Winners, losers, and conspiracy theories

When it comes to conspiracy theories, I'm a mixed bag. For example, I do not for one moment believe John Wilkes Booth or Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. 

The Lincoln and Kennedy assassinations were definitely inside jobs; 9/11 not so much. I do believe we landed humans on the moon, not in a Hollywood studio. I don't believe a long-deceased Venezualan dictator manipulated the 2020 elections from beyond the grave. 

The election conspiracy theory du jour, at least in this tiny corner of the Interwebs: A shadowy cabal of billionaires and lackeys led by Elon Musk hacked the 2024 election and handed the reins of government to a gaggle of hate-mongering, ketamine-huffing, former-Fox News hosts with a sociopathic desire for revenge. 

My post on this theory garnered a strong reaction, from hopeful but skeptical, to you're out of your freaking mind, my dude. 

(NB: While I don't subscribe to this particular theory, my suspicions of 2024 electoral foul play remain unchanged.)

My pal Rob — longtime tech journalist, 9-time volunteer poll worker, and fellow craft beer afficionado — published a reaction to my post on his blog, which you can read here. I'll summarize some of his main points.

• No evidence of any hacked uninterruptible power supplies have surfaced, and local election offices are too cash strapped to buy fancy hackable devices in any case.

• Musk's Starlink satellites are limited to simple text messaging, and can't be used to communicate with power supplies.

• Post election polls and 'risk limiting' audits show no sign of vote tampering.

• Pay no attention to the ramblings of the ketamine addict behind the curtain. Musk's shitposts bear at best a tangential relationship to reality.

He concludes:

The unfortunate and ugly reality is that American voters showed awful judgment last November, and we are now all paying the price for that.... Conspiracy theories might help people think otherwise, but this kind of self-delusional behavior will not help write a different script for 2026 and 2028. 

Fair enough. Though I think it's quaint Rob thinks future elections will somehow right this ship. I think we've already hit the iceberg; the question is, who gets to clamber into the lifeboats.  

Rob's response has inspired me to crawl even further down that original rabbit hole. Here are a few answers I've unearthed.

Can an Uninterruptible Power Supply be remotely hacked? 

Yes, it can. 

The Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) [1] issued a warning in 2022 regarding "threat actors gaining access to a variety of internet-connected uninterruptible power supply (UPS) devices, often through unchanged default usernames and passwords."

Malware could also be installed at the factory where these things are made (aka a "supply chain attack") or inserted directly into a device via a USB port. What you can do with a hacked UPS, besides turn the power on and off or fry it like an egg, is less clear.

I asked my new BBF (best bot friend) Claude. Here's what he/she/they had to say:

Seems pretty definitive. (Unless, of course, Claude is in on the conspiracy too. I understand they're good pals with Grok/X.)

Note that on November 6, CISA issued a statement saying it had uncovered "no evidence of any malicious activity that had a material impact on the security or integrity of our election infrastructure." Saying "no evidence" is not the same as saying "didn't happen." But still.

What about those Musky satellites?

As Rob correctly notes, the Starlink Direct-to-Cell service is limited to SMS text messages, and then only to devices with a clear view of the sky. Not much chance of reaching a dusty UPS underneath a voting booth in a school auditorium or church basement.

Until a text that says 'Heyyyy girl, wanna flip some votes with me?' surfaces, I think we can put this one to rest. 

What are 'risk limiting audits' and how do they work?

RLAs are a kind of audits in which poll workers take a random sampling of paper ballots (or paper receipts) and compare the results against what the machines recorded. RLAs use statistical methods to measure a fractional percentage of ballots cast. Beyond that, the process varies widely state to state.

(A handy metaphor: Is the water coming out of your tap safe to drink? Instead of sampling the entire water supply, they take a teaspoon of water from different spots in the reservoir and see if they give anyone dysentery. Doesn't mean you won't get sick; it means the odds of you getting sick are relatively small.)

For example, in 2024, the Commonwealth of Pennysvania conducted an RLA audit of votes cast in the race for state treasurer. In total, 37,000 of PA's 7 million+ votes for treasurer were audited, and only 7 errors were found. [2]

Granted, my math skills began to atrophy long before my voice finished changing, but I do not find this particularly reassuring. To my mind, that only measures whether the machines malfunctioned, or if votes in all races were tampered with; it doesn't measure whether some of them were.

What did Musk mean when he texted about 'finding the anomaly in the matrix' and 'lasers from space'?

What does this man mean when he says anything? There's no telling. Everything that comes out of that man's mouth or from his fingers should be subjected to a polygraph and a blood test. Still, somebody ought to look into where the $250 million+ he plowed into the Trump campaign actually went.

A long history of voter manipulation 

There's been plenty of election fuckery over the years, most of it either revealed much later or still shrouded in mystery, and almost all of it in one direction. 

Remember those stories about how lackeys working for Ronald Reagan in 1980 secretly negotiated with Iran's ayatollahs to prevent the release of hostages until after the election, preventing Jimmy Carter from winning a second term? Those "October Surprise" stories were just rumors — until they were confirmed 43 years later. 

It's the original electoral sin from which all the others have followed.

There are still questions around how the 2004 Ohio results were tabulated. This is the the state where exit polls showed Kerry winning by 3%, and final results had Bush II ahead by that margin. That state gave him his second term, after the 2000 Florida non-recount gave him his first.

No one has ever adequately explained how 75,000 ballots cast in Detroit in 2016 were 'spoiled' in a swing state won by candidate Trump by only 11,000 votes. 

And so on.

My argument is simple: Why should we assume this past election was any different? Why should we accept the surprising results of 2024 at face value?

Rather than dismiss rumors of vote manipulation as outlandish, investigate them. That's what the Republicans clamored for in 2020, even if they then refused to accept the results of those investigations. 

If you're going to claim dead dictators were flipping votes, surely you can take a closer look at lasers from space. 

What's your pet conspiracy theory? Post it in the comments or email me: [email protected].

[1] Chris Krebs, former head of CISA, famously declared the 2020 election "the most secure in US history," He was promptly fired by Trump 2020 and is now being actively targeted by Trump II.

[2] New York, the state where SMART Elections has filed suit challenging the results in the County of Rockland, does not use RLAs. It does use traditional audits, reexamining 3% of voter  ballots chosen at random, but I cannot find any results relating to that county.