While some of us were still reeling from the Brutal Blue Blowout, X was quietly and collectively settling into a period of solemn reflection.
Hahahahaha. Just kidding. The whole platform—well, at least my personally curated feed—is currently a furious sea of spreadsheets, screenshots, and claims of shameless, flagrant, industrial-scale fraud. If the phrase “statistically impossible” got paid by the mention, it could retire to a private island and never work another day in its life.
Reports are describing scanner failures, registration discrepancies, tabulator mismatches, locked polling locations (with people and polling going on inside), and voters being told they must have forgotten that they’d already voted. And even though those are all entirely different issues requiring different explanations, oddly, “Shut up, your concern is a threat to democracy” seems to be the universal response.
A broken scanner isn’t necessarily sinister. A fraudulent text almost certainly is. And neither gets resolved by telling everyone to calm down.
Imagine your bank trying this.
YOU: “Excuse me, my deposit isn’t showing.”
YOUR BANK: “Most deposits process correctly.”
YOU: “Wonderful. What happened to mine?”
YOUR BANK: “You know, this is exactly the sort of rhetoric that undermines confidence in banking.”
Some of the claims are unverified, but many have been documented by election officials themselves. In Westchester County, New York, ballot scanners rejected paper ballots in 44 of the county’s 45 municipalities on Election Day. Not four polling places. Not fourteen malfunctioning machines. All. But. One. What happened to the thousands of ballots that couldn’t be processed? Oh, those went into “emergency compartments” to be scanned later. Right. Presumably the chain of custody is being held together with painter’s tape and a pinkie promise.
Look, I appreciate an emergency compartment as much as the next gal. On an airplane, I would like several. At a polling place, however, the phrase invites follow-up questions. You know, like what exactly happens next and who exactly is going to make sure that happens and how can I actually be certain it won’t live in democracy’s junk drawer for all of ever?
Naturally, officials insisted the ballots would be secured, guarded, and ultimately counted. And Richard Nixon insisted he wasn’t a crook.
Several hundred miles south of Westchester, in Fulton County, Georgia, two scanners failed during early voting, leaving 1,069 ballots requiring “special handling” and potentially rescanning. Again, that’s not a number pulled out of a particularly imaginative corner of X. It’s right there on the county government’s website. (I know. Scanners sometimes jam. Scammers also sometimes jam scanners. If I can concede the former, shouldn’t election officials be able to concede the latter? And then actually look into it when it happens?)
In the very same county—what are the odds?—voters reportedly received text messages informing them that their polling locations had changed. Fulton officials later warned that the messages were fraudulent. Unlike a tabulator throwing a tantrum, a fake polling-place switcharoo isn’t a malfunction. Someone had to create it and send it. Who? To how many people? How’d they get the numbers? How is this not traceable? And how many people didn’t get to cast a ballot because of it?
Texas’ math is also stubbornly refusing to math. Incumbent Republican Governor Greg Abbott drew his usual number of votes, but somehow his virtually unknown Democratic challenger Gina Hinojosa found nearly two million more voters than Beto O’Rourke did in 2022. And Democrat Senator-elect [*pukes a little lot*] James Talarico had more support than Kamala Harris did in the presidential election. I guess a whole bunch of red-blooded Texans just up and decided there was nobody better to represent them than the “God is nonbinary” guy. Sure.
But wait! There’s more! Not only did Texas pick up nearly three million new voter registrations practically overnight, it would appear that the state’s early-voting tracker got its accounting degree from Bernie Madoff University. Over at This Will Hold, someone who had the foresight to take daily dashboard screenshots discovered that a previously published turnout count dropped mysteriously by 28,348 voters. No explanation. No correction. Just a shiny new number.
And in a fitting finale for the Lone Star State, after facing a possible felony conviction, Democrat Ericka Lomick publicly announced she was ending her campaign. But her name wound up on the ballot anyway—and she went on to win both the general and special elections. Apparently, in Texas, even Democrats who stop running can’t stop winning.
Lomick is not, shockingly, the only midterm victor who has unfinished business with the criminal courts. Democrat LaKesha Womack, who flipped North Carolina’s 14th Congressional District, is also facing felony charges for failing to return a rental car. (She’s admitted to it, but, you see, she was homeless and having a medical emergency. Cut a girl some slack.) Womack, a first-time candidate, raised a staggering $56,000 in campaign funds to beat the Republican incumbent—just the former speaker of the NC house—who was working with nearly $2 million. To recap: Womack had no name recognition, no money, and a pending felony, and she beat the guy who won the seat by 16 points last time around. Anyway, she’ll be sworn in with the rest of them in January and presumably, no longer living in a stolen car.
In Kansas, you didn’t even have to be on the ballot to wind up in the election-season crime blotter. A postal worker was just federally indicted after investigators discovered 4,404 pieces of undelivered mail in her garage. The haul included 394 political mailers supporting Republican candidates and PACs. Guess how many progressive pieces of mail this government employee nicked? Zero. None. Not one.
I’m picturing a rebrand: “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds. Unless your courier has strong feelings about an upcoming election and a two-car garage.”
Anyhow, the rest of the state is probably super above-board.
And just in case you haven’t reached your threshold for odd little curiosities, here’s another: We’re being told/scolded/lectured/condescendingly informed that the GOP got clobbered because Republicans stayed home. But some diligent arithmeticians online are pointing out that the numbers tell a wildly different story. In 2022, Republican House candidates got roughly 54.2 million votes nationwide. This year, projections put them at around 55.6 million. So apparently, the Republicans who supposedly couldn’t be bothered to vote not only showed up—they brought 1.4 million friends. Meanwhile, Democrats, who received 51.3 million votes in 2022, are projected by those same analysts to rake in more than 70 million votes this year.
Seventy million. That’s nearly 19 million new votes—roughly the equivalent of New York State. So, like, where did everybody come from? Did Dems discover a secret warehouse full of registered voters? Was there a nationwide BOGO promo on blue ballots? Were they giving out “I VOTED” stickers with the Costco hotdogs? (I mean, I think we know where they came from… but doesn’t anyone want to hear them answer that question?)
What’s also crazy (in the ice is cold sort of way) is that just before Election Day, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller announced that not a single Democrat-run state had bothered to check its voter rolls for citizenship—and that the number of illegals on those rolls could be “astronomical.” (The DOJ has already identified thousands of potentially ineligible registrants in California alone, although you will be shocked to learn that the state disputes the findings.) I guess “nothing to see here” now comes with a strict no-peeking policy.
“In a normal election, human behavior is messy,” writes @TruthAnswersAll on X. “You expect local factors to create a mix of trends, with some counties moving left and others moving right. Yet, across all of these massive, diverse states, every single county arrow points in the exact same direction. A 100% uniform shift across entire states is virtually unprecedented in modern political history. For this level of flawless, wall-to-wall uniformity across hundreds of different communities defies everything we know about traditional geographic and regional voting patterns.”
There’s more, of course. So much more that I’d need a third screen and a different blood pressure to process it all. But the big question is, what do we do with all of this info? It looks like “wait for someone to save us” is not one of the multiple choice options here. Americans are being encouraged to march down to their local election offices, demand copies of all records related to the administration, conduct, tabulation, audit, and certification of the election (don’t worry, there are templates!), photograph tabulation tapes, record machine serial numbers, verify reported outages with utility companies, and investigate any suspicious wireless signals.
I’m sorry. I came to select a representative. That used to require ID and maybe a small, stubborn reserve of civic optimism. New-and-improved voting apparently calls for an electrical engineering degree, a background in detective work, a lawyer on speed dial, and an in with Brenda from accounting, because she’s the only one who knows how printers work.
I mean, I’ll do it if that’s what it takes. But seriously? We have technology that can land a rocket backward on a floating platform in the middle of the ocean. I have a robot that can vacuum around the dog. We can resurrect dead movie stars and cast them in leading roles. How does counting votes in one of the wealthiest, most technologically advanced nations on the planet still require a mathematically-gifted citizen militia? Third-world countries manage to pull this off without deputizing everyone’s Aunt Linda. I’m almost positive we could do better.
It’s sort of like when the captain tells you to turn off your phone before takeoff. “Dude, I thought you were flying this plane. Are you absolutely sure you want to leave the fate of every life on board to me?” It just feels like a pretty risky move on the whole industry’s part.
Look, I’ve already conceded that maybe we screwed up and handed Democrats a historic victory on a silver platter. But when 2+2 suddenly equals 19 million, I think it’s fair to ask who’s holding the calculator. I’m not asking for a system that guarantees my side wins. I’m asking for one that can explain itself when my side loses so spectacularly even AI is at a complete loss. Preferably without asking me to check everyone else’s work.
POLL REDUX FOR FINICKY PHONES:
How are you feeling about the official 2026 midterm results?
They’re real, we blew it.
Mostly confident, with questions.
It seems kinda sketch, TBH.
ALREADY BOUGHT THE TRENCH COAT.
*combo/unsure/other
P.S. Is it just me, or does the White House social media coordinator deserve a raise?
I don't believe my Tx county shifted blue. We are considered one of the reddest counties in the nation. I saw zero Talefreako signs here. And I have many cousins in Kansas. (they all vote red) They say no way at all this could happen in their counties. In my Facebook truther group everyone is saying their state results are suspicious. Not buying the results.
Too big to rig?
Democratic Socialists: “Hold my beer.”