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.

  • Hideakikarate@sh.itjust.works
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    1 month ago

    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.

    • nexusband@lemmy.world
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      1 month ago

      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…

      https://youtu.be/X3hXeEiFcJM?si=-lJLqmIDZM4PewcT

    • jordanlund@lemmy.worldM
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      1 month ago

      Problematic for a couple of reasons:

      1. You can’t just insert fake ballots, that would cause the vote count to be incorrect when compared to registered voters.

      2. 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 121,417

      Now 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 - 6,953,384

      So 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.

      • nexusband@lemmy.world
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        1 month ago

        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

        • jordanlund@lemmy.worldM
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          1 month ago

          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.

          • adarza@lemmy.ca
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            30 days ago

            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.

            • Captainvaqina@sh.itjust.works
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              30 days ago

              THIS.

              They had direct access to our voting machines during their bullshit “inquiries”.

              The voting machines that ARE KNOWN to have direct access vulnerabilities.

          • Ashelyn@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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            30 days ago

            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

            • jordanlund@lemmy.worldM
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              29 days ago

              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.

    • JackbyDev@programming.dev
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      30 days ago

      Write your senators and representative and ask them to enforce section 3 of the 14th amendment and prevent an insurrectionist from holding office.

      • jonne@infosec.pub
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        1 month ago

        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.

      • Trev625@lemm.ee
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        1 month ago

        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.”)

        • TranscendentalEmpire@lemm.ee
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          1 month ago

          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.

          • asteriskeverything@lemmy.world
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            30 days ago

            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

        • ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.net
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          1 month ago

          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.