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TRUMP STATISTICS
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We had to wait several weeks for the national vote count to be finalized.
Now we have it:

HARRIS = 75,014,534 votes
TRUMP = 77,300,739 votes


In 2020 it was:

BIDEN = 81,283,501 votes
TRUMP = 74,223,975 votes


So the dems lost 6,268,968 votes and Trump gained 3,076,760 votes.
The difference dems loss - Trump gain is 3,192,208 votes and those were stay at home citizens.

If we could give all the absentees to Harris then the tables turn and Harris jumps ahead in the national vote.
Now it is Trump 50.8%, Harris 49.2% percentagewise, it becomes Trump 49.7%, Harris 50.3%.
That's national vote and we don't know about swing states and electors.

But we can't do that.
Those 3 million absentees maybe were dem absentees, or about to vote Trump absentees who did n't vote.
Making them 50-50 makes Trump 50.2% and Harris 49.8%, again not knowing about swing states and electors.

So the result is a mixture of absenteism and swing to Trump.
As far as the absenteeism is concerned I 'm attributing it to Putin's 7th of October plot and to the woke agenda.
Seeing that Trump now appoints non-binaries as ministers and a woke +++ character in charge of the FBI, it's not the dems woke agenda really but the woke agenda MAGA propaganda rather.
But the dems did not counter these things effectively.
There are other things as well of course, such as the "prices at a stroke" ...

I don't count the Mexican illegals and the wall since that is the magas clarion call from the time of Dewey vs. Truman.
I don't remember magas / tea party talking about anything else in my lifetime.

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Edited by cosmicway
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9 hours ago, cosmicway said:

We had to wait several weeks for the national vote count to be finalized.
Now we have it:
HARRIS = 75,014,534 votes
TRUMP = 77,300,739 votes

those are not the final numbers

a few states still have a small amount left to certify

as it stands now

these are the latest numbers

https://www.thegreenpapers.com/G24/President-Details.phtml

982da1dae4f44d04b54c2f1e0948d30e.png

Edited by Vesper
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4 minutes ago, Vesper said:

those are not the final numbers

a few states still have a small amount left to certify

as it stands now

these are the latest numbers

https://www.thegreenpapers.com/G24/President-Details.phtml

982da1dae4f44d04b54c2f1e0948d30e.png

Really ?
What are they doing ?
Anyway what remains in infinitessimaly small.

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How colonial law upheld racial hierarchies

What’s in the rule of law?

The British Empire used a great democratic ideal to manufacture racial difference and rationalise colonial domination

https://aeon.co/essays/the-rule-of-law-and-racial-difference-in-the-british-empire

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A defendant on trial in a British consular court in West Africa, c1900. Photo by Popperfoto/Getty Images

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Law was central to the British colonial project to subjugate the colonised populations and maximise their exploitation. Convinced of its superiority, British forces sought to exchange their law for the maximum extraction of resources from the colonised territories. In The Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa (1922), F D Lugard – the first governor general of Nigeria (previously governor of Hong Kong) – summed up the advantages of European colonialism as:

Europe benefitted by the wonderful increase in the amenities of life for the mass of her people which followed the opening up of Africa at the end of the 19th century. Africa benefited by the influx of manufactured goods, and the substitution of law and order for the methods of barbarism.

Lugard, here, expresses the European orthodoxy that colonised territories did not contain any Indigenous laws before the advent of colonialism. In its most extreme form, this erasure manifested as a claim of terra nullius – or nobody’s land – where the coloniser claimed that the Indigenous population lacked any form of political organisation or system of land rights at all. So, not only did the land not belong to any individual, but the absence of political organisation also freed the coloniser from the obligation of negotiating with any political leader. Europeans declared vast territories – and, in the case of Australia, a whole continent – terra nullius to facilitate colonisation. European claims of African ‘backwardness’ were used to justify the exclusion of Africans from political decision-making. In the 1884-85 Berlin Conference, for example, 13 European states (including Russia and the Ottoman Empire) and the United States met to divide among themselves territories in Africa, transforming the continent into a conceptual terra nullius. This allowed for any precolonial forms of law to be disregarded and to be replaced by colonial law that sought to protect British economic interests in the colonies.

In other colonies, such as India, where some form of precolonial law was recognised, by using a self-referential and Eurocentric definition of what constituted law, the British were able to systematically replace Indigenous laws. This was achieved by declaring them to be repugnant or by marginalising such laws to the personal sphere, ie, laws relating to marriage, succession and inheritance, and hence applicable only to the colonised community. Indigenous laws that Europeans allowed to continue were altered beyond recognition through colonial interventions.

The rule of law was central both to the colonial legal enterprise and to the British imagination of itself as a colonial power. Today, the doctrine of the rule of law is closely associated with the works of the British jurist A V Dicey (1835-1922) who articulated the most popular modern idea of the rule of law at the end of the 19th century. The political theorist Judith Shklar in 1987 described Dicey’s work as ‘an unfortunate outburst of Anglo-Saxon parochialism’, in part because he identified the doctrine as being embedded within the English legal tradition and argued that the supremacy of law had been a characteristic of the English constitution ever since the Norman conquest. In his germinal Introduction to the Study of the Law of the Constitution (1889), Dicey noted three key features of the rule of law: firstly, the absence of arbitrary powers of the state; secondly, legal equality among people of all classes; and, lastly, that the general principles of constitutional law had developed as part of English common law, rather than being attributed to a written constitution.

Despite Dicey’s attempts to claim the doctrine of rule of law for the English legal tradition, its earliest formulation comes from ancient Greece. The ancient Greeks contrasted the rule of law positively to the rule of the despot and the tyrannical possibilities of unfettered or arbitrary rule. The doctrine has developed significantly over the past two centuries and can be divided into two main types: formal and substantive ideas of rule of law. Seeking to divest the rule of law from ideas of justice, the formal or thin version of the doctrine is best encapsulated by Joseph Raz in The Authority of Law: Essays on Law and Morality (1979):

A non-democratic legal system, based on the denial of human rights, on extensive poverty, on racial segregation, sexual inequalities, and religious persecution may, in principle, conform to the requirements of the rule of law better than any of the legal systems of the more enlightened Western democracies.

The rule of law was used to give a gloss of moral legitimacy to the colonial enterprise

For formalists, the value of the doctrine lies in its ability to define the lawful authority in any jurisdiction; the constraints that it seeks to put on executive power, and its role in allowing individuals to plan their own lives in light of open, general, clear and reasonably stable rules of governance. On the other hand, modern substantive theories of rule of law associate the doctrine with various ideas of ‘good’, be it democratic government, or protection of human dignity and rights, or notions of liberty. In response to Raz, Tom Bingham noted in The Rule of Law (2010):

While … one can recognise the logical force of Professor Raz’s contention, I would roundly reject it in favour of a ‘thick’ definition, embracing the protection of human rights within its scope. A state which savagely represses or persecutes sections of its people cannot in my view be regarded as observing the rule of law, even if the transport of the persecuted minority to the concentration camp or the compulsory exposure of female children on the mountainside is the subject of detailed laws duly enacted and scrupulously observed.

While they may define rule of law differently, both schools champion its importance both to the state and to the citizenry. I argue that, in the British Empire, the doctrine of the rule of law was similarly championed and used to give a gloss of moral legitimacy to the colonial enterprise. In doing so, it helped to hide the policies of racial and colonial difference that undergirded colonial law and enabled the extraction of resources from the colony to the metropole. Far from meeting the lofty goals of substantive ideas of rule of law, the exercise of legality in the colonies could not even fulfil the prosaic promises of the formalist conceptions of the doctrine.

The British Empire established its earliest colonies in the 17th century in North America and expanded rapidly in the 19th century. At its peak in the early 20th century, it covered a quarter of the world and ruled over 450 million people. Dicey’s exposition of the rule of law was an imperial project and Dicey himself was a frequent participant in the British debates about the empire and its moral and legal responsibilities. He sometimes recognised that the rule of law when imposed by one society on another may itself be ‘arbitrary and oppressive’, however, the doctrine itself, as he understood it, was fundamentally sound. He attributed the discrepancy to the fact that certain civilisations were too ‘backward’ to appreciate its benefits. Despite these reservations, Dicey held a positive view of the British Empire and its commitment to rule of law, and noted that: ‘The one permanent, certain, indisputable effect of English government in the East has been the establishment of the rule of law.’

The British viewed their claim to have established the rule of law as a great achievement and an important benefit of the empire as it spread across the globe. It was central to Britain’s self-perception as a coloniser. Rule of law not only stood in direct opposition to the rule of the ‘oriental despot’, it also distinguished the British from other European colonisers such as the Spanish and the Belgians who were deemed to be brutal and inegalitarian. In practice, the doctrine was reserved for those seen as ‘civilised’ enough by the British imperial officers. When they wished not to extend the doctrine, imperial officials deemed certain communities too backward to merit its application. For instance, most colonised people were denied the right to a jury trial. Further, judges serving in the colonies, far from being independent, were appointed ‘at pleasure’ and were expected to be loyal to the colonial state, with their office being subject to executive removal. Any attempt by them to extend the rule of law to the colonised population against the perceived interests of the colonial regime led to the swift removal of the judge from office. In one such case, the Privy Council advised the removal of Joseph Beaumont as the chief justice of British Guiana in South America in 1868, on the grounds that he lacked ‘judicial temper’ and tended to embarrass the colonial government by criticising their practices against indentured labourers in the colony.

When from time to time attempts were made in the colonies to honour the principle of equality under the rule of law doctrine, these measures were limited. For instance, in the case regarding the institution of taxes in newly conquered Grenada, in Campbell v Hall (1774) almost echoing modern substantive – especially modern, rights based – ideas of rule of law, Lord Mansfield noted: ‘An Englishman in Ireland, Minorca, the Isle of Man, or the Plantations, has no privilege distinct from the natives while he continues there.’ Yet, the widespread practice of slavery across the empire, and other forms of colonial and racial difference belied Mansfield’s premise.

In The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (1993), Partha Chatterjee posited that the rule of colonial difference underlies all colonial legal systems. That is, despite the supposed liberal ideology of the coloniser, the empire could operate only through a preservation of the superiority of the ruling group over the colonised population. This hierarchy between the coloniser and the colonised was not a byproduct of the system, but the very object that every colonial legal system was created to instil, maintain and justify.

Some were placed outside the ambit of the rule of law while still being subject to law’s coercion

A subject’s race and the so-called dichotomy between the ‘civilised’ and the ‘savage’ were central to the application of law in the colonies. These distinctions were based on ideas of intrinsic physical and biological difference between different populations, with the white Anglo-Saxon man placed at the apex of both the racial and cultural hierarchies. Those who were considered racially ‘inferior’ were also considered to be culturally ‘backward’, with each category serving to reinforce the other. This involved the linking of previously value-neutral physical attributes or cultural practices and assigning to them value-laden interpretations, either positive (as in the case of the ruling races) or negative (as in the case of colonised races).

A stark example of this idea of racial difference can be seen in Lord Sumner’s Privy Council judgment in Re Southern Rhodesia (1919):

The estimation of the rights of aboriginal tribes is always inherently difficult. Some tribes are so low in the scale of social organisation that their usages and conceptions of rights and duties are not to be reconciled with the institutions or the legal ideas of civilised society … On the other hand, there are indigenous peoples whose legal conceptions, though differently developed, are hardly less precise than our own. When once they have been studied and understood they are no less enforceable than rights arising under English law. Between the two there is a wide tract of much ethnological interest …

Race, thus, played an important role in determining the types of rights that were made available to the colonised populations. Based on where they were assumed to be on the ‘scale of civilisation’, some communities came to be placed entirely outside the ambit of the rule of law while still being subject to law’s coercion. At their most stark, the racial inequalities upheld by the empire took the form of slavery that dehumanised the African origin population and remained legal until the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 fully came into effect in 1838.

For instance, the slave code passed in Barbados, known as An Act for the Governing of Negroes 1688, explicitly noted that the slave population ‘are of Barbarous, Wild, and Savage Natures, and such as renders them wholly unqualified to be governed by the Laws, Customs, and Practices of our Nation’. This justified the creation of a dual legal system, wherein ‘slave crimes’ were to be tried in slave courts without the benefit of juries. Such laws not only created ‘status crimes’ – ie, crimes that could be committed only by enslaved people, such as being a runaway, abusing a planter/free person, possession of weapons – they also created a dual system of punishment wherein only enslaved people faced brutal punishments that sought to attack their bodily integrity, including flogging, branding, dismemberment and other bodily mutilations. As a result, the dominant experience of colonial law from the enslaved peoples’ point of view ‘was of terror and violence’.

Elsewhere in the world, the Indigenous people belonging to what were described as ‘savage tribes’ in Australia were seen to be inherently outside the law, as were those who were deemed to be ‘hereditary criminals’ under the Criminal Tribes Act 1871 in colonial India. And, in blatant disregard for the doctrine of rule of law, these communities were often collectively punished for any crime by an individual of the group.

By contrast, during the 19th century, white settler colonies came to enjoy some of the freedoms that were seen to be ideologically linked to the rule of law. Across the empire, the colonising population was aware of the privileges granted to them under colonial law and reluctant to see them reduced in any way. Using Chatterjee’s framework, Elizabeth Kolsky argues in her study Colonial Justice in British India (2010) that the notion of rule of law was constantly contradicted by the institutionalisation of racial difference under the law, as well as the overt partiality of legal personnel, including the police, judges and juries. This led to one of the biggest legal controversies in colonial India, when the Ilbert Bill of 1883 was proposed to allow Indian magistrates to preside over cases involving European British defendants. After sustained protest by the white population, the Bill was finally passed in 1884 after securing the compromise of ensuring that they could be tried only by European British majority juries. Of course, similar provisions were not made for the Indian population.

Similarly, in the context of South Africa, Martin Channock argues in The Making of South African Legal Culture 1902-1936 (2001) that the doctrine of rule of law developed in the country ‘primarily along the racial frontiers’ and was used to restrict the rights of African and Asian people in the jurisdiction. He uses the example of the Natives (Urban Areas) Act of 1923 to show how increasingly arbitrary and despotic powers were exercised by local municipalities to remove Black Africans from urban municipal areas, including a regulation that empowered the local superintendent to not only remove people from an area, but to order their huts to be destroyed if they did not comply within 24 hours. And yet, in Tutu and others v Municipality of Kimberley (1918-23) this regulation was found to be neither ultra vires nor unreasonable.

With regards to the Asian population, various economic laws that sought to deny them licenses to trade in South Africa reflected the racial unease of the colonisers. Channock outlines three main concerns: the colonisers worried that the proximity of white housewives to Asian traders in the absence of their husbands may lead to inappropriate contact; that Asian traders extending credit facilities to poor whites may erode racial hierarchies; and, similarly, white women working in Asian shops may lose their sense of ‘racial superiority’. Thus, it is evident that, despite any claims to the rule of law, racial difference was built into the very edifice of the South African colonial legal system and lay the foundations for racial segregation through Apartheid later.

Direct racial discrimination was also apparent in the punishment meted out for crimes. Across the British Empire, the most severe punishments were saved for violence committed by non-whites against the white population. And if the perpetrator was white, punishment for white-on-white violence was a lot more rigorous than the punishment for acts of violence committed by white men against the non-white population. In large part, the latter kind of violence was an intrinsic and normalised part of the colonial capitalist structure that allowed ‘masters’ to have the ‘right of correction’ to brutally beat, flog, mutilate or confine their workers as and when they saw fit. Invisibilised by its omnipresence, routine and indiscriminatory violence by the colonising race remains one of the British Empire’s most closely guarded secrets.

Further, the issue of equal punishment for the same crime for people of different races had always been contentious, and arguments against it focused both on the supposed mental and civilisational differences between the races and their physical or biological differences. For example, in 1844 the legislative member Herbert Maddock argued for shorter jail sentences to be awarded to Englishmen in India on the grounds that ‘the heat of a crowded building surrounded by high walls’ was not at all injurious to the health of the native population but would have a detrimental effect on white prisoners.

Racial discrimination under the law was further entrenched through indirect means by restricting the access of the non-white populations to both legal education and legal professions. For instance, in Tanganyika, in the absence of any local legal training being available, the colonial government required a British law degree to practise law in the territory, while at the same time following a policy of preventing Africans from receiving scholarships to study in Britain. Similar policies were followed by the British elsewhere in Africa, thus, effectively excluding the non-white population from entering the legal profession in large parts of the continent, which no doubt helped to stifle local resistance against colonial law and governance.

Despite the endemic failure of the doctrine of rule of law in the colony, the suitability of the rule and its application were never questioned. Instead, the failure was blamed on the corruption of local officials both white and non-white, or on the backwardness and criminality of the native population. Both this ‘corruption’ and ‘backwardness’ were then posited as reasons for colonial rule to continue until the local population was civilised and advanced enough to accept the mantle of rule of law by itself.

The rule of the colonial powers was anything but stable, open and clear governance

A few key reasons point towards the inevitable failure of any substantive notions of rule of law in the colonies. Firstly, the concept could not overcome its origins. Despite its universal claims, rule of law could not transcend its European social roots and, thus, mostly remained an oppressive imposition patchily enforced when it was of benefit to the coloniser. This links to a second issue: as David Killingray notes in ‘The Maintenance of Law and Order in British Colonial Africa’ (1986), the concept of rule of law remained incompatible with the continuing need of colonial law to oppress and exploit the colonised population. Due to its very nature, the colonial state needed to possess autocratic powers: ‘Government was usually by decree or proclamation, while a battery of laws and reserve powers were directed at the maintenance and preservation of the colonial order.’ Thirdly, racial discrimination within the colony further weakened the commitment to rule of law. Indeed, as we have seen, despite the rhetorical stance of legal equality, legal practice and conventions awarded distinct privileges to the white population and frequently tolerated, and even excused, white violence against the non-white population.

Setting aside the substantive ideas of rule of law, the evaluation of the formalist notion of the doctrine in the British Empire also points to the failure of rule of law in the colonial setting. Within formalist ideas of rule of law, the thinnest conception of the doctrine takes the form of rule by law. Rule by law is the idea that law is the means by which the state conducts its affairs and, thus, easily collapses into the notion of the ‘rule by the government’. Such a doctrine places minimal limitations on state power, save seeking to offer protection to citizens and communities by restricting unfettered or arbitrary rule by the executive. Yet, even formalist notions of rule of law were regularly undermined by the frequent suspension of civil law through the invocation of autocratic martial law under which the colonised people’s already limited freedoms were further restricted and the rule of the colonial powers was anything but stable, open and clear governance. Across the empire, the British frequently resorted to martial law from the 19th century onward, especially in response to popular movements such as the Demerara slave rebellion of 1823 (in modern Guyana), the Indian Uprising of 1857, and the Mau Mau Uprising in Kenya in the mid-20th century.

Despite the obvious flaws in the rule of law doctrine in the British Empire, the discourse encountered an unexpected twist in the 20th century. As the struggle against colonialism intensified in Asia and Africa, British officials’ lack of commitment to rule of law in the colony came to be branded by the anticolonialists as ‘un-British’ and condemned as the ‘lawless law’ of British rule. On one hand, the idea of rule of law was denounced as simply being a veil to cover the colonial and capitalist exploitation of the colonies; on the other hand, colonised people actively chose to use the concept as a means of legal and political protection, resistance, collaboration and subversion.

Even a scholar such as E P Thompson, a Marxist historian who was critical of law as a device that mediates and reinforces existing class relations, valorised the idea of rule of law in Whigs and Hunters (1975) and described the British contribution to it as ‘a cultural achievement of universal significance’. In fact, Thompson, like others, justified the ‘goodness’ inherent in rule of law by arguing that Indian freedom fighters, including M K Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, had used the idea of rule of law in their quest for Indian independence. However, as critics of the doctrine highlight, it is important to remember that when colonised people couched their own demands for greater rights in the conceptual language of rule of law, they did so as a strategic move to gain legitimacy and visibility for their causes, and not necessarily as a commitment to the doctrine itself.

At the same time, the anticolonialists’ choice to use the rhetoric of rule of law in their own movements, even if it was a choice made for strategic reasons, points to the endurance of some of the ideals associated with the concept. Despite its status quo-ist nature, and complicity with liberal capitalist regimes, the doctrine has come to stand as shorthand for justice, equality and democracy, which were precisely the objectives that the anticolonial struggles of the 20th century sought to achieve. The enduring legacy of the doctrine to both colonial and anticolonial agendas continues in the 21st century, where the promotion of rule of law has devolved into a multi-billion-pound industry. While furthering neo-imperialist global structures, international developmental aid is routinely tied to rule-of-law commitments and is forced upon postcolonies in the Global South; at the same time, resistance movements in these countries seek to use the concept of rule of law to denounce global capitalist exploitation.

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LIVE: 3 dead, including child, 6 injured in Madison Abundant Life Christian School shooting, shooter dead

https://www.wmtv15news.com/2024/12/16/law-enforcement-responding-report-school-shooter-madison-abundant-life-christian-school/

 

 

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40 minutes ago, cosmicway2 said:

I am now cosmicway2.
I bought a new pc and I cannot login !!!
Login does n't work.
I want my badges back.

Is it really you ? How do we know you're not an imposter ? Where do you stand on commies ?

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6 minutes ago, Fulham Broadway said:

Is it really you ? How do we know you're not an imposter ? Where do you stand on commies ?

Now I signed in. Zaphod explained me - I was using my no 2 email instead of my no 1 email (and cosmicway2 used a third-fourth one to register).

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1 hour ago, Vesper said:

Our Top Story

This%20Modern%20World%20121724.jpg?cb=33

I think they've been underestimating the video game industry; or maybe it's a cry to get some of their "smart" money eh... but nbc certainly did try. 🤦‍♂️ even though the game he played is... let's say... unrealistic.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/ironic-suspect-unitedhealthcare-slaying-played-video-game-killer-rcna183550

Edited by robsblubot
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This faces up as some seriously fucked up shite.

You will not knock this out in one night. This is some heavy duty reading.

Methodology is discussed and there are plenty of charts and graphs to help you visually understand. It's an amaziing job: one that supports suspicions that this election may have been manipulated.

 

b766bd8964353c2c5e85c72e093e173a.png

https://smartelections.substack.com/p/the-press-release

 

Electors Voted Today

We thought it was a fitting day to send out a press release about our Study of the Drop-off Factor in the 2024 Presidential Election, along with the questions that the study raises about the election results. Below is the full press release. We hope you will share this widely. Share it with local, state and national media. Share it online. Share it with your friends, family and networks. It is a thorough and clear presentation of the issue designed to stimulate thought and conversation.

If we don’t talk about these issues, it will be much harder to solve them. The first step is to have the courage to express our doubts.

Drop-off By State & By County

Today we also released the state drop-off bar charts showing the drop-off as measured by raw number of votes and percentages in each state. If you’re not familiar with the drop-off phenomenon, it’s worth taking 10 minutes and reading our previous post on this.

What is drop-off? We measure the difference between the votes for the President and the next down-ballot race, both in raw numbers and in percentages for each major party (Democrat and Republican). Why measure this? READ OUR PRESS RELEASE!

Ohio is notable, with a 10% Republican drop-off and the Democratic Presidential candidate in negative territory, getting 4.63% less votes than the Democratic Senate candidate.

If you’d like to see the county by county data for a particular state there is a link on our website, below each state bar chart. That takes you to the spreadsheet for that state.

The spreadsheet shows you the drop-off by county for the entire state. The election results that the data refers to are in separate tabs on each spreadsheet.

Review the detailed Ohio drop-off analysis by county.

 

e5582074-3b63-4570-9fe8-f6251d903b0d_944

Review the detailed New York drop-off analysis by county.

 

5213aa50-e06b-4e85-a92e-2b707f639b3c_202

 

Review the detailed Montana drop-off analysis by county. Harris is almost 20% behind the Democratic Senate Candidate, Senator Tester, among Democratic voters.

e9c7b92b-3d1b-43e9-a90e-de224dc53026_956

Please link & credit when you share.

If you share our data, please link back to our work and credit the source.

Link either to our website, or the Substack post where you got the data:

Source: SMARTelections.us

Source: SMART Elections Substack

Please credit our work by copying and pasting this text:

Analysis by the SMART Elections Data Team. All rights reserved. ©2024 SMARTelections.us #SEDATA

That allows people to know the source of the data, have more confidence in it, and gives them the opportunity to get involved in improving our elections.

Here is the Full Press Release

Drop-off factor in Election Data Raises Questions About 2024 Election Results

December 17, 2024 | Source: SMARTelections.us

View in browser

New York, New York - - As electors in each state are voting for President and Vice President today, SMART Elections, a nonpartisan organization focused on security and public oversight of U.S. elections, is releasing a comprehensive analysis of the 2024 Presidential election phenomenon commonly referred to as “drop-off”. The detailed study includes six swing and eleven non-swing states and confirms what has been widely discussed on social media, Substacks, Reddit forums and among political advocates on both the left and right: in six of the seven swing states, and in all but four of the non-swing states they examined, there are considerably more votes for the Republican presidential candidate than for the next down-ballot race. The study calls this pattern “drop-off” and tracks the percentage of the drop-off and the number of votes involved, county by county, in all 17 states. The analysis for each state is available at SMARTelections.us

Drop-off: Democratic vs. Republican

By contrast, there is no large drop-off between the Democratic presidential candidate and the next down-ballot race. On the SMART Elections Substack, they post, “Instead, on the Democratic side, we find an opposite phenomenon. There are a large number of votes for the Democratic Senate candidate (or major down-ballot race) where there is no vote for the Democratic presidential candidate (Harris).”

Drop-off Leaves Democrats and Republicans Both Asking Questions

In a press conference on December 11th, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries called attention to the strange drop-off phenomenon. He opened the press conference by saying, “The elections are over and the American people have spoken. Former President Trump will be the next President of the United States of America.” However, Jeffries ended his press conference on a different note, pointing out the odd contrast that in five of the seven swing states where election results show Donald Trump as the victor, the Senate races and sometimes the majority of down-ballot races were swept by Democrats. “What happened in the other five?” he demanded. (24:24) “In North Carolina,” he continued, “notwithstanding the fact that Donald Trump won at the presidential level, Democrats won the Governor’s race, the Lieutenant Governor’s race, the Attorney General race, the Secretary of State race, and the State Supreme Court, in North Carolina, on that very same day that Donald Trump won the presidential election.”

Republicans have also taken note of the drop-off figures, wondering conversely why the large Republican vote for president is somehow not reflected in their Senate and other down-ballot races.

Number of Votes Involved is Larger Than Margin of Victory

The number of votes contained in these drop-off margins are startling. In five of the six swing states that are included in the analysis, the margin of drop-off votes is greater than the margin of victory.

  • Arizona

    • Drop-off margin = 267,956

    • Margin of victory = 187,382

    • Drop-off is 80,574 votes more than the margin of victory

  • Michigan

    • Drop-off margin = 99,109

    • Margin of victory = 80,103

    • Drop-off is 19,006 votes more than the margin of victory

  • Nevada

    • Drop-off margin = 70,067

    • Margin of victory = 46,008

    • Drop-off is 24,059 votes more than the margin of victory

  • North Carolina

    • Drop-off margin = 341,949

    • Margin of victory = 183,047

    • Drop-off is 158,902 votes more than the margin of victory

  • Wisconsin

    • Drop-off margin = 58,178

    • Margin of victory = 29,397

    • Drop-off is 28,781 votes more than the margin of victory

Methodology of the Study

In order to accomplish the analysis, SMART Elections assembled a team of data scientists to gather and analyze 2024 election results. The team meticulously extracted and cross-checked election data. Each analysis was done independently by two separate data analysts. The results were then compared and confirmed to be identical before publishing. In most states the analysis compares presidential votes to Senate votes in the same party. When there is no Senate race, the Attorney General or Governor’s race was used in the comparison instead.

Different Demographics, Similar Drop-off

The most unusual aspect of the drop-off is its consistency. Statistical oddities are usually explained by specific demographic realities. Certain populations with their idiosyncratic voting behavior patterns create specific data sets that can be unique. However, with regard to the drop-off numbers, states with vastly different demographics are exhibiting the same patterns. Arizona and North Carolina would seem to be quite removed from each other demographically. However, Harris has 6% fewer votes than the next down-ballot race in both states.

Causes of the Drop-off Remains a Mystery

What specifically is causing the drop-off is unclear. Possible explanations include:

  • Democratic Robert F. Kennedy Jr. supporters may have supported Trump in the presidential race due to Kennedy’s endorsement, but voted with the Democratic Party on down-ballot races.

  • Pro-Palestinian voters, especially young voters, may have chosen not to vote for president, or split their ticket.

  • Split-ticket voters may have chosen to cast a ballot for Trump while voting for down-ballot Democratic candidates.

  • New Republican voters were possibly excited for Trump and not other candidates.

  • Racial and gender bias against Vice President Harris may have contributed to her low numbers.

  • All of these may have been factors in the election results.

Some Explanations Don’t Add Up

The numbers for some of these explanations do not pan out. For example, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s poll numbers in Nevada, according to FiveThirtyEight, had fallen to 5% by late August when he dropped out and endorsed Trump.

The SMART Elections Data Team has calculated the drop-off by political party, but it can easily be calculated for all voters as well. The Republican drop-off was approximately 5% of all presidential voters (1,484,840 votes) in Nevada. Kennedy withdrew from the ballot in Nevada and threw his support to Trump in late August. In theory, the 5% of Nevada drop-off (calculated from the number above of all presidential voters) could be a result of Kennedy voters supporting Trump and then voting Democratic in the down-ballot races. But it is highly implausible that Trump received 100% of Kennedy’s 5% support and that 100% of those voters then voted for a split ticket.

By comparison, a study by Yale, Harvard, Columbia and MIT scholars found split-ticket voting by Democrats in 2020 was 1%.

Furthermore, there was not a single state where Kennedy actually received 5% of the vote. In states where he remained on the ballot, he generally received less than 1% of the vote. Nationally he received 0.5%.

The number of young people voting in 2024 is also insufficient to solely account for the drop-off. Exit poll data from the National Election Pool found that voters ages 18 to 29 made up just 14% of all ballots in the 2024 election. According to the same exit polls, Trump had 46% support among those young voters. So Trump’s 46% of the 14% of young voters equals a 6.4% conservative voting block nationwide. Using Nevada again as an example, in this case, we’ll compare the percentage of these young conservative Trump voters to the 9.87% Republican drop-off in Nevada. Clearly, a 6.4% voting block cannot create a 9.87% drop-off effect.

If Harris’ negative support in some states is due to young people, angered by her position on Gaza, not voting for president; then why in Michigan, with its high Muslim population and active don’t vote for president campaign, is her drop-off still positive—even normal— (0.87%)? But in Montana, a state with a much smaller pro-Gaza movement (100 - 150 protestors at this rally), Harris’ drop-off rate is negative -19%.

Possibly, some combination of the various explanations have combined to create these drop-off numbers, but the consistency of the drop-off across a vast array of demographic landscapes remains surprising.

Error or Manipulation Cannot Be Ruled Out

The possibility that the drop-off is connected to some type of error or manipulation cannot be ruled out. There is no concrete evidence of foul play, and Vice President Harris chose not to request recounts, but public confidence would benefit from further scrutiny of the election results.

SMART Elections recommends that all states conduct a transparent, public review of voting machine source code, audit logs, ballots, voter sign-in files, and election records, such as poll tapes, to generate confidence in the election results. This type of robust investigation would go a long way to reassure voters, especially if the process was open and inclusive. Co-founder and Executive Director Lulu Friesdat says, “Voters don’t want to wonder if their votes are counted correctly. They want to know.”

There are a number of well-established vulnerabilities to the U.S. voting machines in this election.

  • The hard-wired password to Dominion’s voting machines was well known and even published on t-shirts. Dominion is one of the two major U.S. voting machine vendors.

  • The Dominion password and alleged exploits were advertised prominently on an internet forum.

  • On November 18th, @RedBear331 with the handle “Hacking Democracy” makes multiple claims of accessing voting machine totals:

    • “What did we do? Added, switched, & deleted votes with SQL. No logs. No trails. Democracy? More like democracy, unplugged.”

    • 🚨 SQL Democracy – Mission Accomplished 🚨Democracy Suite EMS relies on duct tape & a backdoor password: "dvscorp08!" .This hardcoded "security" + SQL commands = Trump's victory. We started in AZ, GA, PA... but didn’t stop there.Your democracy is a house of cards. 🐻

    • “SQL database from a local EMS system (now Patriot County). Hardcoded backdoor password: "dvscorp08!", still live in systems across the country. Default Super Admin account Detailed exploit guide to replicate our methods. Screenshots of tampered registries”

  • A 2023 letter from top election security experts warned the Department of Justice that the majority of voting software used in the U.S. had been stolen and released on the internet. “The conspirators sought and obtained copies of voting system software from both Dominion Voting Systems and Election Systems & Software (ES&S), which together count over 70% of U.S. votes.” The experts convey urgency, even a sense of panic, saying, “democracy is literally on the ballot.” The letter was covered by PBS.

  • A more recent 2024 letter also to the Department of Justice by security advocates requests that “the Department of Justice (DOJ) initiate an investigation into the 2024 presidential election in light of reports of bomb threats, voter intimidation, voting system theft, documented "back doors" in that equipment that can be used to maliciously alter the results, and related concerns.”

Citing a Public Affairs Council study, Friesdat says, “Prior to the 2024 election, only 37% of Americans told researchers they believed the election would be both honest and open. The percentage of voters with complete confidence is likely even less now.”

SMART Elections is an innovative nonpartisan project. We advocate for improved election security and better public oversight. We want the public to have complete confidence in election results.

Media Contact:

Lulu Friesdat

Co-founder & Executive Director, SMART Elections

[email protected]

 

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