NC and the Bullet Ballot Conspirasy
What is the Bullet Ballot Conspiracy
There are at least two primary threads that claim that the 2024 election was stolen by Trump. One claim is brought by a group of computer scientists who assert that voting machine software has been compromised. This group has published a public letter to Kamala Harris outlining their concerns. Their letter states in part:
In the light of the breaches we ask that you formally request hand recounts in at least the states of Michigan, Nevada, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. We have no evidence that the outcomes of the elections in those states were actually compromised as a result of the security breaches, and we are not suggesting that they were. But binding risk-limiting audits (RLAs) or hand recounts should be routine for all elections, especially when the stakes are high and the results are close. We believe that, under the current circumstances when massive software breaches are known and documented, recounts are necessary and appropriate to remove all potential doubt and to set an example for security best practices in all elections.
Note that North Carolina is not identified as needing a hand recount. I’ll look at reasons that our state is probably not included below.
The “bullet ballot conspiracy” where Stephen Spoonamore alleges that the election was stolen and partially justifies as follows:
Approximately 600,000 votes are for Donald Trump but with no down ballot choices. These are either inserted “bullet ballots” for the Presidential race or manipulated data fields. They are surgically added to totals in limited jurisdictions and within only the seven swing States. This historically unprecedented set of numbers found in the 2024 swing states is absent in every other state. 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. It is a bespoke and programmed outcome.
Spoonamore further states:
North Carolina is the most extreme. The public results indicate over 350K voters cast a ballot for Trump and no other race making up over 11% of Trump’s voters in NC drop off votes or bullet ballots.
He then goes on to describe layer upon layer of speculation regarding the mechanics of the theft of the election.
A “bullet ballot” seems to be one where the ballot records a vote at the top of the ticket but does not record a vote for any down-party races. We’ll return to this as we examine the data later.
NC Election Security
NC secures the votes of its citizens in a number of ways. Most appropriate to highlight in face of the current assertions are:
Paper Ballots: Under state law, all 100 counties use paper ballots, producing a paper trail which can be easily audited or recounted.
Voting Equipment Testing: Before every election, county boards of elections conduct logic and accuracy tests on every voting machine that will be used in the election to ensure proper coding of ballots and counting of votes for every contest on the ballot.
Post-Election Audits: After every election and before results are certified, the State and County Boards of Elections conduct multiple checks designed to detect irregularities, such as equipment tampering, ballot stuffing, and voting machine or tabulation errors. In the sample hand-count audit, for example, two voting sites are selected at random in every county, counted by hand by bipartisan teams, and compared with the machine-counted results. This audit helps confirm the accuracy of voting equipment.
While there has not been a state-wide recount, by the time the NC election results are certified 200 voting sites will have been randomly selected for hand counts and those results compared to the results of the automated tabulations.
Publicly Available Data
NC makes a vast amount of election data available to the public. Voter registration data is available at the individual voter level as well as voting history data (the fact that a person voted is captured however the voters actual votes are not public information). I have been unable to find a dataset that provides raw ballot data. One could argue that much could be learned by making this dataset available (without data that could be used to link the ballot to a specific individual). Without the ability to examine ballot-by-ballot which choices were made by race it is impossible to prove that there are a specific number of ballots cast for a given presidential candidate that did not include a vote in any other races.
What the data tells us
More votes were cast for president than for other state-wide races
Total votes cast for the US Presidential race exceeds the number of votes for any of the other state-wide races that I sampled. This is true for 2020 and for 2024. I calculated the total vote counts for the races because those numbers are publicly available. For each of the state-wide races I analyzed I subtracted the total votes cast in the state-wide race from the total votes cast in the presidential race to get the aggregate drop-off from the presidential race. I then divided by the number of votes cast in the presidential race to get a percent that I could compare between 2020 and 2024. Here are the results:
The most notable delta between 2020 and 2024 is that the race for governor was much more competitive in 2020. In 2024 the Republican candidate, Mark Robinson, was involved in a scandal that resulted in a far less competitive race. Once we understand the dynamics of that race the large discrepancy between the years is understandable. In all other races the results are comparable from year to year with some races having a greater drop-off in 2020 and others having a greater drop-off in 2024.
The best we can say at this level is that the findings are at best unremarkable.
I’ve also dug around in the data to see if I could find a way to approximate Spoonamore’s assertion that 11% or more than 350k voters voted only for Trump and no other candidate. I did a county-by-county comparison of all Republican votes cast in the presidential race as well as all the other races above. Since there is no way for the public to understand the actual content of specific ballots I thought this would be an interesting way to see if I could approximate the total of 350k alleged “Trump Bullet Ballots.” No joy.
I then compared specifically to the Governor’s race. The drop-off between Trump votes and votes for Robinson was almost 657,000 votes so that isn’t what he’s looking at.
I could probably spend the rest of my life trying to determine precisely how he came up with that number and still not figure it out. Instead I invite
to share the methodology used to determine this number for North Carolina so we can continue this conversation on a more level playing field. Perhaps he has some insight into publicly available NC data that I have not yet found or perhaps he can share the set of specific assumptions that allowed him to arrive at the assertions he captures in his note.Should Mr. Spoonamore find the information relevant I utilized the precinct level results for the 2020 and 2024 elections available from the NC Board of Elections website. Specifically https://s3.amazonaws.com/dl.ncsbe.gov/ENRS/2020_11_03/results_pct_20201103.zip and https://s3.amazonaws.com/dl.ncsbe.gov/ENRS/2024_11_05/results_pct_20241105.zip respectively.
The format for both files can be found at https://s3.amazonaws.com/dl.ncsbe.gov/ENRS/layout_results_pct.txt.
I do not claim that I have disproved Spoonamore’s assertions - only that with a county-by-county analysis of vote counts I have so far been unable to find any evidence to support the assertions documented on his post. I’m happy to do a deeper dive should more specifics be forthcoming.
I'm putting together a post that address a number of the charges (from the left) that the election was stolen. Look for it in a day or two.