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.
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/
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.”)
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.
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
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.
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.