By Michael J. Talmo, May 1,2025
The facts presented in this article aren’t going to be pleasant. There is no way to sugarcoat how utterly corrupt elections in my country, the United States of America, really are. My reason for pointing out this unpleasant reality is not to discourage people from voting. On the contrary, my goal is to encourage people to become more involved in the political process, to better educate themselves, and to work to fix what is so terribly wrong.
On several occasions during the 2024 election campaign, then-candidate Donald Trump repeatedly told his supporters:
“Don’t worry about voting. The voting — we got plenty of votes.”
It’s easy for some to dismiss Trump’s comments as the ravings of a deranged, nearly eighty-year-old narcissistic psychopath who’s also showing signs of dementia. But in spite of running the worst campaign I ever saw, lying his ass off, and saying and doing some of the dumbest shit imaginable, such as claiming that Haitian immigrants are eating cats and dogs, falsely claiming that kids in school are getting sex change surgery without their parents’ consent, and simulating oral sex on an imaginary microphone, he won. Or did he?
Trump admitted it. Or did he?
On January 19, 2025, at a rally at Capital One Arena in Washington, D.C., the day before his inauguration (the entire speech can be watched here), C-SPAN reported that Trump boldly stated:
“I got both of them. I got the Olympics, and I got the World Cup. And I said, you know, it’s too bad. One was in 2026, and the other was in 2028. I said, I won’t be there; I won’t be your president. But then they rigged the election, and now we won, so I’m going to be your president for the Olympics and for the World Cup.”
Los Angeles Magazine reported Trump made a similar statement two months later in the Oval Office while bragging that he was responsible for the World Cup and the Olympics being held in the US:
“When we made this, it was made during my term, my first term, and it was so sad because I said, can you imagine, I’m not going to be president, and that’s too bad. And what happened is they rigged the election and I became president, so that was a good thing.”
Fact-checking sites Politico and Lead Stories insist that Trump was referring to the 2020 election, which he and his supporters claim was stolen by Biden, while Snopes reported that “it’s unclear whether Trump was referring to the 2020 or 2024 presidential election.”
However, at that same rally, Trump also made this comment about Elon Musk regarding his victory in Pennsylvania:
“And then he journeyed to Pennsylvania, where he spent like a month and a half campaigning for me in Pennsylvania. And he’s a popular guy. And he was very effective. And he knows those computers better than anybody. All those computers. Those vote-counting computers. And we ended up winning Pennsylvania like in a landslide, so that was pretty good. It was pretty good. So, thank you to Elon.”
Yet, in spite of possibly confessing to one of the most egregious crimes there is, the crowd cheered him. What a sad reflection on how low my country has sunk.
The evidence
Let’s be clear on one thing: even if Trump was saying it was the 2024 election that was rigged and implied that Elon Musk had hacked the voting machines, it doesn’t prove it really happened. We need hard evidence. Unfortunately, we don’t have that evidence when it comes to the voting machines. What we have is probability.
Since elections are historical events and having studied historical methodology, probability means what most likely happened based on all that we know about whatever we’re looking at. We then look at what lines of evidence we have to support or not support whatever the prior probability is. And in my opinion, after looking at the evidence, the probability is very high that the 2024 election was rigged.
In 2023, the Los Angeles Times reported on a 14-page letter sent to then-Attorney General Merrick Garland, the FBI, and the Department of Homeland Security in December 2022. The letter was from sixteen computer science/security experts, some of whom regularly tested/inspected the voting machines used in various states. They wrote this letter to express their concern that, unlike in some states, there had yet to be an investigation by the federal government into the fact that Trump operatives gained access to the software in various voting machines and that such access could allow them to alter election results.
Page 2:
“The same software is used in voting systems across the U.S. Its misappropriation and distribution pose serious risks to the credibility and trustworthiness of election results. The matter urgently requires your agencies’ attention.”
Page 3:
“Access to the software enables bad actors to install the software on their own hardware to create their own exact replicas of voting systems, probe them, and develop exploits. They can decompile the software to get the source code, study it for vulnerabilities, and develop malware tailored to the system. Such malware can be loaded onto systems by a poll worker, maintenance worker, or even a voter: little physical access is needed. Nor is internet access needed. Bad actors could use the software to develop ways to cause the system to malfunction to prevent voters from voting or to manipulate the vote count.”
I sent emails to some of the people who signed on to the aforementioned letter. I got a reply from two. One of them told me this regarding hacking today’s electronic voting machines:
“But if this were done by smart people, then the hack would erase itself on the way out, so there would be no way to determine later that the hack had been there.”
A similar statement was published in the peer-reviewed journal Texas National Security Review in 2020:
“The voting systems responsible for casting and tallying votes still possess many of the same security vulnerabilities computer scientists found in them 20 years ago—vulnerabilities that would allow skilled actors to alter votes without leaving any trace.”
Talk show podcaster Joe Rogan claimed that Musk created a computer app that gave him the results four hours before the election was called. Again, this is not evidence—it’s hearsay. But the fact that Trump operatives did get access to the software in voting machines is not hearsay—it’s fact. But this doesn’t mean that Musk’s Starlink satellites were used to hack voting machines—there have always been lots of other ways.
But manipulating voting machines is only one way to steal an election. Another much older and more common method is disenfranchising eligible voters. This type of election fraud has a long history, and there are different ways to do it.
Greg Palast is an investigative reporter and journalist who regularly works for the BBC and The Guardian. In this 2025 article, he laid out in detail how Trump’s cronies stole the 2024 election. He reported that “if all legal voters were allowed to vote, if all legal ballots were counted, Trump would have lost the states of Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Georgia. Vice-President Kamala Harris would have won the Presidency with 286 electoral votes” and that “Harris would have gained at least another 3,565,000 votes, topping Trump’s official popular vote tally by 1.2 million.”
The only problem is some of the data Palast uses goes back to the early 2000s—it’s old, as talk show host David Parkman pointed out in this video. Another problem is I can’t even find some of the statistics Palast is citing.
Example: In the 2025 article I quoted, Palast claims that 1,216,000 provisional ballots were rejected, as in not counted. Yet, on this page on his website, he claims that “according to the official count of the federal Elections Assistance Commission, 2.7 million provisional ballots were rejected.” I can’t find either statistic anywhere. I emailed Palast last February, telling him who I am and about my plans to do an article on election fraud. I asked him to verify the data he was presenting, but I got no reply.
So, let’s analyze the 2024 election with reliable, verifiable data.
Trump was the first Republican presidential candidate to win the popular vote in 20 years. He got 2,284,967 more votes nationwide than Kamala Harris—77,302,580-75,017,613. However, forty-eight of the fifty states (Vermont and Maine excluded) have laws that prohibit citizens convicted of a felony from voting. These are known as felony disenfranchisement laws.
The Sentencing Project reported that 4,049,978 Americans nationwide were unable to vote in the 2024 election due to felony convictions. Obviously, we can’t know how those over four million people would have voted. Probability and just plain common sense dictate that not all of them would have voted for Harris. Some probably wouldn’t have voted at all. The real question is, what percentage would have voted for Harris based on the many more millions of people who did vote?
Scroll down to this chart, which breaks down voters by race. 57% of White people voted for Trump, 42% voted for Harris, 13% of Black people voted for Trump, 86% voted for Harris, 46% of Latinos voted for Trump, and 51% voted for Harris.
Scroll down to the Sentencing Project data; out of the 4,049,978 disenfranchised felons, 1,336,305 are Black. 86%, or 1,149,222, votes would go to Harris, and 13%, or 173,720, votes would go to Trump. 495,647 felons who can’t vote are Latino. 46%, or 227,998, votes would go to Trump, and 51%, or 252,780, votes would go to Harris. Out of the 2,218,026 remaining White felons, 57%, or 1,264,275 votes, would go to Trump, and 42%, or 931,571 votes, would go to Harris. This would give Trump 1,665,993 additional votes, and Harris would get an additional 2,333,573 votes (couldn’t find any data on the number of Asian and Native American felons who could potentially vote).
As reported here, 88,380,679 early and mail-in ballots were cast. 48%, or 42,422,726, were mail-in ballots. The rejection rate for mail-in ballots in federal elections has been overall increasing since 2016. The rejection rate for the 2022 midterm election was 1.5%. I wasn’t able to find the rejection rate for 2024, so I’m going to speculate high and say it’s 3%, or 1,272,682 rejected voters.
Even If all of the aforementioned rejected votes were for Harris, which I have no way of knowing, so I’m being super generous, 2,333,573 felons + 1,272,682 rejected mail-in voters + 75,017,613 = 78,623,868 votes for Harris. 77,302,580 + 1,665,993 felons = 78,968,573 votes for Trump. Based on my generous numbers with the mail-in ballots, Trump still wins the popular vote by 344,705.
As for provisional ballots, which are used when someone tries to vote in person or by mail and finds out they have been kicked off the voter rolls, I was unable to find any data on how many were used nationwide.
But the popular vote doesn’t elect the president—the electoral college does. The popular vote chooses which political party’s electors will cast the vote for president in each state. Looking at the vote counts in all the states, I doubt if voter purges alone would change the outcome.
Example: Trump won the crucial battleground state of Pennsylvania by 120,266 votes. In Pennsylvania, 4.92%, or 4,800, provisional ballots were rejected; 41,282 convicted felons couldn’t vote, and 1,958,000 mail-in ballots were received, of which 1%, or 19,580, were rejected, which totals up to 65,662 lost votes. Even if I generously, and unrealistically, give every single one of these people to Kamala Harris, she still loses to Trump by 54,604 votes based on voter disenfranchisement alone. Let’s also keep in mind that some of those provisional ballots overlap with the mail-in votes. But I’m working with incomplete data, so I don’t know how many.
To sum up: the probability is very low that the 2024 presidential election was stolen via voter suppression alone, widespread and crazy as it was, as reported here, here, and in this Greg Palast documentary, Vigilantes Inc. But there is also no doubt that Trump’s minions got access to the voting machine software, as reported here, here, and here. Adding that factor to the equation, I would assign an over 90% probability that Kamala Harris won the popular vote and a 70% probability that she won the entire election. But I’m not going to speculate if she would have won by a landslide.
What must be done
The first thing that needs to be done is for computer experts and politicians to stop claiming elections that use electronic voting machines are legitimate in spite of all of the evidence to the contrary.
Example: The sixteen computer experts I mentioned earlier sent a letter to the federal government calling for an investigation because Trump operatives got access to the software in my country’s voting machines that would allow them to alter election results. Yet they claimed that the 2024 election wasn’t stolen and that Trump really won, even though one of the experts who replied to me said that a smart operator could design software that would disappear after it altered election results, which is confirmed in the peer-reviewed academic literature.
This is why numerous countries in Europe, such as Ireland, Norway, Sweden, Finland, France, Spain, Germany, the United Kingdom, Italy, and other countries throughout the world like Japan, Malaysia, and Mozambique banned electronic voting machines years ago. They are too vulnerable to hacking; the software codes in them are owned and kept secret by private companies, and as the German Federal Constitutional Court ruled in 2009, “the inability to have meaningful public scrutiny meant that electronic voting was unconstitutional.” And this is why we Americans need to do the same: throw these machines in the garbage and go back to paper ballots.
What especially needs to be done is to wake Americans up to the fact that the Republican Party and the right-wing conservative groups associated with them hate democracy. They don’t believe in it and want to destroy it. They don’t believe in a government that works for all of us. They believe in a government that only works for the privileged few.
Here is a video of alt-right activist Jack Posobiec admitting it at the 2024 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), followed by fellow Republican and convicted criminal Steve Bannon giving the Nazi salute, which isn’t surprising since neo-Nazis are part of the alt-right. I quote:
“Welcome to the end of democracy. We’re here to overthrow it completely. We didn’t get all the way there on January 6th, but we will endeavor to get rid of it…”
In other words, the January 6, 2021 Washington DC riot wasn’t about correcting an injustice. There is zero evidence that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump by legions of illegal voters. In my opinion, this claim was a pretext to get access to the voting machines so his supporters could steal the 2020 and future elections. Don’t forget, it was Team Trump that created slates of fake electors from seven swing states and ultimately tried to get then-Vice President Mike Pence to substitute the list of fake electors for the real electors and declare Trump the winner as reported here and here. To his credit, Pence refused.
Republican claims of massive voter fraud are just a bullshit excuse to suppress the vote via ID laws, citizenship tests, not allowing married women who took their husband’s last name to vote, and other draconian measures. Voter fraud is a myth, as explained here and here.
Bottom line: Republicans don’t want everyone to vote because their policies are unpopular and only benefit the very rich.So, they do all that they can to keep the voting populace down. What we have to do is make the voting populace go up.
So, register to vote and start voting. Get everyone you know to register to vote. In the US, voter turnout has always been pretty low—in the 60s percent for presidential elections and in the 40s percent for midterm elections. Get those vote totals up to over 90%. The more of us that show up to vote, the harder it will be for them to cheat.
And don’t let all of the draconian rules prevent you from voting. Make sure you will be able to vote on election day, which I recommend doing in person if at all possible. Get a passport even if you don’t travel anywhere. It’s a guaranteed green light to vote. Apply for it a year before you need it to vote. Check well before election day that you will be able to vote.
If a Republican is running unopposed even in state elections, run for office yourself or see if someone in your community can. If a conservative, corporate Democrat is running, which is still better, but not much better, than a Republican, vote for a progressive third-party candidate like the Green Party. Only vote for the corporate Democrat if it’s a tight race and you have to prevent the Republican from winning. And keep in mind that there are some good Democrats left, so make sure you vote for them. Don’t support Democrats who try to act like Republicans, which is what Kamala Harris did, and shot herself in the foot.
Bottom line: stop voting Republican. The entire party causes nothing but trouble and only cares about the rich. Vote every single Republican out of the House of Representatives in the 2026 midterm election and every Republican US Senator who is up for re-election. Afterward, demand that the House impeach both Trump and Vance and that two-thirds of the Senate convict them, which will legally and constitutionally remove them from office. Replace them with a progressive president who will fire Trump’s entire administration. If we are to save our republic, which is a democracy, the Grand Old Party needs to become the Gone Old Party.
And very important. Don’t let Republicans distract you by demonizing immigrants, transgender people and other minority groups. These are attempts to divide us and get us to fight among ourselves. The purpose is to redirect our anger away from the real cause of our social ills: the very rich as explained in this video. Simply stated: stop worrying about who is in the toilet or your life will be in the toilet.
Know your enemy
Hating democracy isn’t just about greed and corruption; it’s mainly about the conservative worldview. But it’s important to understand that the conservative worldview has nothing to do with living a conservative lifestyle. It has to do with how one sees the world and how it should be run regardless of how rich or poor one is. The same applies to the liberal worldview.
Former UCLA Professor Philip Agre wrote an in-depth article entitled “What Is Conservatism and What Is Wrong with It” back in 2004. He explained:
“Conservatism is the domination of society by an aristocracy. Conservatism is incompatible with democracy, prosperity, and civilization in general. It is a destructive system of inequality and prejudice that is founded on deception and has no place in the modern world…conservatism is unjust and cannot survive except by pretending to be the opposite of what it is.”
Today’s aristocracy are multi-billionaires who believe that because of their wealth, they are better than the rest of us and have a right to rule over us. They believe that doing so is their right and their destiny and that it creates a more stable society. This is why the White House posted a picture of Trump with a crown on his head that said “long live the king.” Trump also recently declared, “I run the country and the world.”
So, if you hold this worldview, understand that you are serving the interests of the rich and will end up with a society that consists of a small group of mega-wealthy billionaires that will rule over you, a very small middle class consisting of professionals and small business owners, but over 90% of the population will be dirt poor. An aristocracy has nothing but contempt for the common people.
Simply stated, today’s billionaire robber barons are telling us to go to hell, and it’s the job of the Republican Party and right-wing media to con us into looking forward to the trip.
Closing thoughts
Trump’s second term as president has been a disaster. Just about everything he’s doing is illegal and unconstitutional. But is he deliberately trying to crash the US economy and weaken the nation? An ex-KGB agent claimed that back in 1987, during a trip to Moscow, Trump was recruited as a Russian asset under the code name “Krasnov.” And Trump has done a lot of pro-Russian stuff for Vladimir Putin during both his terms as president. Unfortunately, there really is no hard evidence to say for sure.
But there is one thing we do know for sure: Trump is following Project 2025, as reported here. This 887-page far-right manifesto was cooked up by the Heritage Foundation in 2023. It seeks to turn the US president into a king and our secular democracy into a Christian dictatorship. We can’t allow this, folks.
Even if Trump isn’t a Russian agent, in light of the mess his administration is making, I think we should give Trump, Musk, and Vance to Putin in exchange for a ballerina, a trained seal, and a dancing bear.