New Starlink Election Fraud Claims: A Deeper Look and a Fact Check

Fact Checking a New Round of Claims

In recent days, I’ve been getting DMs from readers asking about new posts circulating on Substack and social media that claim Kamala Harris actually won the 2024 election—and that this time, there’s proof. The new theory that secret updates were made to voting machines right before the election; that Elon Musk’s Starlink network was used to manipulate results in real time; and that Harris votes vanished from precincts where she should have performed strongly.

This is essentially a continuation —with new evidence—of the post election claims, most notably by technologist Stephen Spoonamore, which pursued ideas including “bullet ballots,” vote erasure algorithms, and server-side manipulation. Those earlier claims made waves but eventually stalled—mainly because the technical documentation never materialized, and (some argued), the theories lacked internal consistency.

This new wave claims to solve that problem.

So … it got my attention. I went in with an open mind. I read the posts. I checked the court filings. I pulled vote data. I read everything I could find from both believers and skeptics. Here’s my report.

The Claims – What’s New This Time?

The centerpiece of the new theory is recounted thoroughly in a June 11 Substack post titled "She Won. They Didn’t Just Change the Machines. They Rewired the Election." Unlike earlier post-election theories, this one doesn’t just focus on theoretical vulnerabilities plus suspicions or vague statistical anomalies. It introduces what it claims is a complete mechanism consisting of software manipulation; a new access mechanism; and a test case.

• New Technical Documentation: It describes engineering change orders (ECOs) showing that Pro V&V, a federally accredited test lab, approved software and hardware changes to ES&S voting machines just before the election, without triggering a full certification review. It did so, according to the new claim, by declaring the changes to be “de minimis” (inconsequential) which allowed the changes to be implemented without a complex recertification process. This “de minimis” claim is presented as essentially bogus — a cover to create an ability to make substantive changes without subjecting them to review.

• A New Starlink Access Pathway: It claims that Elon Musk’s Starlink gained a new, previously unknown access that provided real-time internet connectivity to voting machines, allowing votes to be altered during tabulation.

• ‘A “Smoking Gun” Test Case: It cites five machines in Rockland County, NY, that recorded zero votes for Kamala Harris while showing hundreds of votes for other Democrats in the same precincts.

These claims suggest a full system: motive, method, and result. According to the post, this wasn’t just dirty politics or local fraud. It was a coordinated digital operation—technically sophisticated, nationally scaled, and hidden in plain sight.

The Evidence Presented

1. The Software Updates

The claimants point to engineering change orders (ECOs) filed by Pro V&V, an election vendor, in the months leading up to the election. These documents show:

• Updates to ES&S machines involving printer models, ballot bin configurations, and file path structures.

• These updates were categorized as “de minimis”—meaning minor enough not to require full re-certification or public disclosure.

• The article argues that this classification allowed potentially significant system changes to escape scrutiny. It presents the “de minimis” categorization as done intentionally to shield the changes from the kind of scrutiny a re-certification would have carried out — and it suggests this was done knowingly, as a dodge to make it possible to introduce manipulations into the vote-counting software that went unnoticed because no recertification took place.

2. The Starlink Access Layer

The post introduces a new mechanism for real-time interference: It claims that days before the elction, this happened:

Just days before the election, Musk activated 265 brand new low Earth orbit (LEO) V2 Mini satellites, each equipped with Direct-to-Cell (DTC) technology capable of processing, routing, and manipulating real-time data, including voting data, through his satellite network.

DTC doesn’t require routers, towers, or a traditional SIM. It connects directly from satellite to any compatible device—including embedded modems in “air-gapped” voting systems, smart UPS units, or unsecured auxiliary hardware.

From that moment on:
- Commands could be sent from orbit
- Patch delivery became invisible to domestic monitors
- Compromised devices could be triggered remotely

So — the claim is that this enabled Starlink internet connections to be used to provide covert access to tabulation systems, especially in rural swing-state counties. The theory holds that voting tabulators were networked via Starlink during or just before vote processing, allowing for dynamic vote alteration from a central command.

3. Harris Vote Drop-Off in Rockland County

The article zeroes in on Rockland County, NY—particularly five machines in the town of Ramapo. It claims:

• One machine (District 35) recorded 552 votes for Trump and 0 for Harris, yet showed 331 votes for Democrat Kirsten Gillibrand in the same batch.

• In multiple districts, voters reportedly signed affidavits saying they voted for Harris, but those votes never appeared in local tallies.

• The court has ordered a hand recount and initiated a discovery process—something the article presents as a major turning point.

Evaluating the Evidence Critically

The Software Updates Happened

Yes—Pro V&V did make changes and did so without recertification, filing them as “de minimis.” These were documented and legally filed with the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC). According to Pro V&V, they included: replacing printers, reorganizing file storage locations, and addingmounting brackets and ballot bin modifications.

These changes were claimed to be “de minimis” by the Pro V&V, and the claimed changes were reviewed under federal protocols. According to Jack Cobb, director of Pro V&V, none of the changes affected tabulation logic. No update modified vote counting software or ballot interpretation algorithms. Unless Cobb blatantly lied not just verbally but in the data presented to the monitors (and no evidence of that has surfaced), these changes fall well within legal and technical norms for “de minimis” and were, in fact, de minimis. They did not touch on vote tabulation. So, based on the evidence, it seems that the claim that Cobb in essence falsified substantive changes as de minimis is not supported by the available evidence.

The Starlink Claim

The claim is that Starlink launched 265 new satellites days before the election that were “direct to cell” and thus had a back door into the voter tabulation machines. The claim is that once the Direct to Cell new satellites were up and functioning, Starlink had a back door into vote tabulation machines.

But:

• According to all of the evidence I could find, Starlink was used only for interfacing with electronic poll books—the books used to check on voter registration status, not vote tabulation machines, which are different and were never connected to the internet. To be very clear, according to state and federal election officials, no vote tabulation systems were connected to the internet, Starlink or otherwise, at any point in the voting process.

• Tabulators are “air-gapped”—physically disconnected from any network during operation.

• No forensic audit, network trace, or post-election review has ever found evidence of Starlink being used to manipulate vote counts.

The claim feels intuitively powerful because Starlink is new, decentralized, and fast—and of couse, it’s controlled by Elon Musk. But none of the technical facts I could find support the idea that it was ever connected to vote-counting machines.

The Harris Vote Drop-Off in Ramapo

This was the most attention-grabbing claim.

• The five machines in question are located in the villages of Monsey and Kaser, in the town of Ramapo.

• These areas are overwhelmingly populated by Orthodox and Hasidic Jewish communities, which practice bloc voting under the guidance of rabbinic leadership. The rabbi’s say “vote for ____” and the community votes for ____. In this case - Trump.

• In presidential elections, these communities have repeatedly supported Republican Presidential candidates—while simultaneously voting for Democrats in local or statewide races that impact schools, zoning, and housing.

• This may (and probably does) explain the zero votes on these machines. Indeed — and this was quite comopelling — the same machine that recorded 0 votes for Kamala Harris in 2024 also recorded 0 votes for Joe Biden in 2020.

That’s not a theory—that’s confirmed by machine-level public records from the Rockland County Board of Elections.

The behavior looks strange and it is a bit strange. But it reflects a consistent, well-documented political pattern. And while the court did order a hand recount in response to the concerns, no ballots have gone missing and no irregularities in machine performance have been confirmed. More importantly, even if there turned out to be such a problem in Rockland, there is no evidence connecting it to the theory outlined above, since the voting tabulation machines were never connected to the internet, and thus were not subject to the type of manipulation envisioned in the theory.

Tentative Conclusions

• The voting machine changes were real, but the idea that Pro V&V scammed the system by claiming “de minimis” to cover up malicious changes does not seem to be supported.

• The deployment of 265 Starlink satellites just before the election is confirmed, but there is no evidence any of them were ever connected to voting tabulators and it appears they played no role in vote counting.

• The “zero vote” anomaly has a strong sociological explanation and a clear historical precedent- bloc voting by orthodox jewish communities acting on recommendation of their rabbi. It happened in 2020 with Joe Biden receiving zero votes as well.

That doesn’t mean every question has been answered. The Rockland County hand recount is still pending. If new forensic evidence emerges, it deserves scrutiny. But nothing presented so far appears to substantiate the claim that Kamala Harris won and that votes were stolen from her.

What the Fact-Checkers Say

After coming to the foregoing tentative conclusions (and only then, so as to avoid confirmation bias), I went to the various fact checkers:

• Snopes: Starlink–vote manipulation claim = False

• PolitiFact: No evidence of backdoor access or tabulation interference

• FactCheck.org: Broad theory = Baseless

• AP, Wired, Al Jazeera: Confirm no known irregularities in system architecture or vote reporting

These organizations consulted election officials, cybersecurity analysts, and the voting machine manufacturers themselves. Their results reinforce what I found.

Final Thoughts

I understand why people want this to be true. I would have “wanted it to be true” if I let myself think that way but investigative disciplline required that I keep those thoughts at bay. I followed the evidence trail as best I could, looking for evidence that would really support the claims. I just couldn’t find it.

Anyway like I said at the outset — if someone out there can refute what I found out, or think I found out — or can clarify or ask further questions — I’m open and still looking into this. Maybe I missed something, or misunderstood something. I can’t guarantee anything except that I took an honest, hard look at it and when I got deep down in the weeds I found things that left me skeptical for the reasons stated.

If anyone has more details, or conflicting information, please provide it in the comments. I will welcome further information of clarifications, meanwhile, you have my findings to date.