Who really won the 2024 election?

Ever since November 6, I've been cycling through four of the five stages of death and dying — denial, anger, bargaining, and depression. I am never going to reach acceptance.

The results of that election have always smelled a little off to me. It seemed unfathomable that the American public was so stupid, racist, and misogynistic that it would put a convicted felon and adjudicated rapist back in the White House. It felt like the fix was in, but I couldn't point to any evidence to support that. It was a conspiracy without a theory.

Here are a few things that have been gnawing at me since that dark day:

How did Jeff Bezos and billionaire LA Times publisher Patrick Soon-Shiong know to pull their papers' endorsements of Harris a week before the election?

Why were tech broligarchs Horowitz and Andreessen — the latter an alleged lifelong Democrat, but not usually loud about it — so sure Trump would win that they went public with their endorsement of him?

Do you really think six impossibly corrupt Federalist Society Supreme Court justices would have granted nearly unbridled powers of immunity to the president — ensuring Trump would never face justice for crimes he clearly committed — if they thought a Democrat would be in charge over the next four years?

I wanted Harris and the Democrats to challenge the results and demand accountability. Of course, they did not. In situations like this, liberals wring their hands, while conservatives clench their fists. Democrats concede; Republicans attack. [1]

Now a lawsuit filed in Rockland County, New York, is attempting to challenge the results of the election. Per Newsweek:

According to the complaint, more voters have sworn in legal affidavits that they voted for independent U.S. Senate candidate Diane Sare than the Rockland County Board of Elections counted and certified, contradicting those results... The complaint also cited numerous statistical anomalies in the presidential election results.

They include multiple districts where hundreds of voters chose the Democratic candidate Kirsten Gillibrand for Senate, but none voted for then-Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic candidate for president. The complaint said that in Rockland County, 9 percent of voters who voted for Gillibrand did not vote Harris, giving Harris a -9 percent drop-off rate.

The normal 'drop-off' rate is rarely higher than 1 or 2 percent. And that's just one of many extreme statistical anomalies surrounding the election.

Lasers from space, but not the Jewish kind

A group calling itself The Common Coalition (aka This Will Hold) recently published a series of Substack posts containing enough conspiracy theory material for at least three Oliver Stone movies. Bear with me here, because it's going to get murky.

• They start with the sale of a small technology company named Tripp Lite, owned by Leonard Leo [2] — the Federalist Society architect behind the corruption of SCOTUS — to Eaton Corp. Eaton is a partner of Peter Thiel's surveillance company Palantir Technologies, which among other things makes an AI platform designed to analyze ballot logs and metadata. [3]

• Tripp Lite and Eaton [4] make surge protectors and uninterruptible power supplies (UPS) that connect to a wide range of devices and are certified for use with voting machines. These devices could theoretically could be used to gain admin access to voting tabulation machines, allowing third parties to control them. (Personally, I have never heard of somebody hacking a computer via its UPS; on the other hand, somebody once hacked all of Target's point-of-sale systems via an insecure HVAC system.)

• While a student at Harvard, former Musk employee and current DOGEbag Ethan Shaotran wrote an app called BallotProof that analyzes scanned images of ballots to identify "errors [that] can prevent your critical vote from being counted." Presumably, such software might be altered to introduce errors.

• Another company called Pro V&V carried a series of unsupervised upgrades to voting machines (like, perhaps, switching out their power supplies?). [5]

• Elon Musk's Starlink Direct-to-Cell (DTC) network went live on October 30, 2024, allowing for direct (and unmonitored) communications to mobile phones and other devices (like intelligent UPSes).

So the working theory is that unnamed persons gained access to voting machines in swing states via hacked power supplies, using signals sent via Elon Musk's satellite network, and either deleted legitimate votes for Harris or added false votes for Trump. All of which sounds a little nuts, if I am being honest. When conspiracy theories get this convoluted, I reach for my tin foil beanie and start looking around for large white rabbits in top hats and tails.

But then there's this little nugget, unearthed in a New York Times story last May and quoted here by Heather Cox Richardson:

Fucking lasers from fucking space? Seriously?

It's the data, stupid

What makes this Bond Villain scenario worth at least exploring are the statistically improbable if not impossible results of that election. Like, for example, the huge discrepancy in drop-off rates — where voters vote for a president from one party and senator or congress person from another, or don't vote for president at all — between swing states and normal states.

Per the nonpartisan election security group SMART Elections:

There are often many more votes for the Republican presidential candidate (Trump) than for the Republican Senate candidate (or major down-ballot race). Especially in the swing states, we did not find this on the Democratic side.

Instead, on the Democratic side, we find an opposite phenomenon. There are a large number of votes for the Democratic Senate candidate (or major down-ballot race) where there is no vote for the Democratic presidential candidate (Harris).

So, for example, in one Rockland County precinct, Democratic Senator Kirstin Gillibrand won reelection with nearly 80% of the vote (331 out of 417 votes cast). In that same precinct, Kamala Harris received exactly zero votes, while Donald Trump won 99.6%.

There are only two possible explanations:

1. Kirsten Gillibrand, not a conservative by any measure, has a ton of closeted MAGA supporters; or

2. Something is very wrong. Maybe not Lasers from Space wrong, but still... wrong.

This is far from the only example in Rockland, and that's just one county in one state. Which is why the New York Supreme Court is allowing the case to move forward.

Then there's Pennsylvania, where University of Michigan professor Walter Mebane performed an 'eforensics analysis' of all votes cast across the state's 67 counties. His conclusion: As many as 225,440 votes in the Pennsylvania presidential race were possibly fraudulent, exceeding the 120,266 vote margin of victory between Trump and Harris. 

This is not proof by any means. But it's certainly enough to warrant rechecking the results, just to make sure. Which is why the Election Truth Alliance, which hired Mebane to perform the analysis, is urging people to sign a petition demanding a paper ballot audit in the Keystone State, and to lobby their Congressional representatives.

Was the 2024 election hacked?

The trouble with conspiracy theories is they're too perfect. Everything runs like clockwork and fits together like a jigsaw puzzle. Life is a lot messier and harder to control than that. Then again, if this conspiracy were truly perfect, we wouldn't be talking about it. And everything about this stinks like low tide at Mar-a-Lago.

This Will Hold summarizes:

A clean sweep in all seven swing states. The fall of the Blue Wall. Eighty-eight counties flipped red—not one flipped blue. Every victory landed just under the threshold that would trigger an automatic recount. Donald Trump outperformed expectations in down-ballot races with margins never before seen—while Kamala Harris simultaneously underperformed in those exact same areas.

I get it. Even if we could somehow prove this election was stolen by Elon Musk and his stable of UPS-hacking satellites, it's not like we'll be getting a do-over. The MAGAts have a stranglehold on power, and we'll need to wrestle it out of their AR15 trigger fingers.

I also would not expect the world's most lavishly funded, exclusive old folks home — also known as the United States Congress — to do anything about it. (Wouldn't want to upset their billionaire donors or lose that awesome health care package.)

But it's still important to name the crime, if not for ourselves then for any who follow. Without the Zapruder film, most of us would simply accept that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. It stamps a Big Fat Lie on the conceit of a popular mandate for the atrocities now being committed. It might motivate more people to vote the old guard out (assuming our voting systems aren't already compromised beyond repair) or demand more stringent audits of results.

Instead of all the theories about why Kamala lost — Gaza, Joe Rogan, aggressive voter suppression, the lack of a prolonged primary contest, aggro manboys whose daddies never loved them — the truth may be both simpler and more horrifying.

Where do you stand on these theories? Did Oswald act alone? Share your thoughts in the comments or email me: [email protected].

[1] And not just on January 6, 2021. Remember the "Brooks Brothers riots" stopping the 2000 Florida recount? Completely fabricated by Roger Stone and his minions.

[2] Tripp Lite was a $1.6 billion donation from longtime conservative donor Barre Seid to a dark money group named The Marble Trust, controlled by Leonard Leo. Per ProPublica: "Even in this money-drenched world, Seid’s $1.6 billion gift exceeds all publicly known one-time donations to a politically oriented group."

[3] Imagine the most soulless, evil corporation depicted in Hollywood thrillers, then double that. That's Palantir.

[4] Eaton is also partnered with Tesla.

[5] Per the Dissent in Bloom substack: "The ES&S systems that received these shadow approvals are used in over 40% of U.S. counties. Pennsylvania, Florida, New Jersey, California, all rely on machines that Pro V&V signs off on. The ExpressVote XL, implicated in the Sare vote discrepancy (missing votes) is already being used in battleground states."