This is my opinion, so perhaps this belongs in IMHO. Having worked in computer security (as a Certified Security Professional) since the early 90’s, my experience has been that if you can get physical access to a device (computer, voting machine, etc.) for a long enough period, you can figure out how to reverse-engineer it. Elon Musk & Peter Thiele (amongst others) seem to have a vested interest in the US becoming a ‘technocracy’ and have teams of computer tech/programmers who would have no problem hacking a voting machine. Based on this, plus the crazy statements that DonTheCon made several times (“We don’t need your votes”) and the fact that he won states that had a low likelihood of voting for a madman says to me that the election was definitely rigged. Obviously there’s a stigma attached to making such a statement (Conspiracy theory) because the orange blob yelled the same thing at the top of his lungs after the previous election, and it was obvious to most people that he was lying, but as is his usual tack, donny wanted to poison the well before anyone else.
IF there is a Presidential election in 2028, and DonTheCon wins, it will be rigged - again. IMHO
I’m not sure how probable hacking the system is, since it hasn’t been shown to have happened before, but it’s one of the few plausible ways. If stolen, it wasn’t through voter suppression or even wholescale discarding of ballots, since there were quite a few voter initiatives and even candidates on the blue side that got a lot more votes than Harris did. Voter suppression and ballot suppression would probably produce a wholescale redward shift in those districts.
Another similar thing is that if you change the votes, why not go whole hog and just produce a massive red wave? While I don’t think that any putative hackers are stupid, I don’t think that they’re subtle 69-D chess players who would content themselves with only making sure Trump won and not everyone else on their side.
The only thing that makes me think it is more likely is how often the Republican accuse the Democrats of doing the same thing. This tells me that the GOP are actually the ones who would do it if they could. The only question is if they could.
One of the things that is most helpful to America’s enemies is if we lose faith in our institutions. The two options are that a majority of Americans voted for this idiot, or that Trump cheated, and didn’t get caught. We know he cheats to win in other aspects of his life, so that part is not implausible. What I have a hard time with is that he didn’t get caught.
That requires that either he be so smart and careful that no one outside his inner circle realized that he cheated to win, or else that there are thousands of people in on this conspiracy, none of whom talked. Neither of those options is believable.
I think voter suppression was a big factor in the 2024 election and it doesn’t get talked about enough. But Trump has kind of poisoned that well by yelling “THEY’RE CHEATING” from the opening moments of any contest he is in. I think the best we can hope for is for sanity to be restored soon and some future Democratic-led Congress and Senate to start digging. Once they do, I suspect they’ll find things were much more crooked than they appeared to be publicly.
I’ve never really doubted it was already stolen and will be again. Donny was SO insistent that we didn’t even need to vote, and we wouldn’t have to vote again in the future, and he’d still win. He’s never been able to keep his yap shut.
ETA: true, it could be done via gerrymandering and other means.
The OP’s sweeping statement underestimates the difficultly of the task. A huge variety of systems are used in the various states. Oregon, I believe, is a mail-in only state while the rest use a combination of mail-in and electronic devices from a number of companies.
The balloting machines are stored locally under lock for the rest of the year. Access to them over any period of time would involve thousands of workers. The machines that tabulate the votes also reside locally. No machine is connected to the internet, either.
Removing or changing votes would also result in vote percentages that would look suspicious in relation to the percentages of state and local votes.
State election boards also run audits to confirm results. Any objective effort would spot suspicious numbers and any partisan Democratic effort would surely do so.
Yet nothing like this was reported by anybody anywhere even though this was the most closely examined election in American history.
Why manipulate the votes when it’s so easy to manipulate the voters? Why do you think Trump and Company have laser-focused on controlling as many media outlets as they can?
Harris lost every single swing state. The entire country moved towards the right. Her failure was a complete sweep by Trump. You wouldn’t see that kind of failure on her part if it was some sort of computer conspiracy.
The techniques of the Jim Crow era were effective. Lower income people have second thoughts about paying a few dollars for a poll tax. A literacy text with subjective questions decided by a guy who can see what color your skin is.
In order to prove my citizenship for foreign travel, I had to get a copy of my birth certificate. It took a few dollars and a few weeks of phone calls and letters across the country. A woman with a divorce or two would need multiple pieces of paper like that.
It only takes a few percent of the voters in a few swing states to skew the results. el donald only needed 1280 votes in Georgia, remember?
Computer election stations and the machines used to tally votes from them are ‘air-gapped’; that is, they are not connected to any outside network or the internet. While there have been limited instances of people accidentally connecting voting systems to the internet or unauthorized systems rather than updating them from ‘hard’ media, there are so many different kinds of systems in use as they are procured and maintained at the state level that a broad scale effort to directly interfere with the voting process would be nearly impossible even if a bad actor could gain physical access to the systems.
This is not to say that controversies about voting systems do not exist because they do, and some of these systems use security, encryption, and auditing schemes that are out of date or not on the forefront of secure voting. However, it turns out to be much easier to bypass the hard problem of hacking voting and tally systems and instead just hack the voters directly through subversive propaganda and conspiranoia, limit voting access through onerous voter ID requirements even though actual vote fraud is such a tiny influence on election results, purging voting rolls of legitimate voters, gerrymandering on an unprecedented national scale to marginalize minority voters, and generally trying to undermine faith in the election process and democratic norms.
Here is an entertaining but pretty comprehensive overview of issues with voting systems in the United States:
Donald J. Trump talks a lot of crazy with a good number of statements being contrary to what was said earlier. From a MAGA perspective, the beautiful thing about Trump’s statements is you get to pick which one you like and interpret them however you wish. There were other times Trump seemed to care about votes, like when he told his followers he didn’t care about them he just cared about their votes.
I do not think widespread fraud led to the election of Trump in 2024. He won largely because the opposition was not motivated to vote for reasons which no doubt will continue to baffle me for the remainder of my time on Earth. Unlike MAGA, I need solid evidence of fraud before I’ll start crying about it.
Given how adamant Trump is about election fraud and the premise every Republican accusation is a confession, it certainly comes to mind.
However, there would need to be some considerable evidence before I believe it.
On the other hand, it could be much more likely for 2028. Given the open corruption and graft in this administration and the Republican efforts to drive off impartial election officials and install MAGA loyalists, I works find it much more plausible.
Some might argue the various redistricting schemes, voter suppression, and intimidation suggests otherwise, but I don’t think it as an either/ or situation. As their ejection fraud claims and lawsuits demonstrated, they have much more of an “anything and everything” strategy.
They can still be vulnerable though. As someone who is going into a career in IT, these kinds of things keep me awake at night worrying about bad actors who can turn anything inside a computer into an antenna:
We know for a fact that Donald Trump attempted to commit election fraud because he was caught on tape doing it. But didn’t try some clever attempt to ‘hack’ systems; he did it the old fashioned way of ‘suggesting’ to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger that he ‘find’ the exact number of votes required for him to win the state like some rejected Sopranos side plot of Pauly Walnuts running for county commissioner.
With ‘red’ states trying to keep federal and independent election observers at arms length and election commissions becoming dominated by members of one party, it is entirely possible that some fraud could occur in states like Texas, Missouri, Arizona, and others. But this isn’t ‘hacking the voting systems’; it is a complete subversion of the procedures intended to ensure security and transparency of election processes. But quite frankly, if the GOP loses elections in key states or districts in 2026 and especially 2028, I strongly expect that they’ll just challenge the validity of those elections without basis and use legalistic efforts to deny the legitimate electees from being sworn into office, and run it up the chain to this US Supreme Court. I guess we’ll see how that goes.
There are vulnerabilities to be sure, but actually doing this on a nationwide scale––even if just in critical states––is such a massive effort that would require the kind of coordination of an airtight conspiracy that I just don’t think the GOP is remotely capable of. It is far easier to just manipulate voters, deny election integrity, and in the case of loss challenge the validity of the results to tie the issues up in court.
That technique appears to be a way of covertly acquiring data from a machine. Changing the original data is a separate process.
I see no possibility that hacked data could be reported as voting results. The results are subject to a number of levels of outside checks, sometimes at different locations. Subverting the election control systems of even one precinct or small town might be conceivable, but this would require large numbers of changes over large areas. Again, everybody in the world is closely examining the systems, the people working in it at every level, and the data itself.
If anybody had this power they would already have set up their authoritarian dictatorship and not merely fumbling around for one.
Also why most states use paper ballots. It’s a double-check against what the computers are saying. Many elections boards run spot hand-count checks during the ballot counting process to ensure the results match.
Using stray emissions to read data from a computer sounds difficult but, possible. With good resources, it would be a way to steal military secrets. To change votes, on the other hand, you need to write something. That should take an actual change to code on the system.
