Claims in 'Duty To Warn' Letter to Harris Alleging Compromised Election Are Misleading

Thanks for this! The bullet ballot thing seemed odd but without any real access to information about actual counts I didn't know what to think of it.

Good to know it's more than likely nonsense and we just really suck as a nation and did let Trump win legitimately. :/

Yeah, he won through good old misinformation, propaganda, and blatant lies because his opposition can't keep the successful message of hope and change going to engage apathetic voters like Obama did and would instead rather pal around with Liz Cheney and Netanyahu to try and peel away MAGA voters.

While voter suppression and Republican election meddling is a real issue, our country sucking is the real underlying problem. We couldn't even do a fucking thing about the insurrection four years ago.
- Yup. They had a hook with Walz and the 'weird' talking points. That seemed to really resonate with the Republicans and made them go out of their way to highlight out weird they were.
  
  Then they pivoted to try and win Republicans. And... they died.
  
  'Weird' probably wouldn't have won them the election or anything, but it was working. It could have been paired with good, short talking points about helping people, and Walz is a good enough, and genuine enough (or at least appears to be so) guy to really sell those talking points in a way that didn't feel pandering or cynical.
  
  But they really wanted that right-wing vote. It's like right-wingers telling the Democrats that they'll never vote for them just makes the Dems want to win them over that much more.
  
  It's wild.
- If anyone couldn't see how Trump would be worse than Harris, that is honestly their fault. And now we are seeing the proof of that. It wasn't a hypothetical, we already experienced Trump once, and we're being proven right about him again. This isn't a failing of the DNC to inform people of this, they screamed it at the top of their lungs. They said it during the debates. I was jazzed to vote Harris and keep that asshole away from office. But to enough people, things like that didn't matter and they voted against their best interests, and now things are going to get substantially worse than if they voted Harris.
  
  If anyone couldn't remember what life was like 4 years ago during the pandemic (and throughout Trump's first presidency), that's on them. I honestly can't care about people's issues with the DNC when we're faced with an entirely worse option like Trump. The time for fighting to reform the DNC is during midterms where grassroots candidates can gain traction without threat of us losing it all. Allowing a much smaller volume of complaints about the DNC to take precedent over the tremendous evil Trump presents is a failing of the voters and is why we need the department of education more than ever. This is our brexit.
  
  Building back our institutions after this is going to be much more difficult than it is tearing them down. If Democrats win the next election, I wonder if they're going to be blamed for not fixing things fast enough after their predecessor... Like, oh I dunno... The economy?
  
  https://www.epi.org/blog/the-trump-administration-was-ruining-the-pre-covid-19-19-economy-too-just-more-slowly/
- Yeah, he won through good old misinformation, propaganda, and blatant lies
  
  You forgot voter suppression and gerrymandering. There is an old saying that in amerika, the politicians pick their voters... which is literally the opposite of democracy.
- Yeah, he won through good old misinformation, propaganda, and blatant lies because his opposition can't keep the successful message of hope and change going to engage apathetic voters like Obama did and would instead rather pal around with Liz Cheney and Netanyahu to try and peel away MAGA voters.
  
  The thing is, people on the left tend to actually care about ethics, so if Democrats started doing the dirty shit that Republicans do, they would get voted out of office and held accountable.
  
  It is an insurmountable hurdle. As much as I want to win, I don't want the type of person that is willing to do the shit that Republicans do, in order to do so. I would no longer consider it a win then.
- For me, I just wanna know the % of people who voted for him that weren't swayed by misinformation but actually want all of what's about to come. Those are the real people to worry about. I can get 1%, but what if it's more like 10%...
For non Americans: The bullet ballot is special voting process used in some rural areas, where they hang effigies of politicians up at a range, and issue a box of bullets to each voter. The voters then line up and fire their bullets at the politicians they hate the most. The politician with the fewest holes in them at the end of the day is declared the winner.
- You forgot the best part. You get a full magazine for each gun you own. But the targets are set at 50 meters. So you can't just go buy a bunch of pistols. That's commy crap. Full rifles if you want to make sure your bullets count!
  
  Also Bob gets his own shooting lane. He can bring his full armory if he wants but we aren't waiting in line for that shit. And you have to watch because sometimes he tries to sneak a grenade in there with "Both Sides" written on it.
When I saw comments about it initially, I was thinking about it a bit and thought all likelihood the people who thought it was fake were probably following the same line of reasoning as Trump supporters 2020. I don't think the left is immune to thinking more people think alike than they actually do. Its upsetting, I get it but lets not think without proper information that fraud has actually happened that it was rigged.

The letter, which was spammed on Lemmy and deleted multiple times, just linked to other SubStack blogs as “evidence”. Come on, people

I was disappointed in the lack of critical thinking skills in those threads. I thought Lemmy users were smarter than that. Hopefully we can put all these conspiracies to bed.
- There's a sizable number of people intentionally looking the other way because they think they can fight fire with fire, utilizing the same conspiracy theory thinking that the Right routinely gets away to shape public discourse.
  
  I have to say, the thought crossed my mind. But Dems could never pull it off.
- People are idiots everywhere.
  
  Everybody is an idiot sometimes.
  
  Even you.
  
  Not me tho. Thankfully I'm flawless and don't have to deal with the same nonsense of ever being wrong.
- All I see is the poster on Fox Mulder's wall that said "I want to believe."
- There is always a foreign backed clown trying to challenge every presidential election. Some will always fall for that garbage. Not enough to... You know try to hang the vice president or anything. The left just isn't that gullible.
  
  Ha, imagine how incredibly easy it is to be a Republican politician.
- I don't think the conspiracies are going to go away. I remember when Trump got shot that there were threads with quite a few people convinced it was all staged to get him sympathy votes. I still occasionally see it brought up all this time later.

I wanted it to be true so bad, and sure there were some illegal actions taken (Elmo), it's not enough to overturn anything. It's okay to feel defeated, but not to ignore facts. We lost.

Side note, watch Veritasium's video on "smarter people get this question wrong", it talks about how your political position can blind your critical thinking skills and is important to remember. You can take nothing at face value, even your own thoughts.

Anyone convinced they're immune to propaganda, bias or plain human error is extremely vulnerable to being wrong and never realising it.

Relatedly: One of the easiest mistakes to make regarding fields you're no expert in is to underestimate just how much there is to know that you don't (or maybe nobody does). I'm very prone to that one, personally.
That was a really interesting video!
I just watched the first question in that video and the actual correct answer was incredibly obvious within about 2 seconds of seeing the chart, does that mean I'm an idiot?

What the fuck is this stroke of a title?

The claims made in a 'duty to warn' letter addressed to presidential nominee Kamala Harris are - according to our research - misleading.

Sorry, but this is standard journalistic practice. The sentence is correct english, even in its unedited form, albeit in the same way that buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo is correct english.

I do think it's a practice that needs to be reconsidered in the interest of making journalism more accessible to everyone, but for now you just gotta learn how to read it.
- Have to disagree with you here. I'm not a journalist, but I read easily digestible headlines all day. I had to go back and carefully parse this sentence one word at a time. It's just a bad headline.
- Nope sorry. The style, in the case of this sentence & that famous Buffalo cow-pie, has pushed both sentences beyond people’s ability to understand it without additional processing time. Therefore the style is bad, and should feel bad.
  
  That journalistic style is really only to lower word count anyway, so that headlines could fit onto printed newspaper pages, & maybe to save on ink. I don’t fuckin’ care about a 100 year old practice, nor the editors who sacrificed my understanding so that they could save a buck or 5 seconds. I care about understanding a goddamn sentence.
The whole article does read as a google translate from another language. Is so hard to follow. Still the article only cites Spoonamore had wrong numbers cause later came more accurate ones. It does not address the main issue that the bullet votes are higher than other elections. Still I'm taking everyone involved with a grain of salt.I guess that sadly we'll never know the truth.
There's nothing confusing about it IMO.

This is the difference. Both the right and the left have their cranks, but the ones on the left never get mainstream acceptance. While on the right, they make the crank president.

Because the left is, for the most part, intellectually honest enough to be skeptical of broad claims that seem too good to be true. Even ones that ostensibly benefit them.

While the right just grabs hold with both hands at anything they read immediately and start plastering it all over social media.

One side has the most basic critical thinking skills, and one side is lacking in that.
- Seems like intellectual honesty is a weakness...
- Saying intellectually honest makes it sound like they are better people. But it is just the platform they run on. The two parties essentially pick sides on any possibly divisive issue that gains some traction, because polarization benefits them. Covid for example, 30 years ago, both side were provax. But a vaccine mandate wouldn't happened. As soon as the whole mask thing came up, one side saw people unhappy about wearing masks as an opportunity to divide the populace. So both sides moved to the extremes that already fit thier platforms.

People need to accept who we are, collectively, as a country. We chose this shit. It’ll be a wild ride.

Perhaps people would choose something else if third parties had equal access and we changed how we vote to get rid of the spoiler effect.
People need to accept who we are, collectively,

To do what?
- To avoid immediately resorting to denial and conspiracy theories like some kind of smooth brained conservative, I reckon.

Spoonamore doesn't have shit and has admitted as much when pressed. The guy basically contests results that he does not like. He also does not know what a bullet ballot is. That term deals with ranked choice elections where someone only picks top candidates. The term he is looking for is undervoting.

I get it. When you are shown the enthusiasm at Harris' rallies and how absolutely batshit Trump is, it's pretty easy to conclude that the election must have been tampered with. But there is no evidence that it was directly tampered with. Republicans do a lot of shit to mess with votes but that is all known shit like making voting more difficult in certain areas, gerrymandering, voter roll purges, etc. They are not directly tampering with the presidential election on a mass scale nor are they competent enough to.

I was expecting it to look like a close race where Trump would cheat using the courts.

That didn't happen.

Thank you! I just needed someone to check that dudes math, very happy they did.

North Carolina

Spoonamore alleged that the purported hacking and fraud in North Carolina proved to be "the most extreme" and that "the public results indicate over 350,000 voters cast a ballot for Trump and no other race." However, this is false.

According to the North Carolina State Board of Elections' website, as of Nov. 21, 5,722,556 voters cast ballots. Of those, 5,699,152 ballots displayed votes in the race for president. The website also reported that 5,592,243 ballots bore votes for the state's governor's race. A comparison of the numbers for total votes and the gubernatorial race would reveal the maximum number of possible "bullet vote" ballots for all presidential candidates. The difference between the two numbers is 130,313 votes — a count nowhere near the 350,000 votes stated by Spoonamore. Trump received 183,048 more of North Carolinian's votes than Harris.

Welp.

That's not how this works folks. You are supposed to ignore all evidence to the contrary, then spend the next 4 years claiming the election was stolen and whining like a spoiled toddler
He told a good, plausible story. The count claims were the first thing I was going to verify, and Snopes pointed right to the actual source.

I’ve been peaking back on Reddit to a few sub reddits, r/somethingiswrong2024 is the main one. There’s r/verify2024 and r/houstonwade as well that have some interesting ideas and points brought up about all this. They simply dismissed this snopes report, stating snopes had lost credibility over the past years but not sure how true that is. I don’t know if I was just getting a contact high from the copium over there, I have hope still, I want to believe there is something in the works but ultimately without concrete, indisputable, outright blatant cheating thoroughly documented, there’s not chance of overturning the election. Especially without stirring up the magats nest and causing civil unrest. So do we just stick it out for the next two years and hope we can freely vote and try to gain some sanity back into this country?

There isn't. The numbers don't add up correctly anymore. You can look yourself by checking any other race in a state with the highest number of votes and then the presidential race in that state. If the difference is less than Trump's margin of victory then there cannot be enough bullet ballots to have made a difference.

This is the case in the crucial state of Pennsylvania. There are about 70,000 less votes in the Senate race than the Presidential race. Trump's margin over Harris is about 100,000 votes. That means there's at least 30,000 votes in the margin of victory that voted for Senator and thus are not Bullet Ballots.

The math doesn't math. And the cyber security stuff was always highly suspect. They basically asserted the machines were online with no evidence that was the case and no credible theory for how they would be reprogrammed to be online.
two years? I'm afraid it's four
- Four with Trump, but in two years we might be able to flip the house and senate and make sure Donald's last 2 years in office are miserable.

I feel like the folks who felt super justified in not voting are now obsessive on this. but. but. other people were supposed to get us the democrat against our will....

That is not my experience at all. I'm mostly seeing people the, "Harris ran a perfect campaign," crowd buying in on this one.
- who is like ran a pefect campaign? no politician runs a perfect campaign any more than anything else is perfect in the world. It was fine relative to any other, but elections should not be determined by how well campaigns are run. If politicians put up a an accurate list of their accomplishments and platform online and participate in debates that should all that be needed for an electorate to vote in the modern age.
Why are you okay with your fellow citizens being under represented by First-past-the-post voting?
- Do you still beat your wife (or husband)? Seriously where the hell did your question come from in relation to the chain. I don't believe I have seen anyone, anywhere on here or even way back on reddit and shit that has ever defended first past the post or said it was preferable. Its like citizens united. No one ever seem to defend it or recognize it as legit except the folks that made the ruling yet it does not get changed.

Yeah, we're the people that always love to talk about evidence. So, let's make sure we're applying that principle evenly and demanding and looking at evidence for claims we like the sound and feeling of.

Well there are irregularitiea and a manual recount would either provide evidence or it would prove that no such thing happened.
- You need evidence to justify a recount when they're normally only expected to shift the results by less than a percentage point. They're not cheap, you don't just do them whenever people feel like it.

"Bullet votes" completely jibe with the narrative that a small but significant percentage of Trump voters are willfully low-information, so un-invested in the democratic process that they can't be bothered to take the time even to vote a straight party ticket, and think that voting for a single strong-man will fix all their problems. The non-electoral factors behind all this are deeply troubling, and many of them are criminal, but for the actual voting there's no need to invent a conspiracy when simple shittiness will do.

The bullet ballot nonsense was started by a Republican kook that's made fake election claims about every election going all the way back to 2008.

Definitely something to ignore.

So we upgraded from blaming minority voters to literally Trump's own 2020 election mouthpiece lmao.

Just saying, with that orange turd, every accusation is a confession

It seems people just aren't going to accept elections any more. Yeah trump was the most blatant and harmful but the democrats were pushing russiagate until it hit its dead end and now this.

Starting to think democracy may not be able to survive the internet

How do you define Russiagate?

Are you saying Russia didn't/does not meddle in elections? Or that Trump and his team didn't have ties to it? Or that Russian influence didn't actually tip the scales? Or something else?
- Yeah they at least tried to
  
  Probably but those ties seem very loose. From what I can tell there wasn't much organization at all in the trump campaign , much less effective coordination with Russia. It wasn't Kissinger coordinating with south Vietnam to keep the war going or Reagan talking to Iran to not free the hostages.
  
  Maybe but that's only because the scales were so even. It may be a reason she lost, we can't know because we don't know how many people it actually flipped but my guess is very small compared to the other reasons clinton lost. I don't think it invalidates the election though as fundamentally it was still Americans freely choosing Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton through the broken electoral college. This happens quite often, like the examples above, even in this election it looks like netanyahu was holding off on a ceasefire in Lebanon to keep Biden from getting a win, that doesn't invalidates the election though.
  
  Also I think democrats used it as a cope and scape goat for there electoral problems instead of addressing the actual major reasons people voted for trump. They failed to learn there lesson in 2016 and now here we are.