Posts in GriftMatrix

Some of you might remember my Facebook post from the day after the 2024 election about how “off” the results felt to me. I also posted the week before the election about how, while so many people were in a panic, I felt fine.

I have always relied heavily on my intuition, and it has mostly served me well. I might not always like situations or outcomes, but I can usually see a logical explanation for how those things came to fruition based on how people act and react to things.

Some people say this is called being an “empath.”

But I hate that word and never use it because it’s so misused. The term has been hijacked by people who confuse being able to break down thought patterns with some kind of supernatural emotional superpower. You can have heightened sensitivity to other people’s emotional states without being empathetic to them. You can be highly sensitive without being highly emotional.

Being highly sensitive to emotional cues is really just advanced pattern recognition. It’s noticing the slight tension in someone’s jaw, the microaggressions in their eye movements, the shift in their tone, the way they frame arguments, and who the victim is in the scenarios they communicate or the stories they tell themselves about the world they live in. It’s basically just multi-layer observation.

The “empath” crowd loves to confuse being emotionally reactive with being emotionally intelligent. But having big feelings about other people’s feelings doesn’t make you special – it just means you have poor emotional boundaries. Real emotional intelligence is being able to recognize patterns without getting swept up in them.

And let’s be honest – a lot of self-proclaimed empaths are just using their “sensitivity” as a get-out-of-jail-free card for their own emotional regulation issues. “I’m not being dramatic – I’m just feeling everyone’s energy.” Sure you are – and Mercury being in retrograde is why you missed your deadline.

The ability to break down thought patterns is a skill – not a spiritual gift. You can develop it through practice and observation. But many people, like me, developed it through childhood trauma. When your life is often dictated by the erratic emotional states and actions of adults, you learn to read them as a defense mechanism.

It’s very easy for me to get inside someone’s head and follow their line of thinking to see their perspective. I can see how they reached their point of view while also seeing their mistakes in logic and their biases.

All this to say that as soon as I heard the election results, my intuition immediately told me that something was off, like really, really off.

I woke up right after 4 AM the day after the election because my dog Lucy was crying at the door to go out. This was not normal for her; she usually doesn’t go out until around 7 AM. After I got out of bed and let her out, I flipped on the television at the exact moment NBC was calling the election for Donald Trump.

I had a visceral reaction to the news. It felt like a gut punch. It felt ominous. It felt like a lie.

Have you ever had someone lie to your face, and you know that they’re lying, but you need time to process the lie before you point out that they’re lying?

Like, you just respond with – okayyy. And because you didn’t push back, they think that you bought the lie, but really, all you’re doing is thinking about it every day and working out your cross-examination so that when you do confront them about the lie, you’ve thought through all of their possible explanations or defenses, and you have a prepared argument against those too?

Oh, only me?? 😀

I’ve been doing that since the day after the election. While I haven’t kept quiet about not believing the election’s outcome, I have been waiting for more people to become open to the possibility before going all in.

Whether it was part of an overall plot or just a happy coincidence, it is completely understandable why most people would not want to replicate the same claims that were so easily disproven in the 2020 election. I think that’s why so many people have been scared to speak up about their own intuitions.

Wouldn’t it be crazy if the plan was to make election deniers seem crazy so that people wouldn’t speak out about future elections?

Anyway, I think people are ready now to consider the possibility of some rigorry. So, I am going to start laying out an argument for this.

But it can’t be done in a single post because there is no smoking gun. I don’t have any kind of insider information, and there is no whistleblower. There is only a set of factual arguments that, when put together, show that there is a missing piece of the puzzle.

I am going to attempt to put the puzzle together in front of you and show you where the missing pieces are. I don’t personally know how to find the information to fill in this missing information – but I do know that in an algebraic expression, in order to solve for X – you must first know all of the other variables.

So, that’s what I am going to attempt to gather and share.

Since Facebook isn’t a great way to organize information, I brought Rachelandthecity.com back from the grave. I plan to still share everything here – but I’ll also post it there so it can easily be searched and I can connect ideas and information.

Let’s go.

#ratcblog

Elections are the bedrock of democracy, and when anomalies are found, their integrity is questioned, and voter confidence plummets. The 2024 election was marred by documented security breaches involving voting software from companies like ES&S and Dominion. Even if these breaches didn’t directly alter outcomes, they demand rigorous risk-limiting audits (RLAs) and hand recounts – not just to verify the vote count but to establish security protocols for future elections.

Numbers don’t lie. Analysis of 2024 voting data has revealed eyebrow-raising trends. For instance, Kamala Harris saw an unusual negative drop-off vote rate in swing states, while Donald Trump overperformed in certain districts. These anomalies suggest potential vote swapping or other forms of manipulation.

And here’s the thing – I’m open to the possibility that this wasn’t large-scale voter manipulation orchestrated by a foreign entity (though that remains my top theory 😉). Even before 2024, non-conspiratorial analyses of voting machines showed that vote swapping was a common issue simply because the machines are old and rarely replaced.

But that’s not all.

Many voting machines run on software that hasn’t been updated in years – sometimes decades. Outdated software lacks modern security patches, making it vulnerable to known exploits. Hackers can manipulate votes or introduce malware through these gaps.

Plus, old hardware often can’t support newer, more secure operating systems or encryption standards. Physical components degrade over time, leading to mechanical failures that could either be misinterpreted as security breaches or exploited for tampering.

Newer technology offers advanced security measures like multi-factor authentication, better encryption, and real-time anomaly monitoring. But it has its own issues – see the PBS News Hour video I posted yesterday for more on that. Meanwhile, older machines lack these protections, making them susceptible to unauthorized access, both physically and digitally.

And it gets worse.

Many machines still rely on outdated communication protocols that are no longer considered secure. Some use unencrypted Wi-Fi or even physical media like USB drives to transmit data – both easily interceptable and manipulable.

When updates are attempted, compatibility issues between old hardware and new software often arise. This leads to reluctance to upgrade due to the high cost and risk of system failure or incompatibility during an election.

Then, there’s the issue of manufacturers discontinuing support for older models. No security patches, no technical repairs, no updates to counter newly discovered threats.

Many older machines also lack transparent, auditable vote records. Modern systems often include paper trails or other verification methods, which are critical for public trust. Without them, discrepancies fuel widespread doubt about election integrity – exactly where we are today.

Replacing these outdated machines with secure technology would be astronomically expensive. As a result, local and state governments – often responsible for election funding – prolong the life of existing equipment, prioritizing budget constraints over security.

Election timing further complicates things. The short window between elections often leads to quick fixes rather than comprehensive security overhauls.

And let’s not forget: malicious actors have had decades to study these machines’ vulnerabilities. Their functionality is well-documented, making them prime targets for exploitation.

All of this has been known for years, yet officials have kicked the can down the road repeatedly. This failure has allowed conspiratorial election theories to become the norm, while lazy reporting on vote anomalies fails to distinguish between baseless fraud claims and credible, data-backed irregularities.

The longevity of outdated voting machines means they still operate under security standards that are woefully inadequate by today’s measures. This doesn’t just jeopardize election outcomes – it undermines public confidence in the entire democratic process. Addressing these vulnerabilities requires regular technological updates, secure system design, and robust cybersecurity practices.

Bottom line: Even if the anomalies in the numbers weren’t caused by a foreign actor, something caused them. Voting machines have known vulnerabilities. We need to figure out if these two things are connected.

SOURCES:

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/voting-experts-warn-of-serious-threats-for-2024-from-election-equipment-software-breaches

https://apnews.com/article/election-security-voting-machines-software-2024-80a23479d8a767ba9333b2324c4e424b

https://www.upguard.com/blog/2024-u-s-election-integrity-threats-not-just-data-leaks-and-hacks

https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/why-we-should-still-audit-the-2024-presidential-election

https://www.cisecurity.org/insights/blog/2024-general-election-incident-reporting-wrap-up

Before I even start to talk about the 2024 election, I think it’s important to talk about the 2020 election – after all, election fraud was MAGA’s calling card – so why is this different?

Well, let’s look at the claims made after the 2020 Election.

With 158.4 million ballots cast in 2020 – marking the highest voter turnout in U.S. history – exhaustive investigations found virtually no evidence of widespread fraud. The Heritage Foundation’s database – after years of research – documented only 1,365 proven instances of voter fraud across all elections since 1982.

We were assured that our elections were safe and our systems were proven remarkably resilient under historic levels of scrutiny. Multiple audits and recounts – including Georgia’s hand count – demonstrated no evidence of vote manipulation. The machines’ accuracy rates consistently matched paper ballot counts – effectively disproving claims of algorithmic vote switching.

Then there was stuff like the dead voter theory, which collapsed under scrutiny. Michigan conducted a comprehensive audit of 250 allegedly deceased voters – finding zero cases of fraudulent voting. The few legitimate cases typically involved clerical errors or isolated incidents of relatives using a deceased person’s ballot. The handful of actual cases usually involved widows using their late husband’s name – which is touching but illegal.

Mail-in voting – despite unprecedented scrutiny – showed remarkably low fraud rates. States with established mail-in voting systems provided compelling data. Oregon – which implemented universal mail-in voting in 1998 – reported just 14 attempted fraudulent votes out of millions cast over two decades.

The Dominion voting machine conspiracy proved equally baseless. Multiple audits and recounts – including Georgia’s hand count – demonstrated no evidence of vote manipulation. The machines’ accuracy rates consistently matched paper ballot counts – effectively disproving claims of algorithmic vote switching.

But where did these claims originally come from?

After the election, as results showed, Joe Biden was in the lead, and claims began circulating on social media and some conservative news platforms. One of the earliest and most prominent proponents of this theory was Sidney Powell, a lawyer associated with the Trump campaign at the time. Powell made sensational claims during media appearances and in legal filings that there was an algorithm designed to switch votes from Trump to Biden, particularly focusing on Dominion Voting Systems.

Powell appeared on Fox News in November 2020, alleging that Dominion Voting Systems was created to produce altered voting results in Venezuela for Hugo Chávez and that it had been used to rig the U.S. election for Biden. She mentioned specific algorithms and vote-switching mechanisms without providing substantial evidence.

The claim was amplified by various figures, including Rudy Giuliani, another Trump attorney, and through social media, where it was shared widely by Trump supporters and conspiracy theorists.

But here’s the thing – the IMPORTANT THING – the THING to remember:

There was no evidence of this. None.

So, where did this idea come from?

Sidney Powell’s claim about algorithmic vote switching in the 2020 election primarily seems to have been influenced by a mix of conspiracy theories, misinformation, and a few specific sources:

Powell was deeply embedded in the right-wing conspiracy theory ecosystem. Her claims resonate with long-standing myths about electronic voting systems, including those that surfaced after previous elections where similar accusations were made but never substantiated.

Powell’s association with QAnon, a far-right conspiracy theory group, also played a significant role. QAnon followers had been promoting narratives about election fraud and secret algorithms long before Powell’s statements. Her engagement with this community likely influenced her rhetoric.

Powell referenced claims from the controversial audit in Maricopa County, Arizona, which was influenced by conspiracy theories about voting machines. This audit, however, did not find evidence of algorithmic vote switching. Powell also cited affidavits from individuals like Navid Keshavarz-Nia, who claimed to have knowledge of voting machine manipulations. However, these affidavits were largely dismissed due to a lack of verifiable evidence or because the claims were based on speculation rather than concrete proof.

During interviews, Powell often spoke about having “evidence” but never produced it publicly in a way that could stand up to legal or scientific scrutiny. She appeared on conservative media outlets like Fox News, where she made these claims without providing detailed sources. Powell’s legal filings in various states included allegations of vote-switching algorithms, but these were based on hearsay, speculative theories, and affidavits from individuals who often had no direct connection to the actual voting systems or were discredited. There was also confusion or misrepresentation around patents related to voting technology. Powell and others cited patents as if they were evidence of nefarious capabilities, but these patents actually dealt with security features or were unrelated to vote-switching.

In the end, numerous courts rejected her claims, noting a lack of evidence, which indirectly illuminates the baselessness of her assertions.

The many other legal challenges tell the same story. Trump’s campaign and supporters filed 62 lawsuits challenging the election results. They lost 61, often facing dismissal due to a lack of evidence. Many of these cases collapsed when lawyers – required to present actual evidence in court – couldn’t substantiate their public claims of fraud.

But let’s think this through.

Someone had to be pretty convincing to get all of these lawyers to file these lawsuits without evidence, and many people ended up being punished for doing it. Nine lawyers were sanctioned for a lawsuit filed in Michigan. They were required to pay $175,000 in legal fees and undertake 12 hours of mandatory legal education. In Colorado, two lawyers, Ernest Walker and Gary Fielder, were sanctioned with a penalty of $187,000 for a frivolous lawsuit. In Arizona, three attorneys, Andrew Parker, Kurt Olsen, and Alan Dershowitz, faced sanctions for challenging the election results.

The 65 Project, a group aiming to hold attorneys accountable for trying to overturn the election, targeted at least 111 lawyers for potential disbarment and other disciplinary actions. While not all of these lawyers have been confirmed to have been punished as of the latest information, it indicates a broader scope of legal professionals potentially facing consequences.

Then there’s what happened to Rudy Guiliani and Sydney Powell. In June 2021, Giuliani’s law license was suspended by a New York state appellate court for making “demonstrably false and misleading statements” about voter fraud in the 2020 election. In July 2024, he was officially disbarred in New York State. His license was also suspended in Washington, D.C., for similar reasons.

Giuliani was also found liable for defamation in a lawsuit by Georgia election workers Ruby Freeman and Wandrea’ ArShaye Moss, whom he falsely accused of election fraud. In August 2023, he was ordered to pay nearly $133,000 in sanctions for non-compliance with discovery requests. In December 2023, a jury awarded Freeman and Moss $148 million in damages. Giuliani subsequently filed for bankruptcy, but the case was recently dismissed, allowing creditors to pursue his assets.

And there’s a lot more – just google it.

Then there’s Sydney Powell, who was sanctioned by U.S. District Judge Linda Parker in August 2021 for a frivolous lawsuit filed in Michigan. She and other lawyers involved were ordered to pay over $175,000 in attorney fees and undergo legal education. Powell is also a defendant in Dominion’s ongoing $1.3 billion defamation lawsuit and Smartmatic’s $2.7 billion defamation lawsuit.

Similar to Giuliani, Powell was indicted in August 2023 in Georgia for her alleged role in attempting to overturn the 2020 election, charged with racketeering and conspiracy.

All of this due to a baseless theory?

It seems far-fetched to me.

Unless…

Someone embedded in that Q-Anon / Right-Wing movement targeted them…

BUT WAIT!

Am I about to go down some deep, dark hole to uncover another conspiratorial theory?

Absolutely Fucking Not.

I’m not going to waste your time with any of that nonsense.

Instead, my aim is to show you the evidence that Powell and Rudy could not produce – and that’s the data.

You see, you might have a good night at the casino, get lucky on a few games of Blackjack, and maybe even win a few games of three-card poker. But if you walk around that casino floor and hit on the Roulette table, then win at craps, baccarat, and pai gow – the pit boss will be walking you out of that casino. Because no one is that lucky. And the voting data shows that Trump somehow hit the jackpot over and over and over again.

So, I hope I have established 2 things.

1. In my previous post about election integrity, I discussed why examining how these numbers happened in 2024 is extremely important – even if it turns out it isn’t a long-tail play by the Russians.
2. The claims about the 2020 election and the 2024 election are not the same. The 2020 election fraud claims were based on unsubstantiated theories about how the election might have been rigged. These 2024 claims don’t attempt to establish a theory about how anomalies in the data happened. No one knows how they happened – it’s just an attempt to show people that they do factually exist. And hopefully, if enough people are convinced, then it will build up enough pressure to convince people that it’s something that needs to be figured out – one way or another.

Now that I’ve said all that, I’ll let you ruminate on how these two different issues might correlate on your own. Next up for me will be to start talking about the numbers.

Sources:

https://theconversation.com/trumps-lawyers-in-lawsuits-claiming-he-won-in-2020-are-getting-punished-for-abusing-courts-and-making-unsupported-claims-and-false-statements-230071

https://news.bloomberglaw.com/business-and-practice/trump-lawyer-cases-show-2020-election-punishments-come-slowly

https://news.bloomberglaw.com/business-and-practice/trump-lawyer-cases-show-2020-election-punishments-come-slowly

https://www.reuters.com/article/world/fact-check-courts-have-dismissed-multiple-lawsuits-of-alleged-electoral-fraud-p-idUSKBN2AF1FQ

https://kansasreflector.com/2024/06/08/trumps-lawyers-in-suits-claiming-he-won-in-2020-are-getting-punished-for-abusing-courts

https://www.americanbar.org/groups/public_interest/election_law/litigation

https://www.reuters.com/legal/us-supreme-court-rebuffs-lawyers-punished-after-woeful-suit-backing-trump-2023-10-02

https://www.lwv.org/blog/recent-rise-anti-voter-litigation

Let’s talk about drop-off voting – a pattern that broke all the rules in 2024.

Sometimes, the way ballots are cast and counted reveals patterns that don’t add up. One of those patterns is drop-off voting. The term isn’t official election jargon, but it describes something very real – the difference between the number of votes cast for president versus those cast for down-ballot races like Senate or House. In other words, it is a measure of how many voters bother to fill out the entire ballot versus stopping at the top. Normally, this follows predictable patterns.

But it didn’t in 2024.

What makes this interesting is how drop-off voting is skewed in ways that don’t follow historical trends. When that happens, it raises questions about voter behavior, election integrity, or whether something shady was going on.

In 2024, the numbers went sideways. Drop-off rates tend to be fairly predictable, with small shifts based on how competitive races are, how much attention candidates get, and state-specific voting laws. But in 2024, the drop-off didn’t follow the usual script. Republican drop-off hit 10 percent in swing states, meaning one in ten Trump voters skipped Senate or House races. Meanwhile, Democrats showed a minimal drop-off—sometimes a negative drop-off, with more votes for Senate candidates than for Harris. That means people filled out their ballot for a Democratic Senator – but didn’t vote for anyone as president.

That’s really bizarre, right?

SMART Elections analyzed data from states like Arizona, North Carolina, and Ohio, highlighting major discrepancies between presidential and Senate votes. Either voters suddenly decided to become highly selective, or something about the way votes were recorded or counted was off.

State Laws and Policies

Election laws certainly played a role in how people voted, and there were plenty of big changes that impacted participation:

• Florida reduced the number of ballot drop boxes and restricted where they could be placed, making them less accessible.
• Ohio implemented stricter voter ID laws and changed how ballots were processed, which the Brennan Center for Justice warned could depress turnout.
• Pennsylvania and California allowed drop boxes but enforced strict deadlines that made voting harder for some people.

Election security was the justification, but critics argued that these measures disproportionately affected Democratic-leaning voters. That should have meant Democrats would show higher drop-off rates, but that’s not what happened. Instead, Republicans saw a higher drop-off. If voter suppression were the main factor, both parties should have seen similar trends. They didn’t.

Make it make sense.

Impact on Election Outcomes

Drop-off voting can shift power in Congress and state legislatures. In 2024, the Seattle Times pointed to lower-than-expected Democratic turnout as a factor in Kamala Harris’s loss. Yet, in some states, down-ballot Democrats performed better than their own party’s presidential candidate. That makes no sense in a hyper-partisan election.

This kind of split-ticket voting happens occasionally, but not at this scale. The idea that large numbers of voters backed Trump for president but then turned around and voted for Democratic Governors or Senators in the same states doesn’t align with past elections. Either voter ideology shifted in a way that no pollster saw coming and makes very little sense, or something else was at play.

Drop Off Voting and Signs of Manipulation

Anomalies in Voting Patterns

Major drop-off discrepancies are red flags. When a presidential candidate gets significantly more votes than their party’s Senate or House candidate in the same state, something is off. Why would anyone take the time to vote for a Republican president but skip voting for the other Republicans on the ticket? If these patterns were spread evenly across both parties, that would be one thing, but that’s not what happened.

If similar states with similar political leanings but different voting laws show different drop-off rates, that suggests localized interference.

If one candidate receives way more votes than their party’s down-ballot candidates, it raises the question of ballot stuffing, where fraudulent votes are added to inflate the numbers for a single race.

Cybersecurity and Election Integrity

The stakes in 2024 were high, and election security was a major concern. Reports pointed to:

• Increased cyber threats targeting voter databases and election systems.
• Electronic voting glitches where down-ballot votes weren’t recorded correctly.
• Ballot harvesting issues where mass collection of ballots led to selective submission.

Why This Matters

Drop-off voting isn’t just a technical statistic – it is a signal. When patterns don’t align with past elections, it means something changed. The question is, what? Voter behavior? New laws? Or something more deliberate?

Some drop-offs are normal. But when the numbers defy logic, they demand scrutiny. Did voters suddenly change their habits, or were external forces at play? If the answer isn’t obvious, then it is worth taking a closer look at how votes were cast, counted, and reported. Until those questions are answered, the drop-off voting patterns of 2024 remain a red flag in an election that was already under the microscope.

Sources:

https://votingrightslab.org/2024/11/25/how-state-election-laws-shaped-voting-patterns-in-2024

https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/why-was-there-a-broad-drop-off-in-democratic-turnout-in-2024

https://smartelections.us/dropoff

https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/voting-laws-roundup-2024-review

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy9j8r8gg0do

Democratic decline in the United States: Strategic manipulation of elections

https://www.npr.org/2024/10/25/nx-s1-5163635/ballot-drop-boxes-explainer

How disinformation defined the 2024 election narrative

https://www.cnn.com/2024/11/10/politics/trump-voter-shifts-nationwide/index.html

How far-right trolls use leftist symbols to hide in plain sight

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