Despite more than 60 failed legal challenges across the USA, Donald Trump continues to assert that the 2020 US presidential election was “stolen” from him by Joe Biden and the Democrats. He has never been able to provide any credible evidence to back up this claim. In fact, his own attorney, Rudi Giuliani, was forced to pay damages to two election workers after making baseless allegations that they had helped to falsify the result in Georgia.
Now, in a court case in the USA, evidence is starting to emerge of – let us say – ‘mysterious results’ ballots held in New York and elsewhere in November 2024, which appeared to help Trump. The case is in its early stages – there is nothing definitive yet – but evidence points to results that are, to say the least, difficult to explain. In what would be a stunning reversal, it is not impossible that Trump benefitted from election irregularities and ‘stole’ the 2024 election.
Peculiar results in Rockland County
Rockland County is located west of the Hudson River and is part of the New York metropolitan area, with a population around 340,000. In the 2024 general election, some precincts there reported rather bizarre results.
For instance, in Precinct 35 in the town of Ramapo, Democratic Senate candidate Kirsten Gillibrand received 331 votes while the Republican candidate got just 82. At the top of the ticket was Kamala Harris, the Democrat’s presidential candidate. How many of her colleague’s Democrat supporting voters ticked a box for her? Zero. That’s right, none. Not a single person in Precinct 35 opted for Harris. Meanwhile, Trump received a thumping 552 votes, 100% of the total. Amazing, eh?
Weird and wonderful results in other districts
In Precinct 58, Gillibrand received 544 votes to her opponent’s 34. But in the presidential race, Trump got 588 votes (99.66%) to Harris’s measly two. Similarly in Precinct 55, Gillibrand received 909 votes, her Republican opponent, Michael Sapraicone, just 42. But Trump, on the same ticket, received 986 votes (99.8%) and Harris again only two.
Here are the actual printouts for Precinct 55:
The ‘drop-off’ rate
Across these three districts, out of 1,784 voters who picked the Democrat’s candidate for senator, only four voted for Harris. Trump, on the other hand, received 2,120 votes, amounting to 99.81% – a result that defies belief. It’s not unknown for voters to ‘split’ their vote – choosing one party to represent them in the Senate and another for president – a phenomenon known as the drop-off rate. However, these numbers are far beyond what can normally be expected.
A comprehensive academic study of voting in the US 2020 election, published in Nature in November 2024, found the drop-off rate in the battleground states was between 1.2% and 1.9%. This sounds reasonable to me. There are always some voters who for one reason or another can’t stand a presidential candidate for the political party that they prefer. But it’s a far cry from the near total drop-off of the Democratic vote in the above districts.
A legal challenge in Rockland
Diane Sare (LaRouche Party), the third candidate in the Senate race in Rockland, has now brought a legal challenge against the local Board of Elections, alleging they undercounted votes for her in the 2024 election. She was recorded as having received five and two votes in districts 39 and 62, respectively. Afterward, Sare did a quick survey of her own street and found more people voted for her than Rockland’s tally showed. She now has sworn affidavits from six voters in District 39 and three in District 62 who say they voted for her and is confident many more will be uncovered.
Sare is supported by Smart Elections, a group that describes itself as “experienced, non-partisan election security advocates”. Their independent research showed the drop-off rate in non-swing states in 2024 was broadly within the margins indicated in the Nature paper. But in six of the swing states, the rate for Trump virtually tripled, winning him the election:
And while Trump overperformed by a huge amount, Harris underperformed in exactly the same in the swing states.
Some fruity allegations
An anonymous, anti-Musk Substack account, This Will Hold, has made some extraordinary allegations, which look more like wild conspiracy theories rather that serious evidence and have not at this stage been substantiated by any reputable sources.
The author links Musk, tenuously, to a company providing battery back-ups and surge protectors, Tripp Lite, owned by Eaton Corporation, which is said to have a partnership with Palantir, founded by Peter Thiel, a well-known contributor to right-wing causes and the man behind Vice President JD Vance’s meteoric rise to political prominence.
Tripp Lite products, it is alleged, were connected to various devices and voting tabulators across the USA powered by software from Election Systems & Software and were somehow capable of being used to remotely manipulate the election result.
The Substack author claims:
“The data makes no statistical sense. A clean sweep in all seven swing states. The fall of the Blue Wall. Eighty-eight counties flipped red – not one flipped blue.
“Every victory landed just under the threshold that would trigger an automatic recount. Donald Trump outperformed expectations in down-ballot races with margins never before seen – while Kamala Harris simultaneously underperformed in those exact same areas.
“If one were to accept these results at face value – Donald Trump, a 34-count convicted felon, supposedly outperformed Ronald Reagan. According to the co-founder of the Election Truth Alliance: ‘These anomalies didn’t happen nationwide. They didn’t even happen across all voting methods – this just doesn’t reflect human voting behaviour.’
“They were concentrated. Targeted. Specific to swing states and Texas – and specific to Election Day voting. And the supposed explanation? ‘Her policies were unpopular.’
“[The drop-off was]:
- Not in early voting.
- Not by mail.
- With exception to Nevada, only on Election Day.
“And only after a certain threshold of ballots had been cast—where VP Harris’s numbers begin to diverge from her own party, and Trump’s suddenly begin to surge.
“As President Biden would say, ‘C’mon, man’.”
The other side of the coin
There are others who claim the Ramapo results are nothing out of the ordinary. Experts have told PolitiFact they’re simply the result of a town with a large Orthodox and Hasidic Jewish population bloc voting in support of their rabbis’ endorsed candidates. Moreover, Trump beat Biden in Precinct 35 in the 2020 election, with a similar result, winning by 528 votes to nil. That’s an uncomfortable killer fact for the conspiracy theorists.
In any case, Harris won New York State by over a million votes, so it makes no sense to hack the results in a few small precincts in a state Trump was never expected to win.
However, before dismissing the story altogether, similar allegations were made in January in Newsweek by the Election Truth Alliance, another non-partisan non-profit organisation which claimed that in Clark County, Nevada, the results were “consistent with vote manipulation”. This was also based on an analysis of the drop-off rate.
And in 2022, a candidate in a primary election in Georgia for the DeKalb County Board of Commissioners was “shortchanged by 3,792 votes” as a result of “computer programming” and “human” errors. Michelle Long Spears, who had received over 2,000 early votes found that in all but four of the district’s nearly 40 precincts, she recorded no Election Day votes at all!
A hand-recount uncovered the series of technical errors and Long Spears was declared the winner. This is all reported in The New York Times.
Uncovering the truth at last?
Trump has hinted at possible shenanigans. Before his inauguration, he praised Elon Musk, saying: “he knows those computers better than anybody, all those computers, those vote-counting computers, and we ended up winning Pennsylvania, like, in a landslide.”
More recently Musk claimed on X that: “Without me, Trump would have lost the election, Dems would control the House and the Republicans would be 51-49 in the Senate.”
We may soon get to the truth in Rockland County at least. A judge in the New York Supreme Court ruled a couple of weeks ago that ‘discovery’ must now take place, shifting the lawsuit into an evidence-gathering stage. Sare is requesting a full hand-recount of both the presidential and US Senate races across all districts in Rockland.
For Trump, winning is everything – at any cost
Whether any definitive wrongdoing will be found is unknown. But we do know that Trump attempted to manipulate the 2020 result in Georgia, because there’s a recording of him asking Georgia’s Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” 11,780 votes.
Trump frequently accuses his opponents of being guilty of the crimes or wrongdoings that he himself is either contemplating or has already carried out. The convicted felon, long-time fraudster, grifter and adjudicated rapist is constantly on the alert for ways to cheat or scam his way to success.
He is no student of the Constitution or respecter of democratic norms, or even of democracy itself. Only winning matters to Trump – and by any means. A man who can make provably false claims of election fraud and orchestrate an insurrection to overthrow a democratically elected government may not be averse to a bit of election rigging himself.
If anyone would attempt it, it’s him.
High stakes and bold claims – but no hard evidence (yet)
If Trump had lost the 2024 election, he would probably now be facing a prison sentence, with more serious charges being pressed against him. For Trump, the stakes last November could not have been higher.
But, at the moment, all the talk about the 2024 election being rigged remains conjecture – there aren’t any official investigations looking into it. None of the claims have challenged the overall outcome of the election. And even if irregularities are uncovered, Trump has been confirmed by the Senate and nothing will change that.
