Debunking Spoonamore's Letter
Somebody named “Spoonamoore” wrote a blogpost outlining a conspiracy by Musk (among others) to steal the 2024 election (for Trump). This has gotten a lot of attention in social-media. As a long time election conspiracy-theory debunker, people keep asking my opinion about it. I wrote a blogpost debunking the core point, about “bullet ballots”, but apparently that wasn’t enough. In this post, I analyze the entire thing.
Spoonamore’s conspiracy-theory has four elements:
Evidence (claimed) of fraudulent ballots, namely a statistically high number of “bullet ballots” containing only a vote for President.
Musk’s “free-speech petition” harvesting voter records that fake ballots can be tied to.
Remote access to “pollbooks” to make the count of “votes” and “voters” match.
Change the tabulator results, inserting votes votes at precincts to match how many voters the pollbooks claimed voted.
Step #1 bullet ballots
The core of the conspiracy-theory, the only part that might contain evidence, is the claim that there are an unusual number of “bullet ballots” (votes only for President) or “downvotes” (missing only some races other than President).
While he claims such evidence exists, he doesn’t cite it. He’s vague where he’s getting his information from. Neither his data sources or methods are disclosed.
In fact, “bullet ballots” wouldn’t be public. Few states provide enough information to count them. Georgia does, and once I get a hold of the ballot images after the 2024 election, I’m going to count this. But for right now, he cites no source for such information.
I can, however, partly reproduce his results by counting down votes instead. These are ballots that have a vote for President, but where some other races are missing votes. The number of downotes must therefore exceed the number of bullet ballots (all bullet ballots are also a downvote).
The downvotes are public. We can compare the vote counts for the President race against other races, most easily against statewide races like Senator and Governor.
For example, in the Arizona 2024 race, we can tell there were 3,389,405 votes for President and 3,348,017 votes for Senate, a difference of 1.2%. It’s not precise, we’d have to look at the actual ballots to know for certain, but it’s close enough.
In another blogpost, I do the work and show that number of such ballots is perfectly normal — at least, those where there’s a senate race. Remember from high-school civics class that 1/3rd of the states won’t have a Senate race this year. My home swing state of Georgia has neither a Senator nor Governor race in 2024.
In that blogpost, I document data sources and methods so that anybody can reproduce my work easily. That’s how you can identify conspiracy-theories: they don’t document their sources or methods.
Step #2 registration harvesting
The next step in the conspiracy-theory is Musk’s so-called “free-speech petition”. Musk created a website where people could sign up to promise to defend the First Amendment. He then gave away $1 million each day to the people who had signed up — on the condition that they were also registered to vote.
Musk’s idea was silly, of course. For one thing, it wasn’t a “petition” but a “promise”. For another thing, it’s unclear whether people were signing up to defend the actual First Amendment or Musk’s twisted interpretation of it. Thirdly, it’s not really recording those committed to free-speech so much as those wanting to win $1 million.
Critics see more in this effort. Offering a $1 million lottery to encourage people to register to vote is an illegal inducement, and Democrats are taking him to court over this. (As I read the law, he’s not actually guilty, but it’s close).
Spoonamore sees this as part of the larger conspiracy. In order to stuff ballot boxes with illegal votes, those ballots still need to be tied to legitimate registered voters.
At the end of the election, the number of registered voters who voted needs to match the number of votes cast. It’s a common conspiracy-theory that elections end up with “more votes than voters”, but in fact, this never really happens. It’s such a well-known cliche that it’s always checked after every election.
Thus, Spoonamore theorizes that by harvesting the street addresses of registered voters, Musk (or coconspirators) can stuff fraudulent votes matched to real voters.
It’s a nonsense theory, though, because voter registrations are already public records. In my state of Georgia, it costs $250 to get a list of all registered voters. Something similar is the case in all other states. Musk didn’t need a nefarious plan to harvest lists of eligible voters, he could simply get them with a public records request.
Spoonamore claims the scheme requires more than the public record of the registered voter, that knowledge of Trump support was needed. If registered Democrats suddenly voted for Trump in large numbers, this would look suspicious. But this sort of anomaly isn’t detectable. If it were, the anomaly of suspiciously high turnout among Republicans would be even more noticeable.
Step #3 pollbooks.
The pollbook is the list of eligible voters at a precinct. When you go on election day, they check your name against this list, to see if you are allowed. After you vote, they check off your name, so you an’t vote again.
Historically, this was a paper printout. On the morning of the election, the computers that hold the voter registration database would print out a list of voters for each precinct, including whether they’ve already voted (such as by mail-in ballot).
The theory here is that pollbook numbers need updating. As the count of stuff votes go up, you need to increment the count of voters. You need to mark off specific voter names who you claim have voted.
Spoonamore claims that “ePollBook data is nearly always linked to the internet”, but the opposite is true. It’s usually paper or a tablet not connected to the Internet.
That’s changing. States want to make it easy for people to vote at any precinct, so that if there is a line at one, they can just drive down the road to vote at another. This requires electronic pollbooks that are synchronized via the Internet during the election.
Arizona does this. They use Internet connected e-pollbooks. They have robust cybersecurity measures (such as using VPNs) that make Internet hacking implausible, but technically, they are connected to the Internet. Indeed, this was a problem during the 2024 primaries, early voting in Arizona was disrupted by a global IT outage. The electronic pollbooks could not connect to the server, and hence, the polls couldn’t open.
In the 2024 Presidential election, some precincts in rural counties had their pollbooks connected via Starlink, Musk’s satellite Internet service.
This again brings Musk into election conspiracy theories, but it’s incidental. Internet communication is encrypted on the ends, doubly so when using VPNs, so there’s nothing a router can do to spy on or intercept such traffic. Routers, even Musk’s Starlink routers, can’t do anything to interfere with this, other than refusing to route traffic. It’s a fundamental principle of the modern Internet that routers can only see the metadata (addresses of the packet destination) and not the payloads.
The reason Starlink appears here is because Musk re-invented satellite Internet, converting it from something impractical for most purposes to something as easy to setup as WiFi. It’s by far the easiest way to connect rural locations to the Internet, everywhere in the world, from the heart of the Amazon, to airplanes flying over the Atlantic, to Antarctica, to the election office in the middle of rural Cochise county in Arizona.
Musk is going to appear in a lot of conspiracy-theories in the future. Starlink is a revolution in ubiquitous Internet. It’s showing up everywhere — and will appear again in the next round of conspiracy-theories. But since it’s merely a router, it’s immaterial.
Step #4 tabulator stuffing
The last step is the ballot stuffing.
The problem is that a pure computer hack cannot create paper ballots, so we aren’t stuffing actual ballots, such messing with numbers inside the computer to increase vote count.
Paper ballots are used almost everywhere.
In Arizona, ballots are printed out and hand marked by humans, then fed into the tabulators. In Georgia, precincts use ballot marking devices that help a voter fill out the ballot, which is then printed out. The printout is then fed into a tabulator as a separate step. Sure, a computer is used to vote in Georgia, but there’s s till a paper ballot.
In theory, it wouldn’t be too hard hard for a malicious election worker to create fraudulent ballots and stuff them with the other paper ballots, but there are so many surveillance cameras, election watchers, and other workers that somebody would likely get caught. The conspiracy here is that it all happened via computers. Physical actions can be seen, computer actions are invisible.
Spoonamore’s theory is that the tabulator is hacked to add numbers to Trump’s total, creating more votes going out than paper ballots coming in.
That’s why hacking the pollbook and tabulator together is important, so that the number of votes and voters match. The idea is that at the end of the day, right before polls closed, the hacked pollbook will mark of registered voters that have not yet voted, to make the numbers even.
We can’t detect the hack by simply looking at the tabulator or pollbook records of the number of votes/voters, but we can detect this by counting the number of paper ballots. That’s why they suggest a hand recount of the President race.
The simplest way to guard against this is to count the paper ballots at the precinct at the end of the election day and verify the number of ballots tabulated match the number of paper ballots. This was a requirement proposed by the (Republican controlled) Georgia Election Board, but was struck down by the courts. Democrats claimed this was some sort of evil conspiracy by the Republicans, but is actually quite reasonable.
Tabulators are not connected to the Internet as Spoonamore claims, only some pollbooks. Thus, the reality is that local precinct workers would need to be part of the conspiracy. This is implausible — it demands a conspiracy to big that it’s unlikely to go undetected. Spoonamore claims that such workers can tricked into bad actions, but really, election procedures are more secure than that.
The one conspiracy-theory type thing I might agree with is that local election workers can plausibly tamper with tabulators. In 2021, Republican election conspiracy-theorists raided Coffee County in Georgia and stole all the code for Dominion’s computers, including tabulators. They’ve had 3 years to study that code looking for ways to subvert it.
There’s no evidence of such subversion, but it’s the one part of this entire conspiracy that’s plausible. I would demand evidence before I’d believe it did happen, but I cannot rule it out. In other words, it’s not as crazy as the rest of the conspiracy-theory.
Other nonsense
Spoonamore claims this hack is plausible because it’s a lot less complex than the Hamas pager hack.
It’s a silly comparison, such as claiming since we can land an austronaut on the moon that we can land an astronaut on the sun.
His overstates the complexity of the pager attack. It was not actually a “hack”, no “hackers” were involved. It was straightforward spycraft, inserting explosives into devices the enemy used. It’s impressive as heck, but not a hack.
Hacking pollbooks and tabulators is far harder than you think. The number of people involved would be absurdly high — no conspiracy that big could go long without some whistleblower revealing it.
No rational argument
You don’t need to do the work or be an expert to know this that this bunk. You can simply read the shape of his letter.
He lists a lot of vague qualifications, like being the CTO or cofounder of companies that he doesn’t name. Rational people list their specific qualifications, if they were a CTO of a company, they name the company.
He expects to be believed by the strength of such qualifications, not the strength of his arguments. For example, he doesn’t document where he gets his “bullet ballot” numbers from, so nobody can directly check them.
He makes grandiose statements, like “duty to warn” or “defend the Constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic”. He’s got visions of grandeur.
The point is that he thinks he’s increasing his credibility by such things. He evidently is — among the conspiracy-theory crowd that keeps repeating his letter. But among rational people, all of this decreases his credibility.
Specifically, rational people demand evidence, and he’s provided none of that, only a theory. Has hasn’t even provided evidence of the one element where evidence would be available, the number of “bullet ballots” or “undervotes”.
This is why it’s right to call this a “conspiracy-theory”: he theorizes a very large conspiracy based upon no evidence.
Conclusion
This is an overly long blogpost, and I’m sorry if you had to slog through it, but my goal is to address all the points. Apparently, simply debunking his “bullet ballots” wasn’t enough, people wanted me to look at the rest of the claims.