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A Duty to Warn

By James Moore

In 1960, a handsome young senator and war hero from Massachusetts was trying to become the first Catholic president of the United States. His father, who was deeply involved in his son’s campaign, was worried about the closeness of the race with Richard M. Nixon, a Republican from California. When John Fitzgerald Kennedy won the narrow victory, speculation abounded that his father had bought votes from the mob in Chicago and they had cooperated with the political machinery of Richard Daley, the city’s mayor, and his electoral architecture. The proximate cause of JFK’s victory, however, was his campaign’s effective use of television, strong voter turnout driven by enthusiasm for his candidacy, and the Democratic Party’s established urban political machinery.

Nonetheless, according to some researchers and historical accounts, Joe Kennedy collaborated with the Chicago Outfit, a mafia group that had control over a small number of wards in the city and was led by Sam Giancana. Investigators concluded the mob did not have the reach to influence such a broad election in Illinois and that, further, claims Jimmy Hoffa was involved were false. Hoffa was known to dislike the Kennedy’s and likely would not have offered his union’s help to elect JFK. There were, however, investigations of results in Illinois, Texas, and West Virginia. The findings indicated there were some “abnormalities,” but nothing significant enough to affect electoral outcomes. There was no definitive evidence or proof of the presence of organized crime present in any of those states.

Suspicions JFK’s election might have been stolen retained currency on the basis of a quote circulated that supposedly came from his father. Joe had devoted millions of dollars and much of his influence to help his son become president, and the assumption was that he would, in fact, buy the votes needed to win, if they were on the market. Speculation was that the mob knew a soft touch when it saw one and cut a deal with Joe to get him ballots favoring JFK, for a price. Joe was said to agree to the arrangement with organized crime but was uncertain of the final costs. Reportedly, he told his contact, “I want just enough to win and I’m not paying for a landslide.” The statement is, however, likely apocryphal and part of political folklore rather than a documented account.

Donald Trump did not invent the concept of election fraud, though he appears to have been the only candidate to spend undisclosed amounts of money on five dozen lawsuits to make arguments in 60 courts, which all rejected his allegations as without basis. When the country was barely aborning in 1800, however, the fourth presidential election, a rematch between Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, was marred by both parties making charges of vote tampering in New York, voter intimidation, and procedural delays to influence results in closely contested locales. Three times in the nineteenth century presidential contests were clouded with allegations of backroom deals, buying votes, and various types of corruption. In one instance, the House of Representatives had to vote to pick the president and another involved the passage of a measure known as the Compromise of 1877, which gave the job to Rutherford B. Hayes in exchange for ending the post-Civil War Reconstruction era.

After JFK, forty years later there came Bush vs. Gore and “hanging chads” on “butterfly” ballots, charges of voter suppression and inconsistent counting standards that led to the “Brooks Brothers Riots,” college-age men flown in by the Bush camp to complain about tabulations at voting centers. The U.S. Supreme Court gave the win to Bush when it shut down recounts in Florida. Bush’s reelection was no less controversial when voting machine vulnerabilities were reported in Ohio in 2004, which led to unusual voting patterns and discrepancies between exit polls and official tallies. In 2016, President Obama refused to tell the public the FBI was investigating Russian tampering with the race between Hillary Clinton and Trump, and when he lost to Joe Biden in 2020, Trump let fly with wild assertions of widespread voter fraud allegations that included ballot-stuffing, improper handling of mail-in ballots, and manipulation of vote counts. Audits and recounts and lawsuits proved it all false.

There comes now in 2024, Stephen Spoonamore, a technology executive, network engineer, and expert, who has issued a “duty to warn” letter to Vice President Kamala Harris, insisting it is a near certainty the election was hacked and that Trump did not win without the fraud. His letter is a consequence of the 2015 federal directive to all agencies and contractors associated with intelligence and financial agency technologies to warn of suspicions of hacking. Spoonamore, who has worked as a CEO and CTO of seven high-tech companies, and says his “clients have included numerous governments DoD, DHS, Dept. of State, F100 Financials and F500 Industrials” wrote to Harris, “In my professional view, there are multiple and extremely clear indications the Presidential vote was willfully compromised.” The results, he insists, “have been changed at a scale which reversed the [2024] U.S. presidential election.”

Spoonamore’s analysis of returns led him to believe that false results were inserted into swing states of Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. The votes, he charges, were manipulated by the insertion of “bullet ballots,” which display only a vote for Trump and leave all the other races blank. The hack Spoonamore describes leads to what he calls results that are “improbable in the extreme and well-tailored to the benefit of your opponent.” He claims to have uncovered 600,000 of the bullet ballots for Trump with no down ballot choices selected by voters.

“This historically unprecedented set of numbers found in the 2024 swing states is absent in every other state,” he wrote Harris. “In AZ, MI, NC and WI the effect of these drop-off votes reverses the voters’ will and even more improbably always pushes the winning margin beyond the mandatory recount numbers. It is a result too perfect for belief. You should reverse your concession. Call for both a full investigation of criminal activity and demand hand recounts in all seven swing states.”

Spoonamore said the hack is not technically complex and had to involve a database of registered voters who did not vote. His theory is that Elon Musk’s million-dollar daily giveaway may have been part of the scam because voters needed to give their home addresses to be eligible. Those could then be matched against a registered voter database and turned into legitimate looking votes. A database of pledged supporters of Trump with addresses is an essential part of the setup.

“The easiest method to execute is also the easiest to discover by hand-recount. In a few jurisdictions where the tabulators either had network connectivity, approved or otherwise, or where a person on the team had physical access to the tabulation machine, the Trump votes that were added to the ePollBooks, would need to be added to the tabulators. At which point the ePollBooks and the tabulation totals would match, having been digitally stuffed with demographically credible voters for Trump. But there will be no paper ballot for these votes. A hand-recount will quickly discover the fraud.”

Spoonamore got the attention of the fact-checking website Snopes.com when he said the fraud in North Carolina was the “most extreme” and that it was possible to see from public results that over 350,000 voters cast a ballot for Trump and no other race. The claim, Snopes reported, is false.

“According to the North Carolina State Board of Elections’ website, as of Nov. 21, 5,722,556 voters cast ballots. Of those, 5,699,152 ballots displayed votes in the race for president. The website also reported that 5,592,243 ballots bore votes for the state’s governor’s race. A comparison of the numbers for total votes and the gubernatorial race would reveal the maximum number of possible ‘bullet vote’ ballots for all presidential candidates. The difference between the two numbers is 130,313 votes, a count nowhere near the 350,000 votes stated by Spoonamore. Trump received 183,048 more of North Carolinian’s votes than Harris.”

Which means, even with bullet ballots subtracted, Trump had enough votes to win.

Snopes also deconstructed Spoonamore’s numbers regarding his assertion that Arizona was stolen, where he said, “AZ – 123K+ 7.2%+ of Trump’s total vote. Enough to reverse the outcome.” “However,” Snopes reported, “the latest election results for Arizona showed that out of 3,429,637 total ballots cast, voters cast 3,389,319 total votes in the presidential race and 3,347,964 votes for U.S. Senate candidates. The difference between the total number of ballots and those voting for Senate is 81,673 votes, a count smaller than the more than 123,000 votes asserted by Spoonamore. Trump received 187,382 more votes in Arizona than Harris.”

Which was also more than enough to win even without bullet ballots. Snopes found the same discrepancies and contradictions in the other swing states Spoonamore said were fraudulent. But why not do the hand recount? It is not that expensive, would take a short period of time, maybe a few days, and would improve Americans’ belief in the integrity of their election systems. Trump ought to be in favor of such a move because it would offer further verification of his win, and Harris has nothing to lose. Also, election officials at the state level can prove they know how to conduct safe, secure and fair elections.

And right now there are too many things about American politics that are hard to believe.

This article was originally published on Texas to the world.

James Moore is the New York Times bestselling author of “Bush’s Brain: How Karl Rove Made George W. Bush Presidential,” three other books on Bush and former Texas Governor Rick Perry, as well as two novels, and a biography entitled, “Give Back the Light,” on a famed eye surgeon and inventor. His newest book will be released mid- 2023. Mr. Moore has been honored with an Emmy from the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences for his documentary work and is a former TV news correspondent who has traveled extensively on every presidential campaign since 1976.

He has been a retained on-air political analyst for MSNBC and has appeared on Morning Edition on National Public Radio, NBC Nightly News, Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell, CBS Evening News, CNN, Real Time with Bill Maher, and Hardball with Chris Matthews, among numerous other programs. Mr. Moore’s written political and media analyses have been published at CNN, Boston Globe, L.A. Times, Guardian of London, Sunday Independent of London, Salon, Financial Times of London, Huffington Post, and numerous other outlets. He also appeared as an expert on presidential politics in the highest-grossing documentary film of all time, Fahrenheit 911, (not related to the film’s producer Michael Moore).

His other honors include the Dartmouth College National Media Award for Economic Understanding, the Edward R. Murrow Award from the Radio Television News Directors’ Association, the Individual Broadcast Achievement Award from the Texas Headliners Foundation, and a Gold Medal for Script Writing from the Houston International Film Festival. He was frequently named best reporter in Texas by the AP, UPI, and the Houston Press Club. The film produced from his book “Bush’s Brain” premiered at The Cannes Film Festival prior to a successful 30-city theater run in the U.S.

Mr. Moore has reported on the major stories and historical events of our time, which have ranged from Iran-Contra to the Waco standoff, the Oklahoma City bombing, the border immigration crisis, and other headlining events. His journalism has put him in Cuba, Central America, Mexico, Australia, Canada, the UK, and most of Europe, interviewing figures as diverse as Fidel Castro and Willie Nelson. He has been writing about Texas politics, culture, and history since 1975, and continues with political opinion pieces for CNN and regularly at his Substack newsletter: “Texas to the World.”

 

 

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5 comments

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  1. Canguro

    How unsurprising these allegations are, in a country that has long practised the dark arts; gerrymandering, vote buying, political alliances with organised crime, exclusion and denial of registered voters exercising their choice at the ballot box, along with the more heinous crimes of murdering opponents or stitching them up via blackmailing after enticing via monetary or honeypot indiscretions.

    Trump, being Trump, mentored by Roy Cohn and an affiliate of Jeffrey Epstein until that jacuzzi bromance became too hot to handle, will do anything that gives him the payoff he believes is his for the taking, and if that includes rigging the election outcomes, then so be it.

    It is what it is, until it isn’t, and that ‘isn’t’ would seem, at this point in time, to be an unachievable goal in that land of con men, crooks, thieves, rogues, criminals & swindlers, along with the smoke & mirror merchants.

  2. A Commentator

    In Australia, we are certainly fortunate to have-
    1/. Compulsory voting, which causes resources to be devoted to policy analysis and debate, rather than putting them into getting people out to vote
    2/. Preferential system of voting, which means votes for minor parties aren’t wasted
    3/. A single system of voting throughout the country, thus avoiding a.range of the disputes the US experiences
    But (as I’ve said)…on the other hand, our parliamentary system rewards time servers and sycophantic party hacks. Relying on serving MHRs and Senators is a servere limitation on capability.
    The system of primaries, nomination and run off, combined with selection of capable government ministers/secretaries from outside the political system or parliament would provide far more depth of capability.

  3. leefe

    AC:

    To be strictly accurate, the single system of voting only applies to federal elections. The Tasmanian House of Assembly (and I think the ACT Legislative Assembly) has its own local variant, called the Hare-Clark system, being distinguished from the usual by being even more convoluted.

  4. A Commentator

    Thank you, you’re right.
    Nonetheless, I think the combination of the various facets of the Australian voting system is a great strength.
    It is our parliamentary system that is a weakness. It provides an unnecessarily shallow pool to choose from.

  5. John C

    [And right now there are too many things about American politics that are hard to believe.]

    I’d go further than that. Right now there are too many things about AMERICA that are hard to believe.

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