Election Fraud Debunked?
Asking questions as an independent media outpost
Hi folks,
Something a bit different today: I’d like to address the rebuttal that fact-checking outlet Snopes published about Spoonamore’s claims of election fraud. Spoonamore was one of my sources for last week’s piece on the potential election hack and I quoted him heavily. Some subscribers have asked me to revise the piece with the update, and I thought I’d take the opportunity to do it here and discuss more broadly the role of little independent journalism outlets like myself.
Firstly, the details I wrote about how the election voting software was compromised remains correct and important. This information came from a second open letter written by a group of computer scientists. It is a critical hole in the election infrastructure into which any manner of malware and bad intentions can be stuffed. Remember: 70% of the USA’s election software was compromised in raids. The rest of the piece about the proposed hack—what the data says and how it was done—remains in question.
Snopes writes that Spoonamore’s maths is simply wrong about the bullet ballots:
“Spoonamore alleged that the purported hacking and fraud in North Carolina proved to be "the most extreme" and that "the public results indicate over 350,000 voters cast a ballot for Trump and no other race." However, this is false.
“According to the North Carolina State Board of Elections' website, as of Nov. 21, 5,722,556 voters cast ballots. Of those, 5,699,152 ballots displayed votes in the race for president. The website also reported that 5,592,243 ballots bore votes for the state's governor's race. A comparison of the numbers for total votes and the gubernatorial race would reveal the maximum number of possible "bullet vote" ballots for all presidential candidates. The difference between the two numbers is 130,313 votes — a count nowhere near the 350,000 votes stated by Spoonamore.”
The maths checks out. I read the North Carolina database and did some extra calculations for votes cast only on election day, as Spoonamore claimed this is when the hack would have happened. The percentage difference between votes on election day for the President and the Governor amount to 2.1%. The only way the data could reveal a larger percentage gap is if many people on election day only submitted an under-vote—leaving the Presidential choice blank—and there were a huge number of bullet ballots for Trump. I do not have access to that data to parse it. Where did Spoonamore get it from? I don’t know—I have emailed him twice since interviewing him for the piece, with no response, and have been unable to get a hold of anyone from SmartElections who he claimed to be working with.
Spoonamore has since written his own update apologising to the community, saying, “It appears something other than Bullet Ballots is at play.” He also insists that while the hypothesis caused confusion, there are still anomalies in the vote count which need to be investigated: “[Bullet ballots] may be a part of the issue, but it is very clear a very large set of irregularities exists in this election.”
Now, this is where it’s fair to raise the question why I published the piece if I couldn’t get my hands on the raw bullet ballot data? I was hoping the piece would flush out more sources, a tactic used successfully in papers around the world. When publishing pieces like this, we journalists lean heavily on frequent usage of the words “claimed”, “alleged” and “according to”. These words do the heavy lifting of avoiding libel suits, and highlight to readers that what is on offer is opinion, not fact.
The second reason I chose to publish is that I understood hand-recount deadlines in key precincts were coming up at the end of that week. This is where my standing as a small, independent outlet rather than a corporate news organisation is incredibly helpful. I can make editorial decisions which tie media organisations in legal knots, ensuring a lot of stories never make it out the front gate.
I’m also aware the role of independent journalists like myself is to touch the stories the big guys don’t want. To this day, I haven’t seen my world exclusive investigation into the $500 billion worth of fossil fuels off of Gaza’s coast covered in any major newspaper around the world (although it did get a segment on Russia Today). There are critically important geopolitical factors driving Israel’s genocide of the Gazan people, which they hide under the shadow of October 7th. Israel has been trying to get their hands on that gas for 30 years, and has actively dismissed suggestions of developing it in partnership with Palestine. Now, finally, they’ll have succeeded. Similarly, the Global North’s jaw-dropping support of Netenyahu’s campaign was perhaps caused by a desperate need for gas after Russia’s supply was cut off from the market. These were all points I raised and questions I asked in that piece while the media class was screaming about religion.
My job is to investigate what they refuse to cover, and to join the dots that the powerful refuse to acknowledge. I do that to the best of my ability. It means I am often out on a limb. This time, the limb cracked underneath me.
I still believe there are anomalous instances in this election, such as Trump winning all seven states with just 50% of the vote. I am deeply concerned by the compromised election software and, frankly, I would be unsurprised if reports ever surfaced of a hack. I find Musk’s feverish last-minute involvement in the Trump campaign unsettling and, like many, I found the assurances from Trump that he already had enough votes long before the count started very strange. There are still questions to be raised and points to be addressed, even if the data has thinned out.
I have one last point of my own to raise, something I’ve been thinking of fleshing out into a longer piece: Stop the vitriol. I am shocked at the way some readers are choosing to speak to each other in the comments, and disappointed by the malice others relish in when addressing me. I have considered turning comments off for free subscribers if this continues because I don’t have the time to police it. I’d like to know your thoughts on this matter in the comments below.
In the meantime, thank you to the Planet: Critical base which keep this project going, and welcome to the 2000-odd new people in this community. This publication investigates why the world is in crisis—I’m sure, at least, we can all agree on that.
Stay critical,
Rachel
We don’t actually NEED rigging for this election to have been stolen. The institutional cheating embodied in voter suppression, foreign interference, and a useless, sold out media are enough to throw an election. And all of those things are in play.
But I feel in my bones this was rigged, in exactly the way described in the duty to warn letter.
If for no other reason than that DT ALWAYS cheats, and always telegraphs how by projection. Notice exactly when all the yapping about “rigging” stopped?
Rachel--
I would like to corroborate much of what Spoonamore says, along with the claims in the letter by Buell and others. As an election watcher, I have known for years that the security and validity of machine vote counts has been actively ignored. Audits that could test the accuracy and reveal hacking are largely not done, and when they are done the rules ae not followed, as if trying to hide something. Laws have been changed to make it easier to hide the results of audits, harder to understand them, and harder to gain access to that data. Until we have a good system of audits, I would not trust the count. There are too many ways to hack elections, and too many bad actors who are willing and able to hack elections, to hold trust in the results. On top of the vulnerabilities, the election outcomes are statitically very weird. I see a whole parade of red flags.