this post was submitted on 22 Nov 2024
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politics

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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.

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[–] nifty 2 points 1 hour ago

I kinda knew the popular vote thing would correct itself, I think the reason it’s this close at all is because most people don’t pay attention to politics as much as they should

[–] Sam_Bass 25 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

Piss on him til he fucking drowns

[–] youstolemyname 7 points 4 hours ago (1 children)
[–] Sam_Bass 5 points 3 hours ago

So be it, long as he's dead and gone

[–] xenomor 58 points 8 hours ago

Remember that his first official act as president in his first term was to send Sean Spicer out, literally on day one, to scold the press corp for seeing the paltry crowd at his inauguration. This guy is always, always just small dick energy in an ill-fitting suit.

[–] [email protected] 142 points 12 hours ago (1 children)
[–] stupidcasey 8 points 4 hours ago

Wow, that makes more sense in politics than it does in quantum mechanics

Maybe we can model the quantum world on Politics.

every time a politician has to make a statement he both agrees and disagrees until he knows who the audience.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 9 hours ago

I mean if you take into account how stupid and incompetent he was in his last term and that he now he seems to be losing his faculties it was quite a landslide. Getting 10% should have been a miracle.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

Trump runs on ego. Anything that quells the ego must be wrong.

[–] krashmo 6 points 8 hours ago

This is the only effective way to slow him down imo. Make fun of him for having small crowds at his rallies then sue him for libel when he says his were bigger. It doesn't matter if it goes anywhere in court, you just need to force the conversation to keep his attention.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 8 hours ago

Once he's president he'll probably say these types of stories are subversion of the state.

[–] AshMan85 20 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

Yeah, he is afraid that it will be exposed that he rigged this election.

[–] [email protected] -2 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

It was extremely rigged wasn’t it. Fucking hell man.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 hour ago

I'm not one for conspiracy theories, and we don't have any evidence to back up any sort of claims of rigging or election fraud. In fact, the various lawsuits Trump initiated in the last cycle and audits and recounts and so on provided a pretty damning pile of evidence for "not rigged".

Republicans aren't rigging elections themselves. There's no tomfoolery going on with voting machines, or people voting twice, or similar. They're "rigging" it with legal means -- disenfranchising voters, suppressing turnout, financing third party candidates to peel votes away from the other side, gerrymandering districts, and using massive propaganda systems to influence who decides to vote and what they choose when they do vote.

All said, though, we can always make the system more robust, and increase both voters' confidence in the system and allay any fears of actual rigging. But election reforms are often a "Democrat" issue, so almost any Republican will oppose meaningful reforms that don't do one of the things above to suppress voters.

[–] [email protected] 29 points 12 hours ago* (last edited 11 hours ago) (5 children)

There's even rumors that votes in the swing states were fraudulent as well. A disproportionate number of "bullet ballots" in swing states alone may indicate foul going-ons. The only way to tell would be a recount, however.

Edit: Seems the info is dubious, at best. Partially straight up wrong. Oh well. A few hours of hope was nice.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 hours ago

Write your senators and representative and ask them to enforce section 3 of the 14th amendment and prevent an insurrectionist from holding office.

[–] [email protected] 71 points 12 hours ago (2 children)

This has been shut down pretty well at this point.

[–] BrianTheeBiscuiteer 15 points 11 hours ago (3 children)

How? If there's new info I want to hear it but AFAIK it's been speculated and nobody has done any digging on it.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 hours ago (1 children)
[–] asteriskeverything 13 points 9 hours ago

here is the linked transcript in case you're like me and can't stand getting information from a video

[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 hours ago* (last edited 11 hours ago) (1 children)

If there was anything to it, the Democrats would be talking about it. They have plenty of lawyers that can demand recounts in places where they suspect they could gain something. I know they're generally incompetent, but not that incompetent.

[–] BrianTheeBiscuiteer 19 points 10 hours ago

They sure hide their competence well. Letting the biggest threat to our democracy slip through every crack in the system sure looks like a boneheaded move.

[–] Brkdncr 1 points 9 hours ago
[–] [email protected] -2 points 10 hours ago

Nah man it was rigged

[–] [email protected] 39 points 11 hours ago (2 children)

According to snopes, the claims made by the Spoonamore guy are kinda iffy, I'm afraid. :(

https://www.snopes.com/news/2024/11/21/stephen-spoonamore-letter-harris/

[–] [email protected] 11 points 11 hours ago* (last edited 11 hours ago) (2 children)

I read that earlier and I'm confused why it seems to matter if the vote is above the threshold for the state to flip or not to do a recount.

Take Nevada: " As for Nevada, Spoonamore contended in his letter, "NV - 43K+ 5.5%+ of Trump's total vote. Enough to exceed recount threshold." The Nevada government website (archived) reported that — out of 1,487,887 total ballots cast — 1,484,840 ballots contained votes for presidential candidates and 1,464,728 contained votes for U.S. Senate candidates. The mximum number of "bullet votes" is 23,159. Trump received 46,008 more votes in Nevada than Harris. "

Snopes seems to be saying that it doesn't matter if Trump cheated and sneaked in 23k bullet votes because Kamala would have lost anyway without them. In my view, if ANY cheating occured then that's like really bad right? Even if it didn't flip the election?

23k is a little more than half of 43k so the percentage would drop from 5.5% down to 2.8% which is still wayyy over the usual 0.05% bullet ballots which seems very odd and makes it recount worthy. (Note: The 0.05% bullet ballots figure comes from the original article which I haven't fact checked since idk how so if that's wrong please correct it "In comparison, bullet ballots for Trump in Oregon, Utah and Idaho—the three states which border Arizona and Nevada, with equally fervent Trump voters—count for less than 0.05% in each state.")

[–] [email protected] 9 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

Even ignoring the math, the assertion that a statistically unlikely amount of bullet ballots means there has been fraud is kinda out there. Historically, bullet ballots are fairly common with populist candidates.

[–] asteriskeverything 3 points 6 hours ago

It does seem to me like a valid reason for a recount though and I believe this shit is being rugswept cuz we don't wanna look like conspiracy theorists

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 hours ago* (last edited 9 hours ago)

I think since the total amount of bullet votes isn't as massive as previously thought, it may only be somewhat outside of the norm, making the possible fraud less likely.

I can see where it may be best to be tactical with a demand for recount if it won't change the outcome, as then it could make it harder to have a recount in the next election to the point where it does change the outcome. That's just my 2 cents tho.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 11 hours ago

Oh, thanks for that link. They did go really deep into the numbers with this one. I knew the whole Starlink part of the letter made no sense given how the internet works, but I still had questions about the number of bullet ballots, which Snopes addresses as well state by state.

[–] nexusband 15 points 11 hours ago

I think that's all BS. However, what is not BS is that ballots have just "vanished", due to being challenged by the Vigilante stuff. According to Greg Pallast, investigative journalist with the BBC, there have been over 800k provisional ballots that have not been counted because they have been thrown out. He even has the exact names of people, who's ballots have been thrown out.

If it wasn't so dire, I'd find it extremely fascinating...

https://youtu.be/X3hXeEiFcJM?si=-lJLqmIDZM4PewcT

[–] jordanlund 3 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

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 12 points 11 hours ago* (last edited 11 hours ago) (1 children)

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 1 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 8 hours ago* (last edited 8 hours ago) (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 7 hours ago

THIS.

They had direct access to our voting machines during their bullshit "inquiries".

The voting machines that ARE KNOWN to have direct access vulnerabilities.

[–] jordanlund 2 points 7 hours ago

Oh, absolutely agreed, but again, that's not the accusation when it comes to bullet ballots.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 12 hours ago

Facts don’t care about his feelings.

The gaslighting of his campaign knows no bounds.

[–] dual_sport_dork 5 points 11 hours ago

Yeah, well, this dickbird is already in and our chances of ever being able to legitimately get rid of him are, alas, extremely remote.

So this is only a problem in his own petty little smooth brain. And yet.

[–] nexusband 3 points 11 hours ago

Ballots have just "vanished", due to being challenged by the Vigilante stuff. According to Greg Pallast, investigative journalist with the BBC, there have been over 800k provisional ballots that have not been counted because they have been thrown out. He even has the exact names of people, who's ballots have been thrown out.

If it wasn't so dire, I'd find it extremely fascinating...

https://youtu.be/X3hXeEiFcJM?si=-lJLqmIDZM4PewcT