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Who is producing the most important journalism in the United States at the moment? My vote goes to Stephen Spoonamore, a noted election-integrity expert who publishes at a Substack page called "And When You Are a Hammer." Spoonamore has produced a string of compelling stories about the apparent hacking of the 2024 presidential election, focusing on a growing base of evidence that suggests Donald Trump was awarded a "victory" he did not earn, and Kamala Harris was deprived of a victory she likely did earn. How big is the under-the-radar subject Spoonamore is pursuing with more depth and detail than anyone else in the news business? The fate of American democracy might hinge on it.
For those who are new to his work, Spoonamore introduces himself in a new post titled "What exactly is a Free and Fair Election?"
Syria and Russia just had elections no one thought were free, nor fair. Ireland and Germany just had elections that everyone thinks were free and fair. Here we are in the U.S., with Romania, stuck in the middle again.
Spoonamore proceeds to give his readers a brief homework assignment and provides background on the work he and his associates have done already, plus a look at his personal bio -- focusing on the type of projects that tend to draw his attention. He writes:
Homework Request: Before reading further. Open a comment bar and try to define what is a Free and Fair Election. Then read this. Do some thinking. Then extend your comment.
I intend to collate and review every comment. In the future, I will be working on a project to move some U.S. states from where we are today toward more free and fair elections, which as I detail below, we definitely do not have at this point in history.
First, there are a lot of people who have found my postings recently. I am not an elections expert. I am not a lawyer. I am a technology executive. I have served as CEO or CTO of more than a dozen firms. Most have been in high-technology manufacturing. On about half of them, I was a co-founder. On the other half, I was hired by investors or boards of directors. The majority of the firms I have led remained privately held while I developed them and arranged their sale to larger entities. Twice I’ve held C-suite roles in publicly traded companies. I have led dozens of funding rounds. The majority of parties who invested in these firms have had exits. Two of the companies created a great deal of wealth. A couple tanked. Four are still running as going concerns. Most are what investors consider “nice exits, but not home runs.” It is likely that every day, every person reading this uses multiple technologies one of my firms contributed to. My work has also brought me into close contact overseas with experiences that taught me how deeply, and horrifically compromised electronics can unmake a society.
I have written a lot -- many business-strategy documents, technical reports, and analysis papers. Also a few after-action reports examining when and why things went sideways. Back in the late '80s through the '90s, besides my work in technology, I also wrote plays and TV scripts. In 1999, I stopped doing that work. There are only so many hours in a week, and I had come to not enjoy that line of work.
I also have, what a lifelong friend described as: “An absurdly overdeveloped belief that there is a public good.” True, and I advocate to actually change things, hopefully moving us toward that good. Here are the types of projects that have inspired me to action.
If you count by hours, I mostly have advocated for bike ways and bike paths, public parks, wild-lands protection and public education. I have served on multiple rail-trail development groups, multiple youth sports leagues, multiple parks commissions. Currently, I am the public appointee to a wild-lands conservancy.
If instead you count by the money I have spent hiring lawyers and diverting the time of the technical experts who work with me, the thing I have advocated for most is getting flooking, craptastic, hackable pieces of bunk-designed, totally unsecure computer systems out of the business of deciding public elections. This is because I want to live in a democracy. I have traveled and worked in several dozen countries, ranging across the spectrum between authoritarian and democratic.
I have made this statement over and over and over for 25 years:
“If you want to live in a democracy, you must use hand -marked paper ballots. Only. Hand or machine count them at the precinct level. The public should be able to view this process. Post the local result locally first. Confirm the count with different counters, also viewed by the public at the county level. Keep the paper ballots to resolve any disputes and recounts.”
You can’t hack that. That is not what we have in the U.S., which is, sadly, extremely hackable, and I believe, in this last election , was hacked. I’m not sure it changed the final result, but I do not believe the numbers the computers are outputting.
More updates on what I and allies have found regarding 2024 in a post later today, or tomorrow. Most of it is disheartening. So, brace yourself.
This post is about something more fundamental, and at least for me, hopeful.
What is a free and fair election?
In light of the 2024 U.S. elections, and their aftermath, this is worth asking: In various states within the United States, it’s a different answer from other states. Between the leadership of our political parties, it’s a very different answer. In comparison with the elections and aftermaths in Mexico, France, Romania, Georgia, Russia, Syria and the UK, there are different answers.
I have also done some reading. There is a lot more to do. The writing of Sylvia Bishop and Anke Hoeffler laid out 10 judgment points by which free and fair can be measured. (They encourage and give permission to share the 10 points; there is linky goodness in some of it.):
* Legal framework (whether there was a constitutional right of citizens to vote and seek office, whether elections were held at regular intervals, and whether election-related laws were not changed immediately before an election);
* Electoral management (whether gerrymandering occurred and whether election-management bodies, if they existed, were independent, impartial, and accountable);
* Electoral rights (whether citizens were generally able to vote on the basis of equal suffrage and access);
* Voter registers (whether they were accurate, current, and open to voters for easy and effective voter registration);
* Nomination rules/ballot access (whether candidates had in practice a right to compete in the election, with rejections of candidate applications being based on "internationally recognizable and acceptable norms" and with no candidate receiving more than 75% of the votes, a signal of malpractice or election boycotts);
* Campaign process (whether elections were carried out without violence, intimidation, bribery (vote buying), use of government resources to advantage the incumbent, or "massive financial advantages" for the incumbent);
* Media access (whether freedom of speech was protected and whether the ruling party was disproportionately benefited by government-owned media);
* Voting process (whether elections were conducted by secret ballot on a one-person, one-vote basis, with adequate security to protect voters and protection against ballot-box stuffing, multiple voting, destruction of valid ballots, and other forms of manipulation);
* Role of officials (whether the election was administered with adequately trained personnel, free from campaigning or intimidation at polling places, and with the ability of international election observers and party representatives to observe polling places); and;
* Counting of votes (whether votes were tabulated transparently and free of fraud or tampering).
There are multiple groups converting the work of Bishop, Hoeffler, and others into indexes to score the nations of the world. Two of these scoring systems have been operating for more than a decade. They seem to be dynamic and instructive. Both provide a percentage score with 100% being most democratic, a ranking number out of 173 UN Nations, and a grouping type. The Economist system focuses on the impact to business climate with four grouping types from working democracy to authoritarian regime.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
The second is the Democracy Matrix. Coordinated and created by academic thought-leaders, it places a greater emphasis on individual freedoms and more finely divides the nations into six groupings from working democracy to hard authoritarian. An interesting feature of the Democracy Matrix is that the “category” of a government is not directly linked to the scores. This reflects their view in some countries that the freedom score for an individual is not directly tied to the nature of the government. A second interesting feature is that the Matrix drills into the differences between Llibertarian aspects of freedom versus egalitarian aspects of equal access.
https://www.democracymatrix.
For the remainder of this essay I am going to examine several countries. I will start by listing the scoring category and elements from these indexes, before examining the freedom and fairness of recent electrons. Let’s start with two elections no one considers free nor fair.
Syria
Economist Index Score: 1.4 out of 10. 163rd out of 171. Authoritarian Regime. Democracy Matrix Score: 05 out of 100. 170th out of 176. Hard Authoritarian
Bashar Al Assad inherited the Syria regime from his father. Like his father, he held elections on a regular basis, most recently gaining 95% of the popular vote and in recent by-elections his candidates also did equally well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
I refer to this very complete analysis by Chatham House which I will single out notes less than 50% of the adult population was legally given access to the ballot in Assad’s dictatorship. They had more than 90% voter turnout. Of course the only candidates on the ballot were pre-approved by a national review board appointed by the president. Voting itself is done on hand-marked paper ballots, but the marking is often done on the voter’s behalf by “affiliated baathist” leaders who will fill out all the ballots for the members in their affiliation. Asking to fill out your own ballot is viewed as concerning, and can have negative impacts on your future. All ballot counting is conducted by designated party authorities.
https://www.chathamhouse.org/
One wonders why Assad bothered. Is the show of having elections such a powerful totem it helps him justify 60 years of dictatorship? Perhaps, if only in the mind of the dictator. Syria’s elections were entirely staged, with outcomes clear before they began -- a form of kabuki theatre in which every aspect of the event is known, controlled, and created for mythic cultural reinforcement -- in this case , to reinforce the Baathists now-vanished hold on power. It’s notable, however, it was a fake election’s real power that broke them. In 2011, during the Arab Spring, one of Syria’s forms of rebellion focused on very local elections citizens could control. Citizens organized poster and handbill campaigns backing only local people they wished would hold the lowest levels of local offices. None of these candidates had access to any wider media, none had been approved to appear on the ballot, the laws of Syria did not allow for write-in candidates. Voters made their own check box, wrote the candidates name and then checked the box they made. This was itself ruled to be a violation of election laws: Defacing of ballots. It triggered local protests and arrests. These rejected write-in protests merged with other rebellious activity and eventually escalated to a national civil war, which appears to have finally resolved this past weekend, with Asaad fleeing Syria and being granted political asylum in Russia.
Russia
Economist Score: 2.2 out of 10. 144th out of 171. Authoritarian Regime
Democracy Matrix Score: 26 out of 100. 144th out of 176. Moderate Authoritarian
Vladimir Putin recently won a five-way race, taking 76M votes or 89% of the votes cast. Nearly all voting is done on “the world’s most highly secure electronic voting machines.” The results were released less than an hour after polls closed. Universally declared a sham election by international and domestic observers, I would like to call attention to two features of this exercise. Apx 400,000 Russians voted in this election from overseas. In a fascinating display of citizen voting-rights activism, the Vote Abroad Project got live exit pollsters to nearly half of the sanctioned polling sites. Those sites' electronic voting machines reported 80-95% support for Putin, but the exit polls did not. They showed Moscow populist Vladislav Davankov winning 20-78% at each exit pollster's location and winning the plurality of the overall sampled voters. Putin came in third.
Davankov ran on four policy ideas: 1 - Supporting Western Movies (like Barbie) being screened uncensored; 2 - Being an extremist anti-vaxer and raw-foods advocate.; 3 - Demanding voting in Russia return to hand-marked ballots because Putin’s electronic voting machines are always rigged and Davankov claims he has been involved in planning to rig elections, both at home and abroad; 4 - Being for immediately ending the war in Ukraine, provided the new border is drawn where forces currently sit. Exit pollsters did not ask which issue won over the voters. Bummer.
Statistical modelers in Germany estimate 22M of Putin’s
votes in Russia were actually votes flipped from other candidates in the
voting software. I don’t pretend to understand how they calculated that
ratio, but I can absolutely validate the system architecture of Putin’s
“World’s Most Highly Secure Electronic Voting System” could be
programmed to output any total he wished, just like the systems here in the United States.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Germany
Economist Score 8.8 out of 10. 12th out of 171. Full Democracy.
Democracy Matrix Score 94 out of 100. 5th of 176. Working Democracy.
I have served as an international election observer in Germany. It’s awesome. And great. And believable. They use hand-marked paper ballots. In some precincts, they use scanners with random precinct spot checks made by lottery ball-type drawings. In others, votes are counted by hand. A second set of counters rechecks each count. I will never forget what one of my technical hosts said the day after the elections. A local candidate (who my host strongly disliked) had won a local seat by only a handful of votes. “I am very super disappointed. But at least we know our stupid assholes are actually elected by our stupid voters.” Exactly. Say it with a German accent. It’s funnier.
German elections are meticulous, exacting, free, and fair. I would encourage anyone who wishes to study a good model, to examine them. Start here, lots of links.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
I would like to call attention to a safety feature which exists in Germany, and in the elections of most working democracies. They even have big signs up at voting sites:
CITIZENS CAN DEMAND - AND GET!! - BALLOT SCRUTINY.
In Germany, within 60 days of a federal election, any voter who participated in that election can request scrutiny of the ballots, a full or partial recount. There is a standing Committee for the Scrutiny of Elections, and it can reject the request if it is unwarranted, but if a rejected request is joined by 100 eligible voters, it moves forward. Even if the candidates involved don’t want to challenge the outcomes, it does not matter, the Democracy belongs to the citizens, not the candidates. And if the review finds the race was not correctly counted, it is changed. The correct candidate takes the office within 48 hours.
That is the kind of mechanism that assures you live in a democracy with free and fair elections. Most German ballots are counted on sophisticated ballot scanners, similar to the ones we use in the U.S. -- or were when I was in Germany. But every scanner has multiple spot checks. Any variation leads to immediately reverting to hand-counting. And any voter can raise a scrutiny challenge of the results and expect clarity.
Ireland
Economist Index Score 9.2 out of 10. 7th out of 171 Countries. Full Democracy
Democracy Matrix Score 90 out of 100. 16th out of 176. Working Democracy
Ireland conducts all elections, even snap elections, with three weeks' notice, on paper ballots, twice hand-counted at large public counting centers, staffed by volunteers. Electronic systems for voting were briefly tested. The public was concerned, they were demonstrated to be hackable and untrustworthy. Voting was also slower than paper ballots and 3-5x more expensive when you add the storing, programming, and supporting costs of machines vs. paper. I personally love that the Home Secretary declared voting machines to be “not fun.” Ballot Counting of the hand-marked ballots has a super serious spirit, mixed with a public-party atmosphere and is wholly transparent, free, and fair. I would note, that Ireland’s campaign periods are all run in 3-6 weeks. Every citizen who wishes to vote may vote - even registering same day - and the counting is done by volunteers, double checked, and completed within 48 hours of every election.
https://www.bbc.com/news/
I also note that the number of representatives changes as the population changes, to keep representation at fair levels in each district. The districts are drawn from citizen counsels made up of demographers, experts, and voters selected by random lottery. Entire parties can come and go in a single election and independent candidates have equal access to get on the ballot with major- and minor-party candidates.
Let us now conclude by looking at two Flawed/Deficient Democracies. Both just had Presidential Elections. Both have serious questions if they qualify as free and fair. Both elections saw structural challenges, outside interference, and possible election rigging. These countries are Romania and the United States. They both faced similar events. They have unquestionably diverged in how they are addressing the outcomes. Again, what is free and fair?
Romania
Economist Index 6.5 out of 10. 60th out of 171 Countries. A Flawed Democracy
Democracy Matrix Score 73 out of 100. 46th out of 176 Countries. A Deficient Democracy.
If you have not followed the wild free-for-all, unexplained results, and now-canceled first-round presidential election in Romania, it is a lot to take in. Here is the BBC’s current take.
https://www.bbc.com/news/
If I can sum up. eight notable candidates and several minor candidates are all vying for the open presidency. Romania hosts a series of 24 publicly sponsored debates and gives all candidates near equal access to TV and radio time. For major candidates, spending is fairly strongly enforced. It is supposed to be a battle of ideas.
One of the eight candidates is Călin Georgescu. He is a Trump-like persona, openly running a Trump-mimic campaign. Promising to give power to Christian Extremists, eliminate women’s reproductive rights, strip LGBT citizens of rights, and his campaign slogan is literally “Make Romania Great Again.” At one point, he even claimed he agreed with Trump that illegal migrants are eating people’s pets. He was polling in sixth place two weeks before the election, when two billionaires secretly (and illegally in Romania) purchased millions of dollars in online advertising, mostly on TikTok, ran a pay-for-pledge- to-vote scheme, just like Elon Musk's. They apparently also bribed voters to support Georgescu and unleashed complicated webs of scandals with sock-puppet accounts, promoted by bot farms, primarily on X and Facebook, all intending to undermine the candidates ahead of him. The sock-puppet accounts created a constant barrage of specious ads, accusing the leading candidates of multiple bizarre and grotesque actions, and in some cases, falsely accused them of criminal activity. The candidate Georgescu would then repeat these bizarre accusations over and over, always claiming he would end these corrupt practices. The allegations apparently are not true. Georgescu dominated the news cycles with his daily, ever-changing accusations , always swearing he was the only one who could save Romania.
He came in first place in the first round of the election with 22% of the vote, just ahead of two candidates who had followed the rules, tried to sell the public on their policies, and didn’t bribe anyone. They won 20% and 19%. The vote was conducted on hand-marked paper ballots. Hand-counted. In the days immediately following the election, however, several events happened. Hundreds of people admitted to having voted for him, because they were paid, which is criminal vote buying. A minor party candidate further accused Georgescu of ballot stuffing by using straw voters, also paid, with fake IDs. Also illegal. While that matter was being considered, the intelligence services came forward and declassified documents showing the scope and scale of a Russian oligarch’s outside money illegally pouring in to support his campaign. The money was more than all the other candidates spent combined. Entirely illegally done.
The Constitutional Court, after reviewing the matters , declared the vote-buying and straw-voting was not enough to change the result. Georgescu would still have won, the court found. But the intelligence documenting that the oligarch had financed the entire coordinated online campaign to promote Georgescu -- in conjunction with, and with promised rewards for local oligarchs in Russia, led them to cancel the result of the election. They ruled it was not free and fair. The entire election will be rerun in a few weeks. The court ordered the arrest of the money launderers and election buyers, some of whom have fled the country. They also are considering treason charges against the candidate and others working with him. But Georgescu is currently denying he had any idea that oligarchs and Russians were helping him. He says it was all just a coincidence.
https://www.politico.eu/
The former Romanian secretary of defense put it best: “I think we just dodged a bullet. The goal was to install a dictator who would destroy our democracy, and it almost worked.” Should a democracy defend itself when an election is not free and fair?
The United States of America
Economist Index Score: 7.8 out of 10. 29th out of 171 countries. A Flawed Democracy.
Democracy Matrix Score: 81 out of 100, 36th out of 176 countries. A Deficient Democracy.
According to the Democracy Matrix (DM) score, the USA fell from being a “Working Democracy,” with scores in the low 80s, due to the election of 2016. The DM notes increasingly unpredictable and authoritarian elements within the Republican Party, Mr. Trump himself, and in Republican-dominated states. The DM notes the decline in women’s reproductive rights, minority voting rights, increasing restrictions on access to voting, plus gerrymandering and judicial extremism. The most recent Economist report notes the inaction by the US Department of Justice to address what the report calls a failed coup following the 2020 elections, use of Republican congressional committees as pillory panels and notes the highly political use of tariffs as creating both a corrupting influence for those who buy tariff exemptions and increasing business risk for those who cannot.
The Matrix notes: The US has always had, and still has, one of the highest scores on its Libertarian Freedom Score, it’s the metric of being able to do crazy personal things, but also notes we are quickly falling, and now only in the middle range score, for the Egalitarian Access to those freedoms. They also note shrinking access to electoral processes to change leadership.
Both indexes have commentary, with common concerns about the degradation of US democracy including:
* An inability of the United States to address growing wealth inequality and the increasing use of that wealth to buy political outcomes;
* The extreme nature of gerrymandering in many U.S. states , nearly all of which have been “engineered to create permanent conservative GOP rule, regardless of voter intentions”;
* The undemocratic nature of the U.S. Senate in which each state has only two members despite huge differences in populations;
* The increasingly authoritarian capture of the U.S. court system;
* A refusal of the GOP to accept any electoral result that reduces its power, citing both Trump and multiple GOP state legislatures voting to change the powers invested in various offices based solely on which party controls them;
* Ongoing gender and ethnic discrimination. Both indexes most
recent releases provide comments/footnotes pondering if the the United
States can still be considered monolithically for the scoring indexes,
noting some U.S. states (The EIG singles out California) would score much
higher, while other states would fall below the threshhold for being
classified as “Hybrid-Authoritarian.” (The comments brought to mind my
decade living, building companies, and serving in public positions in
Ohio. I refer everyone to the ongoing commentaries of David Pepper. https://davidpepper.substack.
* The United States has almost no remaining election law that is enforced. It’s a chaotic scrum. There is little or no
functional enforcement of the remaining scraps of election law. We now
condone individuals, and even anonymous donors, to contribute unlimited
sums of money. Where formerly there was some effort to stop coordination
between massive funds in independent PACs and the individual campaigns,
I am not aware of any meaningful enforcement in this past election. The
dam is broken. (Editor's note: A state judge in Pennsylvania allowed Elon Musk's "voting lottery" to proceed in a ruling issued on Nov. 4, the day before the election. The lottery reportedly was conducted in seven swing states. I am unaware of any law that would make the finding of a state court in Pennsylvania binding in any other state. See more on this issue in the following paragraph.)
* We no longer have any public federal policy of equal time
or access, no requirements for any element of truth in advertising, and
while vote buying may remain illegal, in this cycle the courts declared
paying people hundreds of dollars each to pledge to vote for Trump is
not vote buying. (Again, this was a Pennsylvania state-court ruling, which does not appear to be binding in any of the other six swing states where Musk conducted his lottery. Some public officials have said Musk's lottery was not only election interference but also possible election fraud.);
* Nor are there any limits to online influence buying, and despite Russian oligarchs and Putin associates demanding Mr. Trump pay-up what he owes for getting him elected, apparently no mechanism exists for the public to learn exactly what Putin did that he is demanding payment for, nor how much he is owed. Nor what it will cost us all;
* Nor do we have a Supreme Court with any interest in free and fair elections. Besides giving their blessing to the billions of dollars going into our elections, they have gutted the Voting Rights Act, which gave at least basic access rights to every voter. Here in PA , 18,000 ballots, mostly young women, mostly fist-time voters, were thrown out based on partisan GOP ballot challenges ostensibly due to lacking signatures, or non-matching signatures, or lack of postmark. Those 18,000 votes were thrown out because the challengers did not want them counted. That is the only reason. And the PA GOP has been crowing and celebrating about it for weeks. Really. Crowing and celebrating 18,000 citizens did not have their votes counted is not part of a free and fair election. No one would buy you a drink in Ireland ya jaggoffs. In Germany they could even arrest you for false challenge;
* And none of these concerns touches the fact apparently almost none of the hand-marked paper ballots in the seven swing states will be recounted before the presidency is awarded to Mr. Trump. The computers claim he won all seven swing states, all outside the margin of recount, while only winning 49.8% of the vote. Sure, Felicia;
* I for one, find that impossible to believe. I never will. Prove me wrong. Count the ballots. If Mr. Trump believes it, perhaps he can call for hand recounts of the paper ballots, too. He won’t. But I bet he knows he didn’t win all seven. And the truth will come out. Someone’s gonna leak;
More on the state of the technical issues around the election coming up.
I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about what exactly is a free and fair election. Where are we now? How do we get to where we need to go?
Can we even have a free and fair election when we are no longer a “Full” or “Working” Democracy?
Romania did it. Can’t we?
No path?
I’ll be fascinated to watch how Romania does in its do-over vote. And in the next round of Democracy Indexing. They should move up. It’s a pretty ballsy move to deal with a not-free and unfair election by blowing the whistle and running it over again.
