Summary

Donald Trump and his team are attacking media outlets like Politico and The New York Times for reporting that his 2024 election victory over Kamala Harris was narrow, not a “landslide.”

Trump won by 1.6 points and failed to secure a majority of the popular vote, a smaller margin than Hillary Clinton’s over him in 2016.

Despite these facts, Trump and his allies continue to tout his win as “historic” and “dominant,” aiming to bolster his political mandate amid criticisms that his victory was less decisive than claimed.

  • jordanlund@lemmy.worldM
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    3 days ago

    Problematic for a couple of reasons:

    1. You can’t just insert fake ballots, that would cause the vote count to be incorrect when compared to registered voters.

    2. A bullet ballot would support Trump, but have no impact on other races… races which we know Republicans won.

    Looking at Pennsylvania as an example:

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_United_States_presidential_election_in_Pennsylvania

    Trump - 3,542,505
    Harris - 3,421,088
    Stein - 34,508
    Oliver - 33,299
    Total - 7,031,400
    Trump won by 121,417

    Now compare that to the Senate election:

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_United_States_Senate_election_in_Pennsylvania

    McCormick - 3,395,785
    Casey - 3,378,356
    Libertarian - 89,475
    Green - 66,185
    Constitution - 23,586
    Total - 6,953,384

    So 78,016 more people voted in the Presidential race than the Senate race, which is not enough to have given Trump the win if they were all bullet ballots.

    • nexusband@lemmy.world
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      3 days ago

      You don’t have to fake ballots. You can just throw absentee ballots out, after them being challenged…which happens since 2000 (it’s apparently one of the reasons Bush won), this time however there have been over 800k ballots that have been thrown out…in swing states alone.

      Considering the margins are so slim, a few 100k challenged voters here and there…and you have “We don’t need your votes, we have enough” https://youtu.be/X3hXeEiFcJM?si=-lJLqmIDZM4PewcT

      • jordanlund@lemmy.worldM
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        3 days ago

        That isn’t the claim though. The claim is enough “bullet ballots” (Trump only ballots) had been inserted to flip the election.

        Elections don’t work that way. I was telling people the same thing in 2016 and 2020.

        When people cast a vote, it’s tied to a registration. If you insert a bunch of votes, you end up with more ballots than voters.

        • Ashelyn@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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          2 days ago

          So, not to say I necessarily believe in this, but the case laid out has a lot to do with Elon’s PAC, which was collecting only names and addresses with the promise that voters would be paid x amount after taking some sort of pledge. The argument then follows, that if electronic tabulation systems were hacked and continuously connected to the Internet, the people who signed up to his list could have their vote automatically cast as a bullet ballot for Donald Trump. Supposedly, there’s a way they could do this digital ballot stuffing specifically for voters whose ballot had not shown up as cast within the voter registry past a certain point in time, so all the fraudulent ballots look like legitimate ones tied to actual people.

          It’s pretty far-fetched, but just plausible enough that it’s appealing to a lot of people who were blindsided by election day’s results

          • jordanlund@lemmy.worldM
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            2 days ago

            Tabulation systems aren’t connected to the internet. Any manipulation has to be done on a machine by machine basis, which can still be done with physical access and USB keys, but doing that at election scale would not go un-noticed.

        • adarza@lemmy.ca
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          3 days ago

          counting machines could be compromised and doing an office space thing in targeted areas, flipping one democrat vote for every 10 counted. no one would question it. only a hand count would verify, and those aren’t usually done anymore.