Election Stolen By Multi-Pronged Attack
Update #10 | Hack only one of many methods used to undermine election integrity
If you haven’t read the original post,
I highly recommend reading it first ↓
Author’s Note: This post is too long for some email clients. You may have to open it on your browser instead.
Update #10
Not just a hack: Trump’s “win” was the result of multiple, systematic efforts to sway election results
In the two weeks since Election Day, it’s become clear that bad actors launched several simultaneous operations to suppress or manipulate the vote. These were carried out by decentralized groups, most likely unaware of others’ parallel efforts.
These groups all call themselves different things. Their members hold different ideologies. They have different reasons for their actions. And each group used differing, illegal methods to harm the election. But they all had one thing in common: they helped subvert the will of the American electorate to install Donald Trump into his second term as president.
The Beast With Many Heads
Those who have read my prior posts, especially Update #7: Russia's Playbook For How To Steal An Election, Part 2, may recognize the striking similarity between this and Ukraine’s 2016 election. When Russia seeks to undermine an election, it doesn't rely on just one method—it deploys them all. From cyberattacks to disinformation, voter suppression to threats of violence, the tools are numerous and ever-evolving. Much like the mythical Hydra, lopping off one head only leads to two more sprouting in its place, continuing the onslaught. The more heads that emerge, the more difficult it becomes to cut through the chaos and identify the source of the threat.
Russia often employs a wide range of tactics, essentially "throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks," according to Caroline Orr Bueno, a social and behavioral sciences researcher specializing in disinformation networks.
It also makes it much harder to untangle the meddling after the fact.
Each new layer of interference helps to erode trust in the election process, leaving voters questioning not just the results, but also if any election could truly be free and fair when held in this environment.
Let’s dive in, and examine the Hydra’s many heads:
1. Cyberattacks on voting equipment
Other Western nations would never call our voting machines and systems “secure.” They aren’t. Here’s a quick recap:
Historically, U.S. election systems were hacked in elections in 2000, 2002, 2004.
In 2016, Russia targeted election systems in all 50 states with hacks, probing for vulnerabilities they could use later. The Senate Intelligence Committee warned that U.S. elections remain vulnerable.
Numerous computer science and election security experts have sounded the alarm over the years.
Yet these vulnerabilities haven’t been patched, in part due to Republican resistance to election security bills.
In 2021, Trump supporters illegally breached numerous pieces of voting infrastructure, and even made copies of the software, in an organized and multi-state operation that experts warned represented “serious threats” to future elections.
Now in 2024, data analysts find it statistically impossible (reportedly 35 billion to 1 odds) that Trump would win all seven swing states above the margin for recounts, but without winning the popular vote. Election security expert Steven Spoonamore cites anomalies in the numbers of “bullet ballots” (ballots containing votes for just the presidential race, with the rest left blank) in swing states as proof that election tabulation machines were hacked.
But perhaps most telling is something less data driven—that Trump instructed his followers this summer to stay home on Election Day, saying he didn’t need their votes.
Legal teams working with Spoonamore and the non-profit SMARTelections are rushing to meet state deadlines to challenge the Presidential result.
2. Christian extremists recruiting “Trojan Horse” poll workers
In the wake of the 2020 election and Trump’s unsubstantiated allegations of voter fraud, a growing connection between radicalized Christian evangelicals and MAGA operatives blossomed into a “Dominionist” Christian supremacist movement. The leaders of this movement, known as the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR), advocate for “spiritual warfare” to establish Christian dominion over America by conquering seven key “Mountains” (or institutions) of family, religion, education, media, entertainment, business, and government.
Donald Trump didn’t just steal the election, he stole America’s future. And it will stay that way unless we do something about it.
Please take ten seconds to share this article and help us get the word out!
With democracy at stake, isn’t this election worth double-checking?
Seizing upon this momentum, former Republican opposition researcher Joshua Standifer formed a political group, called the Lion of Judah, to recruit Christian nationalist volunteers to serve as “Trojan horse” poll workers in swing states. This was framed as a way for Christians to "identify fraud," but instead inserted MAGA extremists and election skeptics into key roles during the 2024 election.
Standifer traveled the country with a pro-Trump, Christian nationalist revival tour, training volunteers to monitor elections and report "fraud" directly to Lion of Judah's hotline rather than local authorities. At these events, he encouraged the conservative Christians in the audience to take on roles as election workers rather than just volunteers, explaining that "when the polls start to close or chaos unfolds, they're gonna kick the volunteers out" while right-wing Christians would stay behind to be "the ones counting the votes."
Standifer’s description of their role in the election is alarming:
I promised you guys an action plan. We spent months calculating and creating, meeting with experts, something that we felt like could take Christians and put them in a place of influence. Just imagine: It's election night. Chaos is happening. The polls are closing. The volunteers are getting kicked out, but what if we had Christians across America and in swing states like Wisconsin that were actually the ones counting the votes and making sure what's happening?
Believing that any opportunity to influence the election constitutes God’s will, these “spiritual warriors” would gladly manipulate the election results to bring Trump to power.
And it just so happened that “chaos unfolded” as prophesied…
3. Russian bomb threats caused evacuations, chaos
On Election Day, polling places across the country were affected by upwards of 70 or more hoax bomb threats, which caused evacuations and delayed voting. None were found to be credible.
These threats targeted only areas with high Democratic or minority populations. The FBI concluded that they appeared linked to Russia.
These bomb threats may have simultaneously achieved multiple goals:
Suppress the vote in precincts more likely to vote for Kamala Harris
Cause chaos to unfold, allowing MAGA supporters inside targeted polling places to take action and sway the vote
Disrupt the chain of custody over collected ballots, providing legal justification to argue against recounts in evacuated precincts
4. Postal worker suppression of mail voting
U.S. Postal Service employees are a critical cog in the complex machine transporting absentee and other mail ballots to state election offices. We place incredible trust in them to faithfully execute their duties. Sometimes, that trust is misplaced.
Due to the coronavirus pandemic, mail voting made up an exceptional percentage of the vote in the 2020 election. However, it was predominantly used by Democrats, as Trump pushed disinformation about mail vote interference or fraud. There were allegations that Trump’s pick to run the USPS, Louis DeJoy, was slowing down the mail to delay ballots from arriving on time, thereby helping Trump in the election. Under his tenure, the USPS slashed budgets for mail sorting employees and ripped out expensive new mail sorting machines, dragging mail delivery to a crawl.
In addition to these systemic changes, several postal workers took it upon themselves to toss ballots mailed by Democrats.
The same seems to have happened in 2024, with many, many voters reporting missing mail ballots—some were requested by the voter and never arrived, while others disappeared in transit between the voter and the state election office. There are also troubling reports from multiple state election offices about multiple ballots from other states being erroneously redirected there by the USPS. And warnings from state and local election officials about mishandling of mail by USPS causing widespread disenfranchisement of voters.
How do mail ballots get rerouted to election offices multiple states away? Somehow I doubt it’s by accident.
While some states return undeliverable mail ballots to the voter’s local election office, others—such as Pennsylvania, for example— have blank spaces on the outer envelope for the voter to write their name and a return address. It would be fairly easy to sway the election for Trump, simply by discarding any ballots mailed to or from women and minorities (who are more likely to vote blue).
5. Musk’s America PAC voter suppression website
When not creepily suggesting he would impregnate Taylor Swift, Elon Musk spent the rest of 2024 trying to get Donald Trump elected. This included creating his own pro-Trump America PAC (political action committee) and financing it with hundreds of millions of his own dollars.
The website for America PAC offered to help any voter to register to vote. And if you were a voter in a state that heavily leaned toward either Republicans or Democrats, it worked as anticipated! However, if a voter from a swing state tried to use the site, it would collect the voter’s information and then wouldn’t help register them to vote. Not operating as promised, the site clearly ran afoul of voter suppression laws.
6. Musk’s America PAC vote buying scam in swing states
Musk announced a $1 million daily lottery for registered voters in key battleground states—Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin—who signed his petition supporting “free speech and the Second Amendment.”
Federal law bans any type of payment in exchange for voting or registering to vote. Because Musk’s lottery required petition signatories to be newly registered voters, critics argued the lottery amounted to an illegal attempt to buy votes.
Media outlets reported that Musk’s political action committee had already awarded the first two $1 million checks to Republican voters who had cast mail-in ballots, further fueling allegations of unlawful election interference.
Election law experts, the Federal Department of Justice, Pennsylvania's Democratic governor Josh Shapiro, a Philadelphia prosecutor, and voter rights organizations challenged Musk. He was brought to court, but ultimately won the case by “proving” that the scheme wasn’t actually a lottery at all—the $1 million winners were preselected. So it was just standard fraud, then. Right.
Regardless, America PAC helped Musk build a massive list of low-propensity voters in swing states. So did Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA, in fact.
Hey, wait a minute! If you were going to illegally add bullet ballots to help Trump win, wouldn’t it be super helpful to have unlikely voters’ personal information and signatures (like from a petition)?
7. Millions of voters purged from voter rolls by red states
A federal law that prohibits the systematic removal of individuals from voter rolls within 90 days of an election. Despite this, the Supreme Court ruled that Virginia could purge 1,600 voters—suspected to be non-citizens—only six days before Election Day.
Some, if not most, of the voters disenfranchised by this were genuine U.S. citizens. That’s par for the course with voter roll purges, though.
In October, a federal judge ordered Alabama to stop trying to inactivate voter registrations, after 2,074 of the 3,251 voters purged were found to be eligible voters.
In August, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott proudly announced that his state had purged over 1.1 million voters from the Lone Star State’s rolls. Of these voters, only 6,500 of them were what the state called “potential noncitizens.”
The Brennan Center for Justice describes voter purges as a flawed process:
Over the last two decades, jurisdictions have substantially increased the rate at which they purge voter rolls. According to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, over 19 million voters were removed from the rolls between 2020 and 2022. That is an increase of 21 percent compared with 2014–16, which was already an increase of 33 percent from the number of voters removed between 2006 and 2008. Heightening the risk of inaccurate purges, election denial groups have been challenging voters’ eligibility on a massive scale and pressuring officials to investigate large numbers of voters based on outdated or unreliable information.
Voter roll purges have grown into a popular tactic among right-wing governors, who enact them under the guise of maintaining election integrity. However, these purges often disproportionately impact marginalized communities, risking widespread disenfranchisement and potential discrimination against voters of color, the elderly, and low-income citizens.
Since 2022, nearly 1 million registered voters have been removed from Florida's active voter rolls.
Ohio identified 158,857 voters as eligible for removal from its list of registrations this June. More than half of the Ohio voters at risk of being purged from the state's voter rolls are registered in counties with a majority population of people of color, raising concerns about racial discrimination in the process.
In 2017, Georgia purged 560,000 voters. It was later found that an estimated 107,000 of them should have remained eligible. Only 70,000 of them re-registered to vote.
In October, North Carolina officials revealed that they had removed 747,000 registered voters over the past 20 months. Only 183,048 votes separate Trump and Harris in that state.
Voter roll purges have become a cynical tool of political strategy, designed to suppress the votes of marginalized communities and swing the outcome of elections. As more citizens are wrongly disenfranchised, it’s clear that "election integrity" is just another euphemism for maintaining power at the expense of democracy.
8. Votes being thrown out for mismatching signatures
Tell me if you’ve heard this one before. Officials in Nevada are blaming Gen Z voters’ inability to sign their own names for causing tens of thousands of ballots to be rejected. Approximately 32,000 Nevada voters’ ballots were rejected for their signature not matching the signature on their drivers’ license, this year.
In Nevada, voters are allowed to “cure” their ballots and prove that they were legitimately cast. This process must be completed within a couple weeks of the election, or the ballots are permanently invalidated. Of the 32,000 Nevadans whose ballots were rejected this election, only 9,000 didn’t cure their ballots. The 27,000 voters who did fix their votes represent the largest group of ballots cured in Nevada’s history. It’s more than the number of cured ballots from 2020’s and 2022’s elections combined.
That’s a great success about most of the votes being cured, but that’s a ton of votes to get rejected in the first place! And the ACLU says that signature matching laws disproportionately impact marginalized voters.
In Arizona, where 80% of voters vote by mail, they only have five days after Election Day to cure their ballot. In this election, that would be November 10.
The last ballots to be cleared through the signature matching stage were only processed on the evening of November 9, meaning that some voters had only one day to cure their ballot. Though, many of these disenfranchised voters never find out at all, as there’s no unified system to inform them. Some counties mail notices to voters, which may take seven days to reach them—after the opportunity to cure their ballot has passed. Others make phone calls from unknown numbers, which may be assumed to be a spam call.
Officials without training in signature or handwriting analysis are rejecting an incredible number of ballots, while reading what the voter’s name is. Just as with postal workers (above), that makes this too easy to game.
9. MAGA campaign to issue mass challenges to voters’ eligibility
After the January 6 Insurrection, former Trump attorney and election denier Cleta Mitchell pushed forward with a dangerous new project called “EagleAI,” designed to unleash mass voter challenges on swing-state voters.
The initiative built on Mitchell’s previous successful efforts to pressure state officials into severing ties with the bipartisan ERIC system—previously the accepted tool for interstate cooperation on maintaining voter rolls. Nine GOP-led states have pulled out of the program.
In most states, individuals can challenge the eligibility of other voters’ registrations. The process is meant to be used only by individuals who have direct knowledge of a change in a voter’s eligibility, such as a family member who knows that a registered voter has died. But instead, Trump supporters calling themselves “election integrity advocates” have weaponized challenges as a tool to disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of others.
EagleAI is a program to industrialize the process, allowing these right-wing activists to generate thousands of thinly-sourced voter challenges to with just a few clicks. To generate its claims, it uses questionable data from publicly available government records and obituaries, and is easy to abuse by design.
The program doesn’t actually use AI at all; that’s seemingly there only so users can pronounce the EagleAI name as “Eagle Eye.”
The mass bombardment of baseless challenges predictably led to high numbers of eligible voters being wrongly purged from the rolls. Targeted voters would have to jump through additional hoops to prove their eligibility, if they even find out in time to fix it.
EagleAI isn’t the only such program, in fact. It’s joined by similar tools VoteRef, Check My Vote, and IV3, all of which were made by similar MAGA groups to perform the same task.
The impact is especially concerning in swing states, where such tactics could influence election outcomes. The swing states of Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Arizona, Wisconsin, and North Carolina have all been targeted by users of these apps, with varying levels of impact. Activists worked with election officials in these states to normalize the platform and convince them to accept voter challenges generated by these dubious and malicious systems.
Just days ago, a member of Georgia’s election board proposed providing EagleAI with the state’s official voter roll info, to “boost confidence” in the elections.
Other affected states include Florida, Ohio, Texas, California, and New York, where challenges may impact outcomes of state or local races.
The end result, overall, is that tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of people have been illegitimately stricken from voter rolls and disenfranchised.
10. Voter intimidation against Harris supporters
Perhaps the most basic way to discourage voters from showing up to the polls is to threaten violence. Historically, it’s how the Ku Klux Klan and other racists prevented black Americans from voting after the Civil War. Now these tried and true methods are having a revival of their own.
Cases of political violence are on the rise throughout the U.S., with experts saying that it’s the worst it’s been since the 1970s. Reuters has documented 300 such cases since the January 6 Insurrection and notes that, in contrast to the Disco Era, today’s political violence largely targets people rather than property.
In July, four in five Americans said they feared the country was spiraling out of control. An October poll commissioned by The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights found 73% of U.S. voters are deeply concerned about political violence. With increasing extremism from the far right, these fears appear well-founded.
Throughout this election cycle, Trump and his allies have fueled anti-LGBTQ and anti-immigrant rhetoric, stoking extremist actions. The fascist Proud Boys militia organized protests at drag queen story hours and, more recently, marched in Springfield, Ohio. The besieged city faced a surge of bomb threats and hate crimes after Trump and his running mate JD Vance spread false, xenophobic rumors about Haitian immigrants in the area.
The Trinity White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan posted flyers in Springfield reading “Foreigners & Haitians Out,” advocating for Trump’s mass deportation scheme.
A group identifying themselves as the "Trump Klan" targeted Kamala Harris’ voters in San Marcos, Texas. Local law enforcement investigated threatening flyers being attached to Harris lawn signs. Text on the flyers states that the recipient’s identity has been recorded in a “national database of miscreant Harris supporters” and they would be punished after Trump is elected.
Proud Boys chapters announced they were mobilizing and would be watching the polls on Election Day. In Ohio, they claimed to have gotten members recruited as election workers.
“Locked, loaded, and ready for treasonous voter fraud,” wrote one Proud Boys account online in the days before the election.
In Oregon, Washington, and Arizona, arsonists set fire to ballot boxes, while in Arizona, a man shot into a Democratic National Committee office on three separate occasions. Across several states, tensions escalated as early voters physically confronted election workers after being asked to take off their MAGA hats.
In Florida, a man drove around an early voting site hurling antisemitic and racist slurs at those nearby, and a teen wielding a machete intimidated Democratic voters at a polling station. Meanwhile, in Pennsylvania, a female Trump supporter was arrested for harassing individuals standing in line to vote.
Groups of masked men in patriotic clothing and baseball caps harassed and recorded Detroit voters at polling stations on Election Day, even following some voters inside the polls.
All over the country, Americans reported their Harris/Walz campaign signs being taken or vandalized. Others were scared to put them up, fearing a negative reaction from Trump supporters.
“I live in a deep blue city in a deep blue state, and even I was nervous about putting out my Harris/Walz sign for fear of being targeted by MAGA extremists,” wrote Reddit user -sharpwater-.
Widespread accounts on social media of Democrats being the victims of Republicans who trespassed onto liberals’ yards and stole or defaced their property amounts to nationwide voter suppression. These acts come with an unspoken threat of “we know where you live.”
In Fresno, California, Democrats with Harris lawn signs received menacing letters from an anonymous Trump supporter, who said the homes’ addresses would go on a list of sanctuaries to house “illegal aliens.”
With Trump focusing the right’s sights on liberals as “evil” and “the enemy within,” how many Harris supporters avoided the polls because they felt unsafe?
Conclusion
Some of these methods of election interference might not make a dent on their own. But taken as a whole, they signal a concerted effort to undermine trust in the electoral process, suppress the voices of Democrats, minorities, and women, and shift outcomes through intimidation, trickery, and cyberattacks. This multi-pronged assault on democracy not only disenfranchised countless eligible voters but also created a climate of fear and uncertainty. Now, when we need most to stand together and demand change, the Left is fracturing apart and pointing fingers.
Just as with the Hydra, defeating this multi-pronged meddling requires more than just addressing one front—it demands a sustained, coordinated effort to deal with the many heads of interference that refuse to stay down.
Should this nation have another free and fair election, we must learn our lessons from this one and be more vigilant in the future.
More soon.
Author’s Note: Edited 6:26 PM on Nov. 24, 2024 to add content about Harris/Walz signs being stolen, in response to a reader’s suggestion.
If we don’t take action to defend democracy, we don’t deserve to keep it.
If you have relevant information to contribute, please email: tinfoilmatt@proton.me
