Cyber-Security Experts Warn Election Was Hacked

'Musk is guilty as fuck'

Read the update to this piece here.

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Cyber-security experts across America are raising the alarm of wide-scale election fraud securing Trump’s victory — and the data is compelling.

Two open letters penned by computer scientists and hacking experts have detailed how the USA’s election software was compromised and the relatively simple hack which could have then been used to fix the results in the seven swing states. They are calling for an immediate hand recount in key precincts which, they say, should swiftly show that a number of these ballots never existed.

There are already numerous articles online stating that this is a left wing conspiracy, and Elon Musk himself has warned that those raising concerns about the “hoax” will face “the hammer of justice”. However, the articles debunking these concerns have only focused on the claim that Musk used his internet service Starlink to steal the election. As detailed below, this is not what the cyber security experts are warning of — although Starlink may have played a role.

The Data

The key data raising concerns that a hack may have been deployed is the number of bullet ballots which exist for Trump in swing states. Bullet ballots are when voters vote for one candidate—in this case the President—and don’t fill out the rest of the ballot. Every year, in every state—including in the past two elections Trump ran in—the percentage of bullet ballots is around 1%. This trend has stayed consistent in the 43 non-swing states in the 2024 election. However, the percentage of bullet ballots is not just anomalous in swing states for Trump this year—it is off the charts.

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The data in this section came from Stephen Spoonamore, who has since retracted his comments. Please read my update and what this means here:

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According to one of the open letters, in Arizona, Trump’s percentage of bullet ballots totaled 7.2%. In Nevada, 5.5%. 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.

The same pattern continues across the other swing states, with an astonishing 11% of votes for Trump in North Carolina being bullet ballots.

“The numbers are so high to be unbelievable, unprecedented and demanding of further investigation,” writes Stephen Spoonamore, hacking and counter-hacking expert, cyber-security adviser, and government contractor.

Even more bizarrely, the bullet ballots are not widely spread out across the swing states, but targeted in a handful of counties. In Arizona, for example, Maricopa County accounts for almost all of the historic number of bullet ballots.

Critically, only 400,000 votes would be need to be added in strategic precincts in swing states in order to secure Trump’s victory. In each of these swing states, too, the number of votes for Trump takes the count just over the margin which necessitates a legal hand recount. If anything, experts say, the numbers are too good to be true.

“This is not scattershot. It's their big mistake—if they've made a mistake, it's that it’s just too perfect,” Spoonamore told me.

Finally, the other piece of data raising eyebrows is the fact that Trump won all seven swing states—the first candidate to sweep the board in four decades—without record voter turnout. Less than 50% of voters chose Trump, with Harris less than 1.7% behind him. One data scientist crunched the numbers:

“It’s north of a 35 billion to 1 probability that you could win seven out of seven outside of recount range with less than 50% of the vote.”

Here’s what the experts say happened.

Election Software Compromised

The first open letter to VP Harris signed by a number of eminent computer scientists details how, after the 2020 election, a number of Republican activists broke into election polling booths and downloaded copies of the software used to count the votes. These security breaches were reported on by The Washington Post and the Associated Press. Prison sentences were handed down, but not before the software was uploaded onto the internet, now easily accessible on Github, a well-known and legal site used by coders to access and modify software.

In 2022, the civil case in Georgia about these security breaches brought to light that the operatives had been hired by Trump’s lawyers. They successfully accessed all of the software used in Georgia and shared it with others in the Trump campaign. Subsequent court filings show these operatives deliberately targeted swing states¹²³⁴, and have had access for more than three years to “the software for the central servers, tabulators, and highly restricted election databases of both Election Systems & Software (ES&S), and Dominion Voting Systems, the two largest voting system vendors, constituting the most severe election security breach publicly known.”

Together, ES&S and Dominion are used to count nearly 70% of the votes nationwide, including the following percentages in the swing states:

• Arizona: 96% use Dominion and ES&S equipment;

• Georgia: 100% of voters vote on Dominion machines;

• Nevada: 98% vote on Dominion voting machines and the remainder uses ES&S

• Michigan: 69% of voters’ ballots are counted on Dominion or ES&S equipment

• Pennsylvania: 89% of voters ballots are counted on Dominion or ES&S equipment

• North Carolina: 92% of ballots are counted by ES&S

• Wisconsin: 97% of votes are counted by either ES&S or Dominion

With copies of the software, hackers could then relatively easily develop their own working replicas which both do as they were originally programmed and, unseen, perform a secondary function — like tabulating fake votes. Once the software was updated with this secondary function, it would merely have to be reinstalled on the machines, either physically or when the machines are connected to the internet to be serviced with any necessary updates.

“They're just computers. You can teach computer to do anything you want,” said Spoonamore.

Election officials across multiple states have already dismissed the claims that tabulating machines are connected to the internet, insisting, then, that adding fake votes would have been impossible. However, Spoonamore, who has run hacks like this in the past, told me that the fact the software was compromised means these machines could have been connected to the internet without the election officials even knowing.

“It’s a lie that these machines aren’t connected to the internet. They're not supposed to be connected to the internet while they're doing tabulation—but you don't know what was loaded in there for the software.”

The Hack

You can’t create votes out of nothing. You need to vote on behalf of people registered to vote who didn’t show up to the polling booth, wrote Spoonamore in his open letter to Harris. This is where Elon Musk comes into the picture.

“I think he’s guilty as fuck,” said Spoonamore.

In October, Musk announced a $1 million daily sweepstake to those pledging to vote for Trump in the swing states. Curiously, the only information requested on the pledge website was the name and address of the would-be voter: no email, no telephone number. Spoonamore claims this was how Musk built a list of voters with the details necessary to cast a vote in the USA in the correct precinct. In short, he built a second pollbook.

ePollbooks are used in every polling station in the USA and are connected to the internet. Volunteers sign voters into the polling station to double-check they are in the correct precinct and ensure they haven’t cast their paper ballot elsewhere. Strangely, given the owner’s virulent campaigning for a candidate, Starlink was used to connect the election services to the internet in certain counties. Spoonamore also claims that Musk supplied all seven of the swing states with free Starlink service to make their ePollbooks work faster.

However, this hack could be deployed using any network connection. With the ePollbooks connected to the internet, it would have been possible to hack into the system and, using voter profiles of each registered voter who had been checked into a polling station, determine which candidate was gaining in each state. In the final hours, it would have then been possible, using the secondary pollbook created by the $1 million sweepstake, to determine which Trump voters had not shown up and mark enough of them on the ePollbook as having voted. These become the bullet ballots. Only 400,000 of them were necessary to tip this election—at one point Musk tweeted that millions had signed up to his pledge.

Spoonamore explains that with the ePollbook data updated to reflect the desired result, votes would then need to be added to the tabulation machines to match the ePollbook. The machines could have been “digitally stuffed” either over a network connection (facilitated by the compromised software on these machines) or via physical access to the tabulation machine. A second possibility involves the same compromise as above plus “human ballot stuffing”. He notes this could be the reason bullet ballots fall heavily in just a few counties.

“It's actually a pretty standard hack,” he said.

Is this just “BlueAnon”?

Is this just the Left’s version of right-wing conspiracy theories that have played an outsize role in destabilising our institutions? Perhaps. But the alleged fraud here is linked to men like Trump who outright deny democracy and men like Musk who has seen fit to meddle directly in international warfare and sovereign military strategy. Self-organising online communities are mining the election data, compiling plenty of suggestive content, such as Trump telling his followers this summer that he didn’t need their votes, and Joe Rogan letting slip on his podcast last week that Musk knew the results of the election four hours before anyone else via “an app” on his phone.

Even without these suggestions, the data is stark. Legal teams working with SmartElections are currently racing to meet the deadline to challenge the Presidential result, successfully inviting a handful of voters around the country to challenge the vote in their precinct and demand a hand recount. Hand recounts would prove that these bullet ballots did not exist in the numbers recorded by the tabulator machines.

The deadline for calling for a recount differs in every state. In North Carolina, which saw 11% of votes for Trump cast as bullet votes, the deadline is this Friday. One voter has allegedly come forward in a Pennsylvania precinct to demand a hand recount. However, even if every county in the nation recounted their votes by hand, the only person who can challenge the result in Kamala Harris—as the aggrieved party. There is almost no historical precedent for such a challenge and, even if she were to take this to the Supreme Court, with the judges stacked for Trump it is highly likely they would order to stop the recount—as they did for the 2000 Gore v. Bush election.

“For 20 years, I’ve been saying the same thing,” said Spoonamore. “The elections are being hacked, here's how they're being hacked. And every time, people take a few recommendations after each hacked election, implement some of it—but then you sit there going, that's still not secure.”

Online, however, American social media users are exhausted by more calls of election fraud—even those who voted for Harris. Trump’s repeated—and repeatedly unfounded—claim of a stolen election in 2020 seem to have laid the groundwork for disbelief on both sides of the political aisle that voter fraud could have taken place this time around.

Yet, voter fraud has a history in the United States, well beyond Trump’s claims. Thanks to the Supreme Court, the public still does not know the result of the 2000 election. The 2004 Presidential election and a 2002 Senate election were also decried as fraudulent by experts, including Spoonamore—to no avail.

“I don't know why John Kerry refused to engage nor why Max Cleland refused to engage. This is the third time I've walked into the public square, poured kerosene on myself and set myself on fire saying, ‘Hey, this election was defrauded.’ And all three times the same thing has happened. People just run around going, ‘Oh my God, don't question elections. Oh my God.’ They keep questioning integrity. Well, I was right in 2002 and I was right in 2004.”

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1. Clara Hendrickson, “Did data from Georgia voting machine breach play a role in alleged Michigan election plot?”, The Detroit Free Press, (August 31, 2023). Available at: https://www.freep.com/story/news/politics/2023/08/31/michigan-and-georgia-voting-machine-breachconnection/70702597007/

2. Jeremy Duda, “Group led by ‘kraken’ lawyer Sidney Powell hired the firm recounting AZ’s election to probe election in Fulton Co.” Pennsylvania Capital-Star, (May 24, 2021). Available at: https://penncapital-star.com/government-politics/group-led-by-kraken-lawyer-sidney-powell-hiredthe-firm-recounting-azs-election-to-probe-a-pa-election/

3. Christina A. Cassidy, “Georgia election indictments highlights wider attempts to illegally access voting equipment,” Associated Press, (August 15, 2023). Available at: https://apnews.com/article/georgia-trump-indictment-voting-machines-conspiracy-theoriesbc3db57cabd25fd8e335f85ed299e79c

4. Maritsa Georgiou, “Arizona voting system data sent to Montana lab as part of the latest audit,” NBC Montana, (June 3, 2021). Available at: https://nbcmontana.com/news/local/arizona-votingsystem-data-sent-to-montana-lab-as-part-of-latest-audit