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Transcript:
Hey guys, so, last week I came on here and told you that it’s important that we soberly reflect on the results of the recent US election, which showed that an alarming majority of Americans don’t actually care enough about women, LGBTQ people, immigrants, or democracy, enough to come out and vote against Donald Trump, because we cannot move forward in a positive way until we accept and understand that that’s what happened.
I’d like to apologize for that video because it turns out that LALALA THAT DIDN’T HAPPEN THE ELECTION WAS ACTUALLY STOLEN! JUST LIKE IN 2020! WAIT, NOT LIKE THAT! IN A DIFFERENT, LIBERAL WAY! LIKE, THE RIGHT-WINGERS WHO SAID THE ELECTION WAS STOLEN IN 2020 ARE INSANE BUT THIS TIME THE ELECTION ACTUALLY WAS STOLEN!
I talk about conspiracy theories a lot on here, and up until this year, I was pretty much only seeing them gain traction in rightwing circles. Thanks to movements like QAnon, and prominent rightwing entertainers and even politicians who help them, these conspiracy theories spread very quickly. But this year I noticed a change. As I said back in July, I noticed my social media feeds were filled with the conspiracy theory that Donald Trump had somehow faked an armed man shooting a real bullet at him and killing someone in the audience behind him. I was shocked that anyone would believe that, and even more shocked that even after I posted my explanation of WHY it made no sense, liberals kept arguing with me that it MUST have happened that way because REASONS.
In that video, I said that “I suspect this liberal dive into territory formerly dominated by the far right is due to similar reasons the far right went there in the first place: they fell into an echo chamber, saw an existential threat coming, and got scared.”
With that in mind, let’s talk about the latest BlueAnon conspiracy theory: Trump didn’t actually win this election. Donald Trump and his cronies, including Elon Musk, HACKED the vote.
My social media feeds have been flooded with this idea. I’ve seen it on BlueSky, and apparently Threads is absolutely infested with it. It seems to go back to a man named Stephen Spoonamore, who has a Substack where he posted letters to Kamala Harris urging her to rescind her concession and order a recount, because in his capacity as “the CEO or CTO at seven high technology firms including two which specialized in hacking and counter-hacking operations,” he believes he has found “multiple and extremely clear indications the Presidential vote was willfully compromised.”
As evidence, he points out that there were a large number of ballots–600,000–that only voted for Donald Trump as president, with no down ballot voting. He refers to these as “bullet ballots,” which is was a little confusing to me because I’ve only ever heard that term refer to ranked choice voting, where a voter chooses just one candidate and declines to rank the rest. Voting for a president and no other office on the ballot is called “undervoting,” and it’s extremely common in the US, to the point where every election we BEG voters to learn about their downballot choices, and every midterm we BEG people to just turn up even though they aren’t voting for a president.
If you don’t believe me, you can go to the Federal Election Committee’s website and download the election results from any prior election. In 2016, you can see that 136,669,276 voted for president, but only 131,652,458 voted for a member of the House (which all voters had an opportunity to choose), a difference of more than 5 million people. But Spoonamore is concerned with 600,000 that went to Trump.
And by the way, that’s the only way to really guess at whether or not a person “only voted” for president: by comparing the number of people in a state who voted for the president and contrasting it with the number who voted for another race. When comparing between states, you need to choose the House because not everyone gets to vote for a senator in each presidential race. And no matter who you’re choosing to compare to the number who voted for president, there’s no way to tell if that ballot really was only for president, or if they also voted for a judge, a school board member, and the dog catcher without bothering with the congressional race.
Spoonamore further claims that these undervotes are disproportionately high in swing states, but for a start, he wrote his second and thus far final letter on November 12th before all the votes had been tabulated. And further, again, he does not know this! All he can do is compare how many votes each candidate got in a particular state with how many votes someone downballot got, which tells you precisely nothing in this context.
He tacitly admits this in an “ask me anything” he did on Reddit this week, in which someone point blank asked him if he has access to the 2024 cast vote records and ballot images, and if not, then how can he be so confident in his figures? He replies by agreeing that it’s impossible to know without that information, and then dodges the question of how he got his numbers, anyway.
And that’s it! That’s his evidence. Everything else in his letter is a fantasy he made up to explain how Trump and Elon Musk may have stolen this election.
To avoid accusations of poisoning the well, I wanted to lead with that information before I tell you that the very first thing I did, before I even read this guy’s Substack, was to Google him to see if he was worth listening to. And despite how much AI has ruined internet searches, I have to give props to Google for giving me this PDF on the very first page: a “Declaration of Stephen Spoonamore,” written on October 26 of 2008 and which begins “During the evening and early morning on the 2004 General Election in Ohio, on my own computer was watching the results of incoming counties and precincts. I believed there was a more than likely chance County Tabulators had been programmed to manipulate votes. I had a simple Microsoft Excel program running to help with the analysis. As early results showed Kerry ahead, at about 11PM, I noticed a trend in a very few counties (I believe I noted 8 counties on election night) that at about 11PM suddenly began reporting radically different ratios of Kerry to Bush votes. All in favor of Mr. Bush.”
Need I go on? This “lifelong Republican,” (as he stated in his letter to Kamala Harris) has previously campaigned to reverse the 2004 election in which George W. Bush beat John Kerry–the year Bush won even the popular vote, by the way, not the year he actually stole the election in Florida.
The lifelong Republican was also briefly prevented from running as an independent for Ohio state representative in 2016 because he had previously voted as a Democrat in primaries.
The key takeaway here, though, is that Stephen Spoonamore is a hammer and every election he doesn’t like is a nail.
It’s a shame, because the rightwing really does try to “steal” elections, and as I said, in 2000 they succeeded. If you weren’t around back then, George W. Bush had a close race with Al Gore, and it all came down to Florida, where the ballots were terrible designed to be confusing and also to utilize a punch out system in which the vote was discarded if the hole wasn’t cleanly punched, even if it was obvious who the vote was for. They started to do a recount but the conservative Supreme Court stopped it and gave the electoral votes to Bush.
And that’s the thing: the Republicans don’t need a complicated conspiracy to “steal” an election. They’ve been doing it for years, by using loopholes and setting up institutions like the electoral college and even the Senate to get a disproportionate number of votes. They gerrymander. They intimidate. They spread disinformation. I’d love it if we could focus on that stuff, some day.
Over the coming months, officials in every county will be certifying that the election was fair. Or as “fair” as our elections get these days. If that includes some hand-counting of ballots, I’m all for it. If someone wants to file a lawsuit to force the hand-counting of ballots, I’m all for that, too. Election transparency is good, even if it tells us something we desperately do not want to hear: that Donald Trump won the 2024 election.
I’ll admit when I first saw all these posts on social media about an “expert” saying he had hard evidence of election fraud, and I didn’t see a single person present any argument against it, I did get that little zing of happiness. Holy shit! Maybe we won’t lose gay and trans rights! Maybe we can reestablish women’s rights! Maybe we can continue to work towards our climate goals! Maybe it was all just a bad dream! But that desire for everything to be okay, or at least to have a solid villain to fight and a known framework in which to fight them, is exactly what drives most if not all conspiracy theories to one extent or another. It would be so much easier to be able to rally behind the Democrats as they uncover this elaborate fraud and retake the government! Much easier than fighting to educate people, to stop misinformation, to grab people by the shoulders and shake them until they start caring about their neighbors. But we cannot win through fantasy. Only through acceptance, and then action.
