Debunking "bullet ballots"

Bad data, bad theory

There are a surprisingly large number of conspiracy-theories that Trumpist stole the 2024 election. Democrat party leaders aren’t promoting them, but they are still being passed around on social-media.

One of them is this blogpost claiming there was a statistically impossible number of “bullet ballots”, those just containing votes for the Presidential race, and not any for the other ~20 races on the same ballot (such as US Senate, state legislature, or county dog catcher).

That blogpost is debunked in two ways:

1. The numbers are bad. I use the vote counts reported in the media (NBC News) to show that there’s no anomaly.

2. The idea is bad. It’s a logical fallacy to claim an unexplained anomaly can only be explained by a conspiracy. They distort the numbers to make them unexplainable instead of looking for explainations.

Doing the math

First, let’s do the calculations ourselves.

The source of my information is the https://nbcnews.com website’s “live results” pages showing the latest reported nubmers as of November 20, 2024. These aren’t the official numbers, but are close enough for our purposes.

My algorithm is to compare the President race numbers to the Senate race numbers. This isn’t “bullet ballots” precisely, but close enough. I’m not sure how actual “bullet ballots” can be counted (except in odd cases like Georgia that makes ballot images available).

We see that there were 3,389,405 votes for President and 3,348,017 votes for Senate, a differences of 41,388 votes — or 1.2%. This is the normal range we see across the country this election and in past elections.

Thus, we have disproved the claims of abnormal “bullet votes” in Arizona, that there were 123k such votes that was 7.2% of Trump’s total.

Conversely, we can do the same thing for Utah. This is not a swing state, Trump easily won it, and there was presumably no reason to cheat. That post claimed it had only 0.01% suspicious votes.

Doing the math, we see that this non-swing state had 2.2% such votes, where there was a vote for President but not for Senate. This is in fact much higher than Arizona’s 1.2%.

The other swing states with Senate elections break down as follows:

• Arizona = 1.2%

• Michigan = 1.6%

• Minnesota = 1.7%

• Nevada = 1.4%

• Pennsylvania = 1.0%

• Wisconsin = 0.9%

Some other non-swing states:

• Utah = 2.2%

• New Mexico = 2.2%

• Texas = 0.8%

• California = 3.1%

Thus, I’ve completely debunked that claim. There are no anomalies here.

Unexplained anomalies

The core principle of conspiracy-theories is that anything unexplained is proof of the conspiracy. The “conspiracy” is a universal explaination that explains everything, so becomes the null hypothesis if something cannot otherwise be explained.

In other words, it’s not positive proof that something happened, but a sort of negative proof based on believing nothing else could’ve happened.

And it doesn’t work out. It’s inconceivable that if somebody were trying to steal an election that they wouldn’t also insert votes for Senate and House races. The conspiracy-theory doesn’t actually explain the anomaly, it doesn’t explain why only one race was stolen and not others.

This flawed logic means they hunt for anomalies. When they see a data anomaly, they aren’t interested in explaining it. They instead seek to distort it to become even more anamolous, to make it even more unexplainable.

That’s what we saw in the above blogpost. There was no attempt to figure out what was actually going on, but only an attempt to exagerate the anomaly.

For example, in that post, it usually talks about the number of such votes cast, >1% of all votes. But when it gets around to talking about Arizon, it counts them as 7.3% of Trump votes cast, effectively doubling the number in comparison, to make it look twice as suspicious. Comparing to all votes would’ve netted a value of only 3.7%.

Likewise, their number of >1% is suspiciously off, as my count of Utah above shows, with 2.2% suspicious votes.

The point is that the anomally was largely the work of a creative manipulation of numbers rather than an actual anomaly.

Conclusion

I’ve debunked this in two ways. First, I shows that the numbers are wrong. The latest reported results show no anomalies among the swing states, especially not in Arizona and Nevada that were singled out.

Second, I show that the logic is wrong. The numbers were twisted to heighten anomalies, which then used the flawed premise that any unpexplained anomaly is proof of the conspiracy.

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The following image shows a “bullet ballot” from the 2024 State of Georgia election. It contains only a vote for the President, while all the other races were ignored.