“She Won” election conspiracy theories defy belief and do not help

Over the past two weeks, I’ve seen a few friends share a post alleging a sweeping conspiracy to steal the presidential election–not the 2020 election, as Donald Trump and his cult followers have been alleging without proof ever since, but the 2024 contest. These friends have not vouched for the theory put forth in that post and a series of others posted at a newsletter site; at most, they’ve said things along the lines of “these raise interesting questions.”

So I read those “This Will Hold” posts and a separate report posted by a group called the Common Coalition. To summarize thousands of words of copy: They allege that surprising results in swing states and even individual counties–notably, voters choosing Democrats downballot and then picking Trump or not voting for any presidential candidate–are too statistically unlikely to be the result of voters making their own choices and instead are the result of an elaborate plot involving compromised Tripp Lite uninterruptible power supplies that were remotely reprogrammed on Elon Musk’s orders via SpaceX’s Starlink satellites to change vote totals on Dominion and ES&S voting systems.

No, really. Speaking as a tech journalist who has written a fair amount about SpaceX and as a poll worker who has put in 15-plus hour days helping people to vote in nine elections: I’m sorry, but I can only regard them as engagingly-written claptrap. 

Here’s why I think that:

• If so many UPSes were shipped with hidden cellular modems and antennas to election offices in counties, cities and states run by Democratic administrations, how have none of them surfaced? (Bear in mind, election offices don’t have huge budgets to buy high-end hardware. I have never seen anything but generic power strips in my own polling places.)
• At the end of 2024 and still today, Starlink’s only widely-available service to phones is text messaging. SpaceX has done limited tests of data, but Elon Musk was willing to roll the dice on that working clandestinely in dozens or hundreds of devices across the U.S.? 
• Trump or Musk tweeting out absurd claims or preditions is no kind of proof or confession, because they both shitpost all the time while rarely intersecting with reality.
• No part of this extensive conspiracy inside SpaceX has leaked at any point, even as SpaceX employees have come forward to accuse Musk of sexual harassment and indifference to workplace safety at considerable risk to themselves. 
• This Will Hold’s posts don’t mention the “risk-limiting audits” that a growing number of states conduct to check for exactly this kind of post-election ballot tampering. Nevada’s, for example, found “no variations” from the reported results. Ignoring risk-limiting audits in a theory of election fraud is an enormous tell, because election-integrity experts will tell you they’re as essential as hand-marked paper ballots scanned by machines (which is why every state should adopt them). See, for example, the National Academies’ 2018 report Securing the Vote: Protecting American Democracy.
• If people really had cast votes for Harris that somehow vanished, why have we not seen that variance in post-election polling and surveys of voters? See, for example, the data-science firm Catalist’s “What Happened in 2024” analysis and the Pew Research Center’s just-published report on 2024 turnout.
• Many voters really did leave the presidential part of their ballot blank. In Virginia (where the first warnings of a Kamala Harris loss were returns from Loudoun County showing her underperforming Biden’s 2020 numbers), the former vice president got 2,335,395 votes while Sen. Tim Kaine (D) got 2,417,115 votes. In my state and, it seems, others, her problem was Trump getting more turnout from 2020 voters and from new voters than she did.
• Musk spending $250 million and change to persuade those people to vote probably did shape the outcome. So did Trump lying about his opponent and a great many other things while presenting himself as an icon of never-surrender success, with Fox News amplifying all that. But the die may have been cast when Joe Biden decided to run for reelection despite evident trouble selling his message and then not dropping out until July of 2024—leaving Harris to answer the hardest call to the bullpen in American presidential-election history. 

The unfortunate and ugly reality is that American voters showed awful judgment last November, and we are now all paying the price for that. There’s just a meanness in this world, as Springsteen sings, and our country is not and has never been exempt from it. Conspiracy theories might help people think otherwise, but this kind of self-delusional behavior will not help write a different script for 2026 and 2028.