I usually debunk right wing frauds but this time I want to debunk a left wing one, the latest nonsense from some guy named Steven Spoonamore that the 2024 election was hacked and stolen. His claims have gone viral, including a link to something called " Duty to Warn Letter - to VP Harris - Re: Election 2024."
I take pride in the fact that my side engages in far fewer kook conspiracy theories and accepts the will of the people without trying Fascist coup attempts. And I love to point fingers at righties for doing those things and don't want next time to end up with them pointing fingers back and saying: "Your guys do it too."
I've heard of this guy Spoonamore before. I first saw him in 2004 saying that election was stolen. I didn't buy it then. His theory was not possible. His theory this time is not only full holes, its nothing but holes.
Spoonamore claims there are large numbers of what he calls "bullet ballots." Those are ballots in which only one candidate is chosen. Nobody counts "bullet ballots." The polls only count the totals for each candidate. Nobody looks for "bullet ballots." To do so with paper ballots would require an extra hand count without using the machines. And it would only be possible with paper ballots or machines that create paper ballots. Many voting machines just display raw total when you open up the backs after closing the poll. I don't think anybody goes through the machine created paper ballots unless there is a reason to doubt the machine count. Spoonamore claims to have complete bullet ballot statistics for all 50 states. Its nonsense. Someone should ask him where these are and where he got them.
Spoonamore claims in the letter to Kamala that there 350,000 votes in North Carolina for Trump and no other candidates. I'm surprised anybody falls for this, since the North Carolina results are right on the web, and they were Donald Trump 2,878,428 and Democratic candidate for governor Josh Stein 3,067,506. Stein got 191,000 votes more than Trump got, which seems impossible if there were 350,000 votes cast just for Trump. It's even more unlikely, probably impossible, when the totals cast for both races are looked at. For president there were 5,679,658 votes. For governor there were 5,588,974. That's a difference of 90,710, not the 350,000 Spoonamore claims. And the 90,710 is to be expected. Presidential races get more interest and what happened in NC was a pattern across the states.
Spoonamore also says a handful of hackers operating remotely could have pulled the whole thing off. That's not possible. I've seen videos where hackers could change vote totals in minutes but they always had physical access to the machines. The machines are locked up and have tamper proof seals. They are also tested before each election. They are not connected to phone lines or the Internet. A hacker would not have access to them. Perhaps crooked MAGA election officials could get around the locks and seals and if they found a way to coordinate with the with Spoonamore's hypothetocal hack operation (don't know how they could pull that off) they might grant access but that wouldn't' go far either. There were some 2020 election deniers in charge of elections but not many and those that were were mostly located in rural areas. Rural areas don't have many votes to begin with and those they do have are already heavily GOP so there would not be that many Democratic votes to switch. If they tried to simply add votes they would run into the problem of a mismatch with the number of people who signed in to vote. There were mismatches in races in MI before but only by small numbers that could be explained away as election workers missing a few people at the sign in station. Also, strategists for big campaigns have printouts from past elections of vote totals for all races and all precincts. They know what to expect and review afterwards. If they spot a major anomaly, like turnout increasing by 20% in one rural county but not the others, they would know something was up.
Another part of Spoonamore's hoax tha is obvious BS is his claim that a list of potential voters to impersonate came from an Elon Musk operation that offered a chance at $1 million for a pledge to vote for Donald Trump. That's not what Musks operation really was. It offered $1 million a day to voters for signing his political action committee’s petition backing the Constitution. Musk made prerequisite that the signers must be registered voters, so he would have come up with a list of people who CLAIMED to be registered voters, with plenty of folks would have just claimed to be registered for a chance at the $1 million. Not that big a deal since registration lists are already public information. So lets says Musk is teamed up with the hacking operation. The hackers (which as already discussed is impossible) find a way to hack into all those different precincts and add votes for all those people. There's a HUGE problem there. Most of those people would go to vote too. When they did they would be told they already voted, and that would happen very many times. All Hell would break loose. I guess Spoonamore thought of this because he puts in his warning that the hackers would have to have access to information from something called ePollBooks. Those are laptops election workers use for, among other things, verifying that a voter is eligible to vote. And they do send information to a central location where a record would be created of who voted and who didn't. Theoretically those places might be hacked, although I suspect they have sophisticated defenses against that. But ePollBooks aren't everywhere. And another big problem is that they might learn that a voter hasn't voted YET, but no way to know if they would later. So Spoonamore's hackers for each vote must determine that the voter is actually registered, hasn't voted yet, is from an EPollbook location, and then hack into that precinct (impossible) and hope the voter doesn't show up later. I don't think so. And Spoonamore claims this was done hundreds of thousands of times by only a handful of people. That's not credible.
I could probably find more to debunk from this nonsense but at this point anybody who still believes Spoonamore after what I've written must just be someone who is unconvinceable.
Spoonamore's hoax will do far more to harm Democrats than help them. Please don't spread it.
