Dominion voting machines. They were supposedly hacked.

Claims are circulating that the recent election was stolen by hacked voting machines and/or some other means. In this hour of extreme danger, it’s more important than ever to get our facts straight before we proceed. Let’s start at the beginning:

In August of this year, Oaklandsocialist published an extensive article  on the Republicans’ plans to steal the election. Understanding those plans helps us understand what happened in the recent elections. Those unfamiliar with that might consider stopping and reading that link before going further. Those plans had several steps. They all revolved around creating enough confusion and delay that if Trump lost the election various state legislatures could overturn the result and send the votes of the Trump electors to Washington. Another aspect of the plan was to create enough confusion and delay that acceptance of the result would be up to congress. The MAGA US Supreme Court was also relied upon if there were legal challenges. In that case, the plan was for the MAGA (in)Justices to rely on the “independent state legislature” legal theory (as explained in the article). A test for that plan was carried out in Georgia in the state primaries of last May.

Since that article was written, the Georgia Republicans tried to institute another measure in the delaying tactic: They tried to mandate that all ballots be hand-counted. As we will see, that is significant regarding the present claims of a stolen election.

Those stolen election claims rest on several issues:

First is the issue of voter suppression. Possibly the foremost researcher on voter suppression is Greg Palast. He recently wrote a piece called Here’s what we do now.

Palast reports on the purging of 400,000 voters from the polls in Georgia and 1.2 million in Texas. Let’s consider Georgia first. Trump won by less than 400,000 so theoretically it could have affected the outcome. A google search reveals that 107,000 voters were purged in 2018.   Another 300,000 were purged in 2019. In other words, the purges were conducted before the Democrats won a trifecta in 2020 in that state. In both these cases, those purged had not voted in previous elections. In 2022 the Democratic Senate candidate  won reelection. So, yes, definitely many should not have been purged, but it wasn’t like this determined the election outcome in 2020 or 2022. Whether it did in 2024 is open to question.

Now let’s look at Texas. There, Trump won by 4.8 million votes, so even if every single one of those purged had voted and had voted for Harris, it would not have affected the outcome. Moreover, as The NY Times reports “Nearly 500,000 of the voters purged during the time period highlighted by Mr. Abbott were dead. About the same number were cleared after they were put on a list of people who did not vote in two successive general elections and are believed to have moved. Those numbers were roughly equivalent to the number of voters in those categories removed in previous years.” (The purge was conducted at the same time that the state raided the homes of several Latino election activists. That act of vote suppression is a different matter.)

So, while it sounds bad, these purges did not affect the election outcome. 

Mail Ballots

Ballots found in storm drain. The number was insignificant.

Then there is the loss of or misplacement of mail-in ballots. For example, there was the case of a few dozen paper ballots found in a storm drain in California. Election fraud? Nope. They were mixed in with junk mail. What probably happened was that a thief went through the mail boxes in the neighborhood, kept bills and possibly checks, and ditched the rest.

There were also reports of numerous misdirected mail-in ballots. Why? There were over 25.6 million mail in ballots and over 65 million absentee ballots – record numbers at a time when the Post Office has seen cuts. Hasn’t anybody ever heard of human error? And in any case, to intentionally misdirect thousands of mail ballots, never mind millions, would require the involvement, and therefore the silence, of hundreds if not thousands of USPS employees. That is impossible. 

Voting machines hacked?
Now let us go to the main “stolen election” theory – that MAGA/Putin hacked into the voting machines. This rests on the fact that MAGA/Putin got ahold of the software of Dominion and ES&S voting machines. Presumably the corollary to this is the claim that this hacking enabled the machines to flip Harris votes to Trump. If that is not the claim, then the whole hacking claim is meaningless, so we will proceed with that assumption. Before we deal with the theory itself, let’s deal with a few peripheral issues:

1)As we pointed out, if MAGA/Putin had hacked into the voting machines and the cure was to count the paper ballots, then why did the Republicans in Georgia try to get all votes counted by hand, that is to say a count of paper ballots? The only explanation is that the machines were not hacked and what MAGA was trying to do was create more delay and confusion.

2) According to this video  which is making the rounds among the Trump victory deniers, MAGA/Putin obtained the software of the Dominion and ES&S voting machines. Although it is not explicitly stated, the implication is that this enabled them to hack into the machines of those manufacturers and change how they operated. We will deal with that implication below, but there is another problem: The video says that Dominion and ES&S provide 70% of the voting machines in use. That means that 30% are provided by other

Counties where Unisyn voting machines were used. The results from these machines did not differ from those of Dominion and ES&S.

manufacturers, meaning they use different software. In Pennsylvania, the other manufacturers are: Clear Ballot, Hart InterCivic, and Unisyn. So, if the ES&S and Dominion machines were hacked, then we should expect different results from the other machines. That would have been noticed, and no such difference has been reported.

3) Another claim is that the bomb threats were used to disrupt the vote count and change the votes. There is another much more reasonable explanation: That nobody knew in advance who would win and the bomb threats were another means of disrupting things in order to cause confusion and delay.

4) At this point, Trump’s margin of victory is razor thin in three key swing states – Pennsylvania (121,564 votes), Michigan (80,618 votes) and Wisconsin (29,417 votes). His overall popular vote majority is 1.66%, a historically low percentage. If the machines had been hacked to flip the votes, certainly it would have been done to assure a greater margin of victory.

5) Trump will rely on a Republican-controlled House and Senate. If the machines were hacked, surely they’d have done it to flip votes for at least senators to the Republican candidates. In that case, how come ultra MAGAist Kari Lake lost in Arizona? And if the hack was only for the presidential race, how come the overall results for House and Senate more or less tracked the result for president?

7) The media has reported extensively on lost or misplaced mail ballots. Why, then, have they been silent on the claim of hacked voting machines? Those who are “silent” include such figures as Rachel Maddow (who first broke the fake elector story in 2021), Mehdi Hasan, and others. The reason they have been “silent” is that it did not happen. There is no “there” there.

Now let us deal with the theory itself:

Possession of the software for voting machines in and of itself no more enables one to affect those machines’ performance than does possession of somebody else’s computer’s operating system enables one to affect the performance of that person’s computer. One must get into that computer, or in this case MAGA/Putin must get into the voting machines. Let me repeat that: MAGA/Putin must get into the voting machines. Nobody is actually claiming that that is what happened, and in fact it’s nearly impossible for them to have done so. 

According to Wikipedia there were 176,933 voting precincts in the United States as of 2020. I just got off the phone with the office of the Secretary of State of Tennessee (more about that later). A representative told me that there are between 3 and 5 voting machines in each precinct and he thinks this may be about the average in other states. That means there are about 707,732 voting machines in use, of which about 495,000 are Dominion or ES&S (based on the 70% estimate). Somebody has to propose how the hackers can get into all 495,000 voting machines. Doing it individually would be only slightly easier than expecting Santa to get to the home of every child around the world on Christmas Eve.

Some claim (or imply) that the machines are hacked via the internet. Nope. The machines are not connected to the internet at all. Neither before nor during the election. After the election closes, the results are sent in to the central office both by internet and by phone, so if it’s fixed in the internet transmission surely some election workers would notice the difference between the internet result and what was phoned in.
Then there’s another problem: According to the office of the Tennessee Secretary of State, two computer technicians, one appointed by the Democrats and one appointed by the Republicans, test the accuracy of every single voting machine before they go into use, and then they are tested again after the election. Something like this is the common practice in every state.

There is simply no way that the voting machines can be hacked. It cannot be done without being noticed by thousands of election workers. In fact, it’s impossible for it to be done at all, whether it’s noticed or not, unless thee is an internet connection. And that is why all those who claim a “stolen election” might imply that it’s been done, but so far none of them outright say it has. 

Stephen Spoonamore’s open letter to Harris. Spoonamore sounds impressive, but he either doesn’t know what he’s talking about or he is being dishonest.

Now let us deal with an open letter to Kamala Harris that is making the rounds. The letter is from one Stephen Spoonamore, who passes himself off as some sort of computer expert. A search on LinkedIn reveals that he appears to be what we in the building trades call a “jack of all trades and master of none”. He’s founded one company after another with them apparently going in and out of business almost as regularly as Trump’s businesses. He also fancies himself to be a playwright, although according to The NY Times  he’s not a very good one. There is a type of “inventor” in the United States that flits from one genius invention to another and, in fact, is really a crackpot. That’s what Spoonamore appears to be. But maybe he’s not, and even if he is, even a crackpot can be right once in a while. Spoonamore has two main claims:

First he talks about suspicious “bullet voting” or what Spoonamore calls “drop off votes”. That where the voter votes for one candidate in one race only and doesn’t vote for any other races. In this case, there is an unusually high number of Trump drop off  votes in key swing states. Spoonamore gives this example:

“Here are the unprecedented results of drop-offs in the two western swing states:

“AZ – 123K+ 7.2%+ of Trump’s total vote.  Enough to reverse the outcome.

“NV – 43K+ 5.5%+ of Trump’s total vote.  Enough to exceed recount threshold.”

Spoonamore then compares this to neighboring states that weren’t swing states:
“ID <2K 0.03% of Trump’s total.

OR <4K 0.05% of Trump’s  total

UT <1K 0.01% of Trump’s total.”

This is where actual knowledge, knowing what actually happened on the ground, helps. A friend of mine who lives in another swing state – Pennsylvania – explained it to me: “John,” he said, “you don’t know what it’s been like around here the last few months. If you turn on the TV, there’s something about Trump Kamala every 30 seconds. If you turn on your cell phone, you get a message about it every 30 seconds. Everybody is talking about it all the time. Not just the elections, but ‘Trump, Trump, Trump.’ You’d have to be living in a cave and away from everybody else to get away from it. So, what’s happened is that the average person who doesn’t give a fuck, might go and vote, but they’d vote for one person only. It’s like the Trump only votes are the ‘fuck it’ votes.”

This person’s city is passionate about football. At the same time, most people hate New York for some reason. He explains it like this: “It would be like the (Philadelphia) Eagles played the (N.Y.) Jets in the Super Bowl and you weren’t into it. It would be like, ‘what’s wrong with this guy?’”

Spoonamore didn’t bother to investigate so he completely missed the boat on this. Then he makes another claim. This revolves around Elon Musk’s $1 million lottery, which supposedly gave him access to thousands of Trump voters. Again, where Spoonamore misses the boat lies in the fact that those who signed up for the lottery got $100 each, plus an additional $100 for every signatory they recruited. My friend, who is a Harris voter, made $600 that way, recruiting other Harris voters.

Now let’s look at Spoonamore’s other main claim: “Musk’s team used this system to build a list of voters pledged to vote for Trump.   This list could also be used to make a ghost-ballot voter list. ePollBook data is nearly always linked to the internet, and in many jurisdictions this link was being made in real time via Mr. Musk’s Starlink or any available wireless network. Throughout the day, Musk’s team could compare existing turnout models to likely outcomes, based on well established voter profile databases vs. the actual voter turnout coming in from the ePollBooks.” Spoonamore is either totally ignorant or simply lying. The voting machines are not connected to the internet.

Let’s repeat that: voting machines are not connected to the internet. 

The rest of what Spoonamore writes is just a bunch of mumbo-jumbo and I challenge any reader to read it and then repeat back a summary of what it claims. If you cannot, remember this:

It’s not because you are dense.
It’s because what he writes makes no sense.

Here is a more detailed analysis of Spoonamore’s letter by somebody who is more thoroughly familiar with computers and voting machines. It is well worth reading.

Conclusion: There is only one of two ways the vote could have been stolen via hacked voting machines. One would be for computer technicians to personally visit all the approximately 707,732 voting machines and physically enter into them. It is impossible for that to have happened without the cooperation of thousands of officials. The other would be for all the machines to have an internet connection while they are being operated. That did not happen. In other words, it is impossible for the voting machines to have been hacked. Period.

Some say, “oh, I’m not saying the vote was stolen; I’m just saying there should be an investigation.” That is exactly what some of the MAGAites said in 2020. It was just an excuse to cast doubt on an election because they didn’t like that result. If we do that, we will come off to the overwhelming majority, including Harris voters, as being no different from the MAGAites of 2020. That’s because there is no factual grounds to challenge the election outcome.

Section 3 of the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution. It bars insurrectionists from serving as president.

Others say, “Trump should not be allowed to serve because he is an insurrectionist, and the Constitution bars insurrectionists from serving as president.” Well, yes he is and yes it does, but there are two problems here: First is that exactly as is the case with Trump/Putin having gotten that software, we knew he was an insurrectionist way before the election took place. But in neither case did anybody on the left seriously raise it. Where were the voices saying the machines were hacked before Trump won? Where were the voices on the left demanding that he be removed from the ballot because he is an insurrectionist? A few institutionalists like conservative Republican retired judge J. Michael Luttig were raising it. Why weren’t those on the left joining in the call back then? In fact, the demand was questionable even back then, for several reasons: It would have strengthened MAGA and it is virtually certain that the MAGA Supreme court would have thrown it out on the national level, as they did for individual states like Colorado.

And how today do those proponents propose to prevent Trump from taking office? Nobody that I know of is operating under the illusion that there is the slightest chance of getting Biden to refuse to recognize the Trump victory. Bill Weinberg does some usually excellent podcasts in his Patreon based  Countervortex. I have posted some transcripts of some of them on Oaklandsocialist. He destroys the campists as well as

US imperialism. Bill is an invaluable comrade. However, he recently posted a podcast which deals extensively with these issues. His podcast gives valuable information on Trump’s appointees. It also makes other good points. However, the podcast appears to make the same arguments as do others as far as Trump/Putin having gotten ahold of the software. The implication is just the same – that that was used to change how the voting machines functioned. But then he says he doesn’t know if the machines were hacked. In conversation and email communication with Bill, he says it was not his intention to imply that the machines had been hacked, and that that is not his main point. I completely accept that, but given what is making the rounds, people will misunderstand it. Once again: as we have pointed out, hacking into the machines is impossible without an internet connection and there was no such connection. Failing to point this out, whether he intends to or not Bill leaves the listener with the impression that maybe, probably in fact, the machines were hacked.  They were not.

Bill then raises the issue of Trump being an insurrectionist. He is right. That is true. Bill points out that the 14th Amendment bars insurrectionists from holding office. Sure. And who is going to enforce it? Bill seems to admit that neither the Democrats nor the Supreme Court will do so.

Bill’s solution is to call on the MAGA electors to switch their votes to Harris. Electors who do that are what’s called “faithless electors”.

The call on electors to “vote their conscience.” Without something approaching a national general strike, this call is futile.

In the first place, in 14 states  a “faithless elector” can be replaced. But anyway, that doesn’t matter. MAGA is a cult just as much as Jonestown was. Trump’s cult followers will do anything and believe anything he says. The Trump electors were carefully chosen by the Republican cult to be absolutely loyal. No amount of reason will convince them to vote for Harris, and if any of them did switch their vote their lives would literally be in danger, and they all know that. Maybe if there were a truly mass movement of many millions, one which shut down the country, the MAGA electors would switch their votes to Harris. I don’t think Bill thinks that the tiny opposition forces can organize such a movement, nor that one will arise spontaneously, especially not when tens of millions of workers support Trump!

What are the chances of “vote nullification” winning over the millions? I recently talked with two workers. One of them is retired and the other is disabled with long covid. One is white the other black. They both despise Trump and mourn his “three inch” head turn. I criticized Biden for having welcomed Trump into the White House to them. They both said “he had to do that.” No amount of arguing could convince them otherwise. So, if I couldn’t convince them of that, the chance of building a wider movement around the vote nullification slogan is nil.

In fact starting down that election nullification road can be dangerous, especially when we don’t recognize that the goal is entirely unwinnable. On the one hand, it can lead us towards denial of actual facts (the “stolen election” myth), which will destroy us politically in the long run. On the other hand, it can create a sense of desperation that can lead some to carry out desperate acts, acts that put us all in danger. Such a tendency can make us vulnerable to actual provocateurs.

I am not saying that all or even most of those who engage in election denialism and call for election nullification are open to such actions; I am nearly certain Bill is not. I am saying that such a line can encourage others to take up such actions. Rather than stop Trump and MAGA, such actions would multiply the dangers many times over. Think “Reichstag Fire”.

In other words, short of a heart attack Trump will take office on January 20, 2025. That is simply a fact and refusal to accept that fact can lead to all sorts of adventurism. I think the call to nullify the elections can lead to exactly that sort of adventurism, whether it is intended or not.

Also, the idea that Trump won based on a stolen election is damaging in that it underestimates the degree of the crisis within the working class. It can lead to denial that that tens of millions of US workers voted for this fascistic buffoon. Yes, the crisis in the US working class is just that great. Not only that, but we are not alone. We see similar situations in countries around the world.

As far as slogans to put forward, I think “Stop Trump; Stop MAGA” is a much better one than “election nullification” because among other things the latter implies a sense of unreality. And it is much better to focus on building an opposition within the unions and placing demands on the union leadership to actually lead than to focus on the Trump electors.

As far as organizing public protests, that is strictly a tactical issue. In major cities, it’s probably safe for now. However, recently I published a report from a rural area in California.  In the past, protests there were possible although they were met with hostility. Now it is impossible. How about the future, for example a protest in Washington DC on inauguration day, January 20? It is impossible to know right now. It might be overly risky. The general point is that holding public protests is not a matter of principle. No serious person would organize one in Russia or Syria right now, for example.

The French “Yellow Vest” movement. Is such a movement possible here?

Will a new movement arise? We don’t know. The second part of Oaklandsocialist’s perspectives for the Trump regime deals with that question. We urge readers to look at it. One main point is that the working class socialist forces are tiny and without any influence. We must admit the fact. And those who do have influence – mainly the union leadership – will continue to do nothing of substance. The conclusion is that if there is to be a new movement, it will have to develop semi-spontaneously. Whether it will any time soon we cannot say.

The other main point is this: Say what you like about Lenin, but nobody, not even the capitalists, denies that he was a master strategist and tactician. In Left wing communism, an infantile disorder, he wrote: “to accept battle at a time when it is obviously advantageous to the enemy and not to us is a crime.” In another article, he wrote: “one must know how to retreat. We cannot hide the incredibly bitter, deplorable reality from ourselves with empty phrases; we must say: God grant that we retreat in what is half-way good order. We cannot retreat in good order, but God grant that our retreat is half-way good order.” 

Building an open opposition is not a matter of principle; it’s a strategic and tactical question. First and foremost we must recognize that our forces are in an extremely weakened position. We won’t be able to “build a movement”. The movement will have to develop semi-spontaneously. How and when that happens, or even if it happens at all in the coming few years, we do not know. That doesn’t mean we do nothing, but we cannot have the puffed-up pretensions of the sectarian left, which pretends it will “build the movement” itself. “Election nullification” will not succeed. Trump will take office on January 20. We must recognize that fact, no matter how painful it is.

A lot of what we can do depends on how far and how fast Trump will move and to what extent the unofficial MAGA army will develop. Those are things which we simply do not know because the situation is entirely unprecedented in U.S. history. But in any case, we have to start with a recognition of reality. Trump won the election, and not by hacking voting machines or any other such violation of the formal rules. He did it because he actually got more votes than did Harris. And that happened because of the devastating crisis in the U.S. working class.

Dominion voting machines. They were supposedly hacked.