Strange Numbers
The Election Analysis You've Been Waiting For
What Happened in the 2024 Election?
I wish we could tell you. We do not know. We cannot make public claims about what we do not know. We are analyzing many aspects of the election carefully and trying to understand what is there. But to be clear—we don’t have any proof that the election results are incorrect or manipulated.
We are finding patterns in the data that seem strange, but these are strange times. The question of course is: are there legitimate explanations for the patterns, or do they reflect inaccurate or manipulated election results?
What is “Drop-off”
What we’re presenting today is an analysis of what we call “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).
The link at the top takes you to the spreadsheet with the summary data. That spreadsheet is drawn from individual state spreadsheets that we will be releasing shortly both here and on our website SMARTelections.us
Quick note: the “drop-off” here does not refer to ballots left in drop boxes. This data includes all ballots: Election Day, Early Voting, Absentee, Military and Provisional, if they were counted. Ballots left in drop boxes are included in absentee ballots. The drop-off in this context refers to the number of votes dropping off as we count down ballot races.
What we find is:
There are often many more votes for the Republican presidential candidate (Trump) than for the Republican Senate candidate (or major down-ballot race).
Especially in the swing states, we did not find this on the Democratic side.
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).
In data terms this shows up as a high percentage of Republican drop-off and a lower or even negative percentage of Democratic drop-off.
The bar charts in this post illustrate both the raw numbers and percentages of the drop-off on both the Republican and the Democratic side in the six swing states and eleven non-swing states that we examined. You can see in the graph that the Republican drop-off is averaging 5.58% in the swing states, while Democratic drop-off is in negative territory at -1.48%. Republican drop-off is still greater in the non-swing states, but the difference is less extreme: 2 % Republican drop-off compared to 1.37% Democratic drop-off.
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.
Republican Drop-off Larger Than Democratic Drop-off
There is absolutely a large difference in most states we examined between the votes for the Republican candidate and the votes for the Republican Senate or next down ballot race.
How Large is Large?
The differences between the Republican drop-off and the Democratic drop-off in the 2024 U.S. Presidential race are extreme. In the six swing states that we analyzed, on the Republican side, Trump had 752,508 votes more than the Republican Senate (or down-ballot) candidates.
Together with the non-swing states that we analyzed as well, Trump received 1.2 million votes more than the Senate or down-ballot candidates.
The margin of victory between Trump and Harris is currently at 2.3 million. The Republican presidential drop-off numbers from these 17 states alone is equal to more than half the margin of victory. If we calculate the other 33 states, it could come close to or surpass the margin of victory between the candidates.
In five of the six swing states we analyzed: Arizona, Nevada, Michigan, North Carolina & Wisconsin, the difference between the Republican and Democratic drop-off exceeds the margin of victory.
The Stigma of Expressing Doubt
There is a huge stigma around questioning election results in the U.S. Especially since the January 6th insurrection, the mainstream media has developed an arsenal of terms for people who are not completely confident that the U.S. election results reflect the will of the voters.
That stigma has been there for decades, despite the fact that there is a long, well-documented history of election fraud in the U.S. I invite you to read “Deliver the Vote: A History of Election Fraud, an American Political Tradition-1742-2004” by the esteemed Pulitzer-Prize nominated historian Tracy Campbell. You can read it for free here (we’ve just saved you the price of your Substack subscription). It is an often brutal and meticulously documented account of the many many ways that representatives of almost every political party in our nation’s history have used to cheat at elections.
But the pressure not to discuss the problems with our elections is not having the desired effect on voter confidence. Just the opposite: poll after poll after poll finds that many voters do not have confidence in U.S. elections. A global study finds that, “The U.S. Now Ranks 43rd on Election Confidence… in the bottom half of high-income countries around the world.” Nationally about 40% of voters lack confidence in the accuracy of election results and the percentage among Republicans is much higher.
A Republican friend, Kim Hermance, wrote this to me about her experience not believing the results of the 2020 election: “You were deplatformed, doxxed, vilified, called names, people lost jobs etc... for even suggesting something was wrong let alone be part of a group looking into it. NO ONE was willing to help. You were risking your livelihood and safety. I used an assumed name for 2 years. Seriously, I was afraid.” Kim co-founded Project Civica, a grassroots civic participation organization that SMART Elections has collaborated with on poll watching and other election protection efforts. We have a mutual goal of building bridges across the political spectrum and finding common ground to improve U.S. elections.
Spoonamore
The drop-off data has been controversial from the beginning. The drop-off concept was put forward by technology executive and longtime election security advocate Stephen Spoonamore. He published two Duty to Warn letters where he called the phenomenon “bullet ballots” saying:
“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.
His conclusion:
“In my view, a capable and skilled series of exploits, electronic tools and hacks were used to change the Presidential vote in all seven swing states. These activities have reversed the outcomes in at least Arizona, Michigan, North Carolina, and Wisconsin.”
Spoonamore recieved a tremendous amount of pushback on the claim that there were large numbers of “bullet ballots” in the election. This is because bullet ballot is a specific term that usually refers to the use of a single vote in a contest where you could vote for more than one candidate. Like when you can vote for six judges, but you only vote for one to give your top choice more mileage. Based on the analysis of cast vote records in a few states by the Emeritus Chair of the University of South Carolina Computer Science Department, Duncan Buell, there do not appear to be an unusually large number of “bullet ballots” in the election as analyzed so far. Spoonamore has altered the term he is using to describe this phenomenon, but continues to believe that there is something amiss in the election results.
“I was also wrong to have used the term Bullet Ballots in my DTW letter. I apologize. Again. The urgency to warn in Cyber is real. If you wait on an exfiltration, you lose. Unfortunately the Bullet Ballot hypothesis has caused a lot of discord and distraction …They may be a part of the issue, but it is very clear a very large set of irregularities exists in this election.”
We’re grateful to Stephen for having the insight and the courage to alert the public to this issue.
Drop-off vs. Bullet Ballots
What’s the difference?
We are measuring drop-off. Not bullet ballots. That means we don’t know if the voter placed other votes further down the ballot. We don’t have access to the actual ballots or digital ballot images right now to find out. We are measuring the difference between votes for the President and the Senate candidates (or other major down ballot races) — for the Republicans and the Democrats. And then we’re comparing those numbers to each other. As we said at the top, we call this “drop-off”.
The Data is Accurate
Our data is accurate, based on the available election data at the time of the analysis. (As of this date, some states are still labeling their results as preliminary, but they are rapidly finalizing their results.)
How do we know our data is correct?
We use a reliable source. Our data is from uselectionatlas.org, which was recommended as a reliable source of clean election data by one of our top technical advisors. For the North Carolina Attorney General race we took our data from the North Carolina State Board of Elections website.
Multiple team members checked each data extraction.
The analysis was performed independently by two experienced data scientists. They did not share results until each one had completed the analysis. Their results were identical, giving us confidence that the analysis is accurate. We are extremely grateful to them, and the entire SMART Elections Data Team for the enormous amount of time, skill and dedication that has been devoted to this effort.
If you think there is a mistake in the data, please alert us at SMARTelectionsACT@gmail.com. Please put DATA UPDATE in the subject line.
Our Methodology
We extracted each state’s election result by county. For each county we calculated the difference in votes between the Presidential candidate and the Senate candidate on both the Republican and Democratic side. That is, we calculated the difference between the the votes for President-elect Donald Trump in a given county and the votes for the Republican Senate candidate in that county. Then we calculated the difference between the votes for Vice President Kamala Harris and the votes for the Democratic Senate candidate in that state, in that county. In two states, North Carolina and Delaware, we used other down-ballot races because there was no Senate race. For the moment, we have not analyzed Georgia. There is no Senate or statewide race there.
The difference between the Presidential vote and the next down-ballot race, is the raw number of “drop-off” votes. Then we divided those Republican drop-off votes by the number of votes for the Republican presidential candidate (Trump) and we divided the Democratic drop-off votes by the number of votes for the Democratic presidential candidate. That gave us the drop-off percentages for each political party.
These percentages are vastly different on the Republican and Democratic side. The drop-off on the Republican side is very high - in some swing states it averages close to 10%. Meaning close to 10% of Republican Presidential voters did not vote for a Republican Senate candidate. In Ohio the Republican drop-off is over 10%. In Rockland County New York the Republican drop-off rate is 23%.
The Democratic drop-off by contrast is low in most states we examined and actually in negative territory in more than half of this data set. In Arizona, North Carolina and Ohio, the Democratic drop-off is -5%, or lower. That means that according to these results 5% or more of democratic leaning voters, chose to vote for the Democratic Senate candidate, but decided not to vote for the Democratic candidate for president. In Arizona for example there is an almost 16% spread between the Republican and the Democratic drop-off.
What’s Next?
There is a lot to discuss about this pattern, primarily: what is causing it?
There is a huge spectrum of opinion about this.
One academic called the whole issue, “nonsense.” But many other experienced individuals are finding the drop-off pattern very disturbing. They worry it’s an unnatural trend in the data; and they are concerned the election results may have been hacked.
Both Democrats and Republicans have expressed these concerns. Democrats are considering the possibility that votes have been added to the Republican presidential race or deleted from the Democratic ticket. Republicans are considering the possibility that votes were deleted from Republican down-ballot races. For example, there is polling showing that Keri Lake was running just behind President-elect Trump in Arizona, and conservative advocates believe that the official results do not reflect her actual support.
What’s Causing the Drop-off?
Other speculation about the cause of the drop-off numbers includes these suggestions:
Democratic RFK voters crossed over in the presidential race, but stayed with the Democrats on down ballot races.
Pro-Palestinian voters, especially young voters chose not to vote for president.
New Republican voters were excited for Trump and no one else.
Racial and gender bias against Vice President Harris caused her to under-perform.
We’ll be exploring these suggestions next. We’ll especially focus on what data is available to support or refute these arguments. Stay Tuned…
December 17th the Electoral College Meets
Electors for the Electoral College meet December 17th to elect the President and Vice President.
We have a lot more to do to fully investigate what happened in the 2024 election, and to lay the groundwork for improved U.S. elections long term. If you find our work valuable, please subscribe and consider making a tax-deductible donation as well.
Think for yourself, or others will think for you without thinking of you.
~ Henry David Thoreau
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How do these huge drop off votes for Trump in swing states compare historically? Have we seen anything like this before? I have a real hard time believing that several hundred thousand citizens would vote Democrat on the down ballot races -- for senate or attorney general, etc. -- but then pick Trump for president. I'm not an expert in the field, but it seems to me the only way to get at the guts of what happened is still a Forensic Audit, a close up examination of the ballots compared to the votes tallied. Interestingly, Jackie Singh just published details on Twitter and Reddit that implicate an infamous Russian hack in controlling the GOP and our elections. More should come from that.Thank you for your work.
Please see a Reddit-community-driven explanation of how AI and brand new Direct to Cell satellite tech could have been used to insert drop off ballots and cause these strange results. https://substack.com/home/post/p-153003086