They’re legitimate in that more voters actually chose Trump over Harris.
The Republican party also engages in a fuckton of gerrymandering, voter suppression, voter caging, intimidation, etc. to reduce voter output. And then there’s the EC which puts races for President squarely in the hands of a few battleground states.
Then there was vast social media campaigns by interests both foreign and domestic. Many of them are just to confuse the issues and discourage voting. But that’s on top of the massive far-right propaganda machine.
Far-right propaganda (such as the whole of FOX News programming) has gotten really good at turning low-education men into obedient war boys for the MAGA movement. They appeal to their desire to be significant, then isolate them in an information silo and then feed them the MAGA ideology.
Then there’s Elon Musk, who was a considerable factor all his own. One analysis looked at Musk’s $250 million campaign contribution to Trump, including paying people to register to vote. His money flipped about 30,000 votes in key districts at the cost of about $1000 per vote.
Eighteen months later, courts are saying that what Musk did may have been illegal, but the election is over. Trump is President, and we have to live with that. And Musk is beyond the reach of law, so we can’t expect accountability.
Musk can do the same thing thousands of times, and the ownership class is interested in subverting democracy more than just in the US. This figures largely in why several economists, including Nobel laureates are saying that our ultra-wealthy are a catastrophic existential risk for the human species. That the only way out of this mess is to take their wealth back and redistributed it to the rest of the population.
They’re legitimate in that more voters actually chose Trump over Harris.
I’m not even really sure about that part. Not when half the country is using voting machines that are operated by private companies that just happen to have Republican ownership.
But, yeah. Doesn’t matter now. As soon as Harris conceded the race, it was over.
Regarding voter machines, the developers of the machines are not the same as those who operate the elections.
Election results go through a lot of bookkeeping analysis, and the results are examined by multiple entities that have allegiances to both parties, and they don’t like each other very much, so they’re eager to jump on the other when they make an error or a false claim.
If there are irregularities, they get detected, and if not everyone analyzing the results are showing different outcomes, it invites a higher level of scrutiny.
This isn’t to say weird shit doesn’t occur. In Palm Beach, 2000, Pat Buchanan got a conspicuously high number of votes that probably should have gone to Gore, because Democratic-leaning seniors there got confused with the butterfly ballots. In 2020 and 2024, there were a lot of single-mark ballots, in which voters voted only for Biden, Harris or Trump, and abstained from everything down-ballot. Biden got more of them in 2020. Trump got more in 2024. These things happen, but they are oddities within the constraints of the possible, and were robustly confirmed by the system.
Now, I concede that electronic voting machines should run on open source software, and they don’t, but there are a lot of distrustful eyes on the output of those machines. Gaming them would take a conspiracy of a lot of people, and as we’ve seen in the White House, even six super-loyal cabinet members cannot seem to stop information leaks.
PS:I had the same hypotheses and learned about this stuff in 2000 when Bush stole the election from Gore with a bit of help from SCOTUS (who made a ruling they totally knew was bogus, and insisted should never be used as precedent.) Gore won the majority, but failed to take Florida due to the ruling. The United States let George W. Bush (promising to be a compassionate conservative) and we all regretted it immediately after he took office. And then the 9/11 attacks happened in 2001 and everything went way to shit.
They’re legitimate in that more voters actually chose Trump over Harris.
The Republican party also engages in a fuckton of gerrymandering, voter suppression, voter caging, intimidation, etc. to reduce voter output. And then there’s the EC which puts races for President squarely in the hands of a few battleground states.
Then there was vast social media campaigns by interests both foreign and domestic. Many of them are just to confuse the issues and discourage voting. But that’s on top of the massive far-right propaganda machine.
Far-right propaganda (such as the whole of FOX News programming) has gotten really good at turning low-education men into obedient war boys for the MAGA movement. They appeal to their desire to be significant, then isolate them in an information silo and then feed them the MAGA ideology.
Then there’s Elon Musk, who was a considerable factor all his own. One analysis looked at Musk’s $250 million campaign contribution to Trump, including paying people to register to vote. His money flipped about 30,000 votes in key districts at the cost of about $1000 per vote.
Eighteen months later, courts are saying that what Musk did may have been illegal, but the election is over. Trump is President, and we have to live with that. And Musk is beyond the reach of law, so we can’t expect accountability.
Musk can do the same thing thousands of times, and the ownership class is interested in subverting democracy more than just in the US. This figures largely in why several economists, including Nobel laureates are saying that our ultra-wealthy are a catastrophic existential risk for the human species. That the only way out of this mess is to take their wealth back and redistributed it to the rest of the population.
I’m not even really sure about that part. Not when half the country is using voting machines that are operated by private companies that just happen to have Republican ownership.
But, yeah. Doesn’t matter now. As soon as Harris conceded the race, it was over.
Regarding voter machines, the developers of the machines are not the same as those who operate the elections.
Election results go through a lot of bookkeeping analysis, and the results are examined by multiple entities that have allegiances to both parties, and they don’t like each other very much, so they’re eager to jump on the other when they make an error or a false claim.
If there are irregularities, they get detected, and if not everyone analyzing the results are showing different outcomes, it invites a higher level of scrutiny.
This isn’t to say weird shit doesn’t occur. In Palm Beach, 2000, Pat Buchanan got a conspicuously high number of votes that probably should have gone to Gore, because Democratic-leaning seniors there got confused with the butterfly ballots. In 2020 and 2024, there were a lot of single-mark ballots, in which voters voted only for Biden, Harris or Trump, and abstained from everything down-ballot. Biden got more of them in 2020. Trump got more in 2024. These things happen, but they are oddities within the constraints of the possible, and were robustly confirmed by the system.
Now, I concede that electronic voting machines should run on open source software, and they don’t, but there are a lot of distrustful eyes on the output of those machines. Gaming them would take a conspiracy of a lot of people, and as we’ve seen in the White House, even six super-loyal cabinet members cannot seem to stop information leaks.
PS: I had the same hypotheses and learned about this stuff in 2000 when Bush stole the election from Gore with a bit of help from SCOTUS (who made a ruling they totally knew was bogus, and insisted should never be used as precedent.) Gore won the majority, but failed to take Florida due to the ruling. The United States let George W. Bush (promising to be a compassionate conservative) and we all regretted it immediately after he took office. And then the 9/11 attacks happened in 2001 and everything went way to shit.