I guess more accurately: If I was already going to pass an exam, but cheat on it anyway, should I get a pass?
Hmm. Is there any political or judicial will to do anything about Trump or right wing people cheating. We need plausible proof to convict people and if we haven’t arrested Trump for election interference from 2020 by now then what is the point of stressing sure some people should try if these is something but nothing is going to come of it.
The President once elected can still serve even in jail. So yes even if he cheated and we discover something was wrong with election once Kamala conceded Trump won even if she wasn’t mathematically eliminated and it completely turned the tide Trump still would be the next president. I don’t agree with that but yeah. It is as if we discovered someone cheated to get there diploma or degree years after the fact they already got the paper so even if you rescind it to jobs they would still look like a legitimate candidate
Trump runs on ego. Anything that quells the ego must be wrong.
This is the only effective way to slow him down imo. Make fun of him for having small crowds at his rallies then sue him for libel when he says his were bigger. It doesn’t matter if it goes anywhere in court, you just need to force the conversation to keep his attention.
Unfortunately, he will soon have the power of the federal government at his fingertips. He will begin exacting retribution on anyone who is effective in slowing him down.
Ballots have just “vanished”, due to being challenged by the Vigilante stuff. According to Greg Pallast, investigative journalist with the BBC, there have been over 800k provisional ballots that have not been counted because they have been thrown out. He even has the exact names of people, who’s ballots have been thrown out.
If it wasn’t so dire, I’d find it extremely fascinating…
Yeah, well, this dickbird is already in and our chances of ever being able to legitimately get rid of him are, alas, extremely remote.
So this is only a problem in his own petty little smooth brain. And yet.
I mean if you take into account how stupid and incompetent he was in his last term and that he now he seems to be losing his faculties it was quite a landslide. Getting 10% should have been a miracle.
Piss on him til he fucking drowns
Especially if it’s Russian piss…
He would die a happy man
So be it, long as he’s dead and gone
Facts don’t care about his feelings.
The gaslighting of his campaign knows no bounds.
I kinda knew the popular vote thing would correct itself, I think the reason it’s this close at all is because most people don’t pay attention to politics as much as they should
He won popular (more votes than other candidates), he did not win majority (>50% of total votes)
lmao, third parties actually threw the election
I mean there wasn’t enough of them to flip the swing states. Also somehow I doubt that all the RFK Jr and Chase Oliver and Randell Terry and Peter Sonski voters would have gone for Harriss
Bro let me cope…
I’ll let you cope if you make a meme for me What they Wanted: Barack Obama with a lil bowtie and Joe Biden waving a Minnesota flag(new version) What they got: Hillary Clinton with a sunglasses tint effect to make her look darker and John Kerry with 3 purple hearts waving a Minnesota flag(old version)
Not necessarily, he won a majority in Pennsylvania and in states like Wisconsin where he only got a plurality third party voters wouldn’t likely have broken strongly enough against him for him to lose.
Remember that his first official act as president in his first term was to send Sean Spicer out, literally on day one, to scold the press corp for seeing the paltry crowd at his inauguration. This guy is always, always just small dick energy in an ill-fitting suit.
I’m going to go with the Big Lie 2 here. Trump lost the popular vote just like he did with Hilary and Biden.
Wait, what? Trump didn’t win the popular vote?
According to the first google search I did, Trump won by 2.5M votes. What’s the logic behind the statement that he “failed to secure a majority of the popular vote”? Oh, are they’re counting 3rd party votes? Who the fuck cares about that? That seems a lame nit-pick TBH.
Nit-pick? That’s what you are doing with the article
it doesn’t say he didn’t win the popular vote. it says he didn’t secure majority. majority doesn’t mean more than others; it means more than half.
it’s not a nitpick; it’s about him claiming mandate.
Serious question: Does it have any relevance whether or not someone secures majority of the public vote? Other than debunking Trump’s landslide rethoric, I mean.
It is mostly relevant because of the long list of recent presidents who did. It also is clearly not a “mandate” and means at least half the US voters disagree with him. So other poloticians shouldn’t just do what he says. That is mostly relevant inside the republican party, giving those that disagree more room to do so.
if you exclude where it matters, it doesn’t matter; that’s correct.
Well without qualifiers like “the majority of votes for the two major parties”, the majority is literally all the votes.
Don’t feel bad, education from red states is infamously bad. Might want to apply to some English courses at your local community college.
It means less than 50% of votes were cast for him. In simpler terms, more people voted for someone else than him.
I mean, no, a Landslide is historically defined as 400 EVs and that hasn’t happened in a while, not even Obama quite got there.
But it is the biggest victory a Republican has had since 1988. I don’t get all the hemming and hawing about mandates and plurality of PV vs majority of PV and stuff. This was a bigger win for the Republicans then 2000, 2004, and 2016. 2004 is the only one that’s even debatable. Harris lost harder than any democrat since Micheal Dukakis. And while a lot of that is people who only show up for Trump and thus it’s possible 2028 is a democrat wave, there’s also a lot of people specifically turned off by Trump who might not mind the far younger Vance(who had the biggest glowup this year of the 4 people on the tickets, he went from bottom in popularity to comparable to Walz, meanwhile Trump and Walz stagnated and Harris surged and then un-surged)
Wow, that makes more sense in politics than it does in quantum mechanics
…
Maybe we can model the quantum world on Politics.
every time a politician has to make a statement he both agrees and disagrees until he knows who the audience.
