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https://www.gregpalast.com/trump-lost-vote-suppression-won/

Trump Lost. Vote Suppression Won.

Here are the numbers...

Trump lost. That is, 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, if not for the mass purge of voters of color, if not for the mass disqualification of provisional and mail-in ballots, if not for the new mass “vigilante” challenges in swing states, Harris would have gained at least another 3,565,000 votes, topping Trump’s official popular vote tally by 1.2 million.

Stay with me and I’ll give you the means, methods and, most important, the key calculations.

But if you’re expecting a sexy story about Elon Musk messing with vote-counting software from outer space, sorry, you won’t get that here.

As in Bush v. Gore in 2000, and in too many other miscarriages of Democracy, this election was determined by good old “vote suppression,” the polite term we use for shafting people of color out of their ballot. We used to call it Jim Crow.

Here are key numbers:

If the purges, challenges and ballot rejections were random, it wouldn’t matter. It’s anything but random. For example, an audit by the State of Washington found that a Black voter was 400% more likely than a white voter to have their mail-in ballot rejected. Rejection of Black in-person votes, according to a US Civil Rights Commission study in Florida, ran 14.3% or one in seven ballots cast.

There are also the uncountable effects of the explosive growth of voter intimidation tactics including the bomb threats that closed 31 polling stations in Atlanta on Election Day.

America’s Nasty Little Secret

The nasty little secret of American democracy is that we don’t count all the votes. Nor let every citizen vote.

In 2024, especially, after an avalanche of new not-going-to-let-you-vote laws passed in almost every red state, the number of citizens Jim Crow’d out of their vote soared into the millions. According to the Brennan Center for Justice, since the 2020 election, “At least 30 states enacted 78 restrictive laws” to blockade voting. The race-targeted laws ran the gamut from shuttering drop boxes in Black-majority cities to, for the first time, allowing non-government self-appointed “vote fraud vigilantes” to challenge voters by the hundreds of thousands.

Throughout election seasons, The New York Times and NPR and establishment media write stories and editorials decrying vote suppression tactics, from new ID requirements to new restrictions on mail-in voting. But, notably, the mainstream press never, ever, not once, will say that these ugly racist attacks on voters changed the outcome of an election.

Question: If these vote suppression laws — notorious example: Georgia’s SB 202 — had no effect on election outcomes, then why did GOP legislators fight so hard to pass these laws? The answer is clear on the Brennan Center’s map of states that passed restrictive laws. It’s pretty much Trump’s victory map.

America Goes Postal

Let’s look at just one vote suppression operation in action.

In 2020, during the pandemic, America went postal. More than 43% of us voted by mail.

But it wasn’t easy. Harris County, Texas, home of Houston, tried to mail out ballots during the COVID epidemic on the grounds that voters shouldn’t die waiting in lines at polling stations. But then, the state’s Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton stopped this life-saving measure.

Why wouldn’t this GOP official let Houstonians vote safely? Maybe it’s because Houston has the largest number of Black voters of any city in America. Indeed, on Steve Bannon’s podcast, Paxton proudly stated, “Had we not done that [stopped Houston from sending out ballots], Donald Trump would’ve lost the election” in Texas. Texas!

Before the 2024 election, prompted by Trump’s evidence-free attack on mail-in ballots as inherently fraudulent, 22 states, according to the Brennan Center, imposed “38 new restrictions on the ability to vote absentee that were not in place in 2020…likely to most affect or already have disproportionately affected voters of color.” You’re shocked, right?

Texas’ requirement to add ID numbers to an absentee ballot caused the rejection rate to jump from 1% to 12%.

So, here’s the question we need to ask. If restrictions on mail-in balloting swung Texas to Trump, how did all these new restrictions affect the outcome of the vote in other states?

In 2020, an NPR study found the mail-in ballot rejection rate hit 13.8% during the Democratic primaries—a loss of one in seven ballots.

Take Georgia, where the Palast Investigative Fund spent months in on-the-ground investigations.

Here are photos of a Georgia voter, career military officer and Pentagon advisor Major Gamaliel Turner (Ret), demonstrating for young voters how to fill out an absentee ballot, emphasizing that it must be mailed in promptly. He did, seven days before the deadline. But we only recently learned that Georgia officials disqualified his ballot as received too late.

Major Gamaliel Turner (now retired) about to mail in his absentee ballot. The state of Georgia rejected it. (Photo: Palast Investigative Fund, 2024.)

In 2008, even before the majority of Democrats began voting by mail, when absentee balloting was much rarer, the federal government reported 488,136 mail-in ballots were rejected, almost all on picayune grounds (i.e. middle initial on signature missing etc.). An MIT study put the number of rejected mail-in ballots at 2.9%.

That’s the low-end of MIT’s estimate of mail-in ballots tossed out. Charles Stewart, Distinguished Professor of Political Science, author of the report, notes mail-in ballots requested and never received nor returned could raise the total mail-in ballot loss rate to 21%.

For 2024, that would total 14.1 million ballots that, effectively, vanished from the count.

The “failure to return” ballot was exacerbated in this election by the steep cut in ballot drop boxes, a method favored by urban (read, “Democratic”) voters. Black voters in Atlanta used ballot drop boxes extensively because they feared, with good reason, relying on the Post Office [see Major Turner’s story above].

In response, the Republican Governor of Georgia, Brian Kemp, signed SB 202 which slashed the number of drop boxes by 75% only in Black-majority counties and locked them away at night. These moves slashed mail-in and drop box balloting, used by the majority of Democrats in 2020, by nearly 90% in the 2024 race.

Even if deemed “on time,” ballots still face rejection. Marietta, Georgia, first-time voter Andrian Consonery Jr. told me his mail-in ballot was rejected because his signature supposedly didn’t match that on his registration. (I needn’t add, Consonery is Black.) In effect, Consonery was accused of forgery — a federal crime — not by the FBI but by self-appointed amateur sleuths. This challenge to mail-in ballots, part of a right-wing campaign, has gone viral.

Georgian Adrian Consonery Jr.’s mail-in ballot was challenged because of a false claim that his signature was forged. (Photo: Zach D. Roberts for the Palast Investigative Fund, 2024.)

In 2020, the federal government reported that 157,477 ballots were rejected for supposedly “mis-matched” signatures. That’s quite a crime wave — but without criminals.

And that’s before we get to the dozens of other attacks on voting that were freshly minted for the 2024 election, attacks aimed at voters of color.

The crucial statistic is that not everyone’s ballot gets disqualified. One study done for the United States Civil Rights Commission found that a Black person, such as Maj. Turner, will be 900% more likely to have their mail-in or in-person ballot disqualified than a white voter.

Now, let’s do some arithmetic. If we take the lowest end of the MIT ballot rejection rate, and only a tenth of the “lost” ballot rate, and then apply it to the number of mail-in and drop-box ballots, we can conservatively estimate that 2,121,000 mail-in votes went into the electoral dumpster.

Whose ballots? Democrats are 51% more likely than Republicans to vote by mail; and, given the racial disparity in ballot rejections, Trump’s swing-state margins begin to look shaky.

The KKK Plan and the New Vigilantes

In 2020, the Palast Investigative Fund uncovered a whole new way to bring Jim Crow back to life: challenges to a citizen’s right to vote by a posse of self-proclaimed vote-fraud hunters.

Four years ago, the GOP took this new suppression method out for a test ride in Georgia when 88 Republican operatives — remember, these are not government officials — challenged the rights of over 180,000 Georgians to have their ballots counted. These vigilantes based their scheme on the program originally used by the Ku Klux Klan in 1946.

One challenged voter: Major Turner, the same voter whose mail-in ballot was disqualified in a later election.

In 2020, the Major’s ballot was challenged by the county Chairman of the Republican Party in Southern Georgia, Alton Russell. (Russell likes to dress up as infamous vigilante Doc Holliday, with a loaded six-gun in a holster.) In a (polite) confrontation we filmed between the Major and Russell, the GOP honcho admitted he had no evidence that Maj. Turner, nor any of the 4,000 others he challenged, should be denied the right to have their ballots counted.

Note: The Palast Fund contacted a sample of 800 of these challenged voters and found that, overwhelmingly, they were Americans of color.

In 2020, this KKK plan, adopted by the Trump organization, proved its value. In that election, Trump almost won Georgia, falling short by just 11,779 votes — only because local elections officials rejected most of the challenges. But for 2024, the Georgia’s Republican-controlled legislature changed the law to make it very difficult for officials to deny the challenges.

That emboldened the Trump-supported organization True the Vote to roll out the challenge to every swing state. In 2024, True the Vote signed up over 40,000 volunteer vigilantes. The organization crowed proudly that, by August of 2024, they’d already challenged a mind-blowing 317,886 voters in dozens of states. By Election Day this November, True the Vote projected it would have challenged over two million voters. In addition, Trump’s lawyer, Cleta Mitchell, founded Eagle AI to challenge hundreds of thousands more including in swing state Pennsylvania.

How many voters ultimately lost their ballots? Almost all voting officials we’ve contacted have refused to answer.

Placebo Ballots

Those voters who’d been challenged but mailed in their ballot would be unlikely to know their vote had been lost. Others who showed up in person at a poll would be told they could not vote on a regular ballot. These voters were sent away or forced to vote on a “provisional” ballot.

If you’ve been challenged or find you’ve been purged off the registration rolls, you’ll be offered one of these provisional ballots, paper ballots you place in a special envelope. Typically, you’ll be promised your registration will be checked and then your ballot will be counted. Bullshit. If you’re challenged, unless you personally contact or go into your county clerk’s office with ID and proof of address, your ballot goes into the electoral dumpster.

A better name for a “provisional” ballot would be “placebo” ballot. You think you’ve voted, but chances are, you did not, that is, your ballot wasn’t counted.

Here’s an ugly number: According to the US Elections Assistance Commission (EAC), in 2016, when 2.5 million provisional ballots were cast, a breathtaking 42.3% were never counted. Think about that. Over a million Americans lost their vote — though, notably, not one was charged attempting to vote illegally. And that was in 2016, before the vigilante challenges and before millions more had been purged from the rolls leading up to the 2024 election.

And here’s the statistic that matters most. Black, Hispanic or Asian-American voters are 300% more likely than white voters to be shunted to a “placebo” provisional ballot.

The Great Purge and the Poison Postcard

The polite term in government agencies is, “List Maintenance.” It’s best known as The Purge — when voters’ registrations are wiped off the rolls. The EAC keeps track of The Purge. It’s a big business. For example, before the 2022 election, when the data was last available, swing state North Carolina wiped 392,851 voters off the rolls.

The majority of removals were based on questionable, indeed, shockingly faulty information that a voter had moved their residence. I’m not talking about the 4.9 million voters purged because they’re dead, or eight million others whose residential move could be verified, nor those serving time in prison nor those ruled too crazy to vote.

I’m talking about a trick that has been perfected by politicians of both parties to eliminate voters of the wrong persuasion: the Poison Postcard. Here’s how it works: Targeted voters are mailed postcards by state elections officials. (Let’s remember, state voting chiefs, “Secretaries of State,” are almost to a one partisan hacks.) Voters who don’t sign and return the cards, which look like junk mail, will be purged.

The Poison Postcard response rate is close to nothing. In Arizona, according to the EAC, just one in ten postcards are returned. And in Georgia, the vote-saving response is barely above 1%. And that’s the way our partisan voting officials like it.

Were the millions of Americans purged before the 2024 election all fraudsters who should lose their right to vote? Direct marketing expert Mark Swedlund told us, “This only means that most people, especially young people, the poor and voters of color, simply ignore junk mail.”

With the help of Swedlund and the same experts used by Amazon — and believe me, Amazon knows exactly where you live — we took a deep dive into two states’ purge operations for the ACLU.

The state of Georgia had purged hundreds of thousands from the voter rolls on grounds they’d moved from their voting addresses. Our experts, going name by name through Georgia’s purge list, working from special data provided us by the US Postal Service, identified 198,351 Georgians who had been purged for moving had, in fact, not moved an inch from their legal voting address. The state’s only evidence these 198,351 voters had moved? They failed to return the Poison Postcard.

In 2020, I testified in federal court for the NAACP and RainbowPUSH, presenting our expert findings to get those voters, overweighted with minorities and young Georgians, back on the rolls. Unfortunately, the Trump’d-up court system now gives huge deference to a state’s voting operations, a trend which first took off in 2013 when the US Supreme Court defenestrated the Voting Rights Act.

The results have been devastating. According to the EAC data, before the 2024 election, 4,776,706 registrants were removed nationwide simply because they failed to return the postcard.

Also in 2020, the Palast Investigative Fund produced a technical report for Black Voters Matter Fund on a proposed purge of 153,779 voters in Wisconsin, a plan pushed by Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, a group financed by right-wing billionaires. For Black Voters Matter, we brought back our team of location experts who proved, name by name, that the proposed purge was wildly riddled with errors.

Notably, we found that the purged was aimed almost exclusively at African-Americans in Milwaukee and at students in Madison. The non-partisan Elections Board agreed with us, allowing those voters to cast ballots, with the result that Biden squeaked by Trump in Wisconsin by 20,682 votes. (Note: It was not our intention to elect Biden, but to allow the voters, not some Purge’n General, to pick our President.)

Unfortunately, before the 2024 election, the Poison Postcard Purge accelerated. This time, a new Elections Board in Wisconsin (10 electoral votes) decided to use the same discredited purge list to knock off 166,433 voters which, this time, we could not stop. Kamala Harris lost that state by just 29,397 votes. In Pennsylvania (19 electoral votes), the Poison Postcards wiped out 360,132 voters, three times Trump’s victory margin.

And before the vote this year, Georgia ramped up the purge, targeting an astonishing 875,000 voters, earning it the #1 ranking for “election integrity” by the ultra-right-wing Heritage Foundation.

I saw the purge in action in Savannah, Georgia, this October, where 900 Savannah voters, most of them Black, were challenged by one single “vigilante,” according to voting expert Carry Smith. Smith, who wrote her doctoral thesis on wrongful purges in Georgia, was herself on the hit list.

And more

We haven’t even touched on other ways that voters of color, college students and urban voters have come under attack. These include the rejection of new registrations and rejection of in-person votes as “spoiled” (i.e. rejected as unreadable), costing, according to the EAC, more than a million votes — rejections which our 25 years of investigations have found are way overweighted against the Democratic demographic.

After the 2012 election, I was able to calculate, with cold certainty, that 2,383,587 new voters had their registrations rejected; 488,136 legitimate absentee ballots were disqualified, and so on. In that election, a total of 5,901,814 citizens were blocked from voting or had their ballots disqualified. These stats were based on the hard data from the EAC which gathers detailed reports from the states.

Today, with new, sophisticated, and well-financed vote suppression operations, the number of voters purged and ballots disqualified are clearly far higher than the suppression count of 2012. Unfortunately, the EAC won’t release data, if it does at all, for at least a year. We’ve put in Open Records requests to the states, but today’s officials are stonewalling and slow-walking our requests for the data. In no other democracy are the vote totals — or, to be clear, the uncounted ballot totals — a state secret.

America deserves an answer to this question: Excluding a boost from Jim Crow vote suppression games, did Donald Trump win?

From the shockingly huge numbers we’ve discussed here of provisional and mail-in ballots disqualified, the postcard purge operation, the vigilante challenges and so on, we can say, with reasonable certainty, Trump lost — that is, would have lost both the Electoral College and popular vote totals absent suppression.

By how much?

For those who can’t sleep without my best estimate, let me apply the most conservative methodology possible, as I would do in a government investigation.

I’ve updated the 2012 suppression numbers with the newest available data. Not surprisingly, the suppression number has soared, in part because the number of voters has increased by 41.3 million since 2012. But principally, the votes “lost” also zoomed upward because of the massive increase in mail-in balloting by Democrats since 2012, and crucially, the effect of new Jim Crow voting restrictions. Given a minimum two-to-one racial and partisan disparity in voters purged and ballots disqualified, the 2024 “suppression factor” is no less than 4.596% of the total vote.

Those familiar with data mining will note that there is some double-counting in the 9 million voters and their ballots disqualified that I cited at the top of the article. In addition, we must recognize that many voters caught up in the purges and challenges would have cast their ballot for Trump. Therefore, I’ve conservatively cut in half the low end of the range of the calculation of votes suppressed to 2.3% to isolate the effect on Trump’s official victory margin.

In other words, vote suppression cost Kamala Harris no less than 3,565,000 votes. Harris would have topped Trump’s official total by 1.2 million. Most important, this 2.3% suppression factor undoubtedly cost Harris the states of Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Georgia. If not for the wholesale attack on votes and voters, Harris would have won the election with 286 Electoral votes.

Tech note from a numbers guy — and Martin Luther King

Until the Elections Assistance Commission gets updated figures from the states next year (and, under Trump, I doubt we will ever get those numbers), 3,565,000 votes lost to Harris is the estimate I would present in my role as a forensic expert in a courtroom as the lowest conceivable suppression factor.

I rarely make a big deal about my own credentials but, since the election, the Web has been flooded by amateur, arithmetic-defying speculation about computer hacking and other unsupported twaddle. Best to stick to hard, verifiable data. And that’s what I do.

For two decades, I was a forensic economist for government agencies including the US Justice Department; taught statistics at Indiana University; provided expert calculations of vote suppression for the ACLU, NAACP, and RainbowPUSH and won the Global Editors Award for my data journalism on vote suppression measurements for reports done for Al Jazeera, BBC, Rolling Stone and The Guardian. The numbers you get here are exactly what I’d present to a Federal court. In other words, kids, don’t do this at home…calculating the “un-count” requires expertise.

I make this point for another reason: The theory that “Elon Musk messed with the voting machines” is, unconsciously, unintentionally racist. With few exceptions, these silly speculations come from those who simply ignore not just the millions of votes officially reported as suppressed, their theories also ignore the horrifically painful experience of Black people turned away from the polls.

Here is a photo of Jessica Lawrence in tears, moments after her 92-year-old grandmother was tossed out of an Atlanta polling station, into a storm, because she’d been wrongfully purged. Any speculation about the nefarious cause of Trump’s must not leave out Jessica’s grandma nor the millions of other citizens of color who were wrongly barred from their ballot.

Jessica Lawrence at an Atlanta polling station just after her 92-year-old grandmother was denied a ballot. (Photo: David Ambrose for the Palast Investigative Fund, 2018.) See Ms. Jordan and Maj. Turner in the film, Vigilantes Inc: America’s New Vote Suppression Hitmen, available without charge on YouTube.

Now here’s the good news

We saw that in 2020 when, despite extreme, even felonious actions by Trump supporters to block, challenge and disqualify voters and ballots, the theft by suppression was defeated.

That was the work of voting rights groups challenging these attacks. The work was done in the courts and, more important, in the precincts, re-registering the purged, challenging the challenges, “curing” disqualified ballots.

The road is long but victory is certain. After the 2016 election, the Palast team uncovered a cruel, racist purge program called, “Interstate Crosscheck” that cost nearly a million voters, overwhelmingly minorities, their rights. This motivated the Rev. Jesse Jackson to launch a campaign that successfully shut down Crosscheck. Unquestionably, Joe Biden could not have won in 2020 without the Reverend saving literally hundreds of thousands of votes. The point is, they can’t suppress all the votes all the time.

In other words, Democracy can win, despite the 2.3% suppression headwind.

And that’s our job as Americans: to end the purges, the vigilante challenges, the ballot rejections and the attitude that this is all somehow OK.

Martin Luther King gave us our marching orders in 1965, in words just as important today.

“Let us march on ballot boxes, march on ballot boxes until race-baiters disappear from the political arena. I want to say to the people of America and the nations of the world, that we are not about to turn around. We are on the move now.”

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no lnx

Trump won't need to cancel the midterms if this Republican plot succeeds

Thom Hartmann July 08, 2025

James Carville isn’t a man prone to panic, but when he says, “I would not put it at all past [Trump] to try to call martial law or declare that there’s some kind of national emergency,” around next year’s elections, it’s time to sit up straight.

Speaking to NewsNation’s Chris Cuomo, Carville warned that as Donald Trump sees a political shellacking coming in the 2026 midterms — particularly in states like New Jersey and Virginia — he may try something extreme to hold onto power.

“The hoof prints are coming,” Carville said, and he’s not wrong.

This isn’t hyperbole. This is history — the history of nations that have lost their democracies like Hungary and Russia — threatening to repeat itself.

Trump has already laid the psychological and structural groundwork to undermine or suspend elections; he just may not need to declare martial law if his fixers pull off what’s happening already this year.

Award-winning investigative journalist Greg Palast, a committed non-partisan, has laid it out in painful detail. And what he’s uncovered should terrify every American who believes in democracy.

Palast argues that Trump’s GOP doesn’t have to wait for November 2026 to win. They plan to win it in 2025, through something he calls The Great Purge, authorized by five corrupt Republicans on the U.S. Supreme Court.

That’s right: before you even cast a vote, millions of names may already be scrubbed from voter rolls. If you’re Black, Latino, a student, a woman who changed her name at marriage, a military service member, or simply someone who moved apartments, you’re already a target.

Let’s break it down:

In the lead-up to the 2024 election, the U.S. Election Assistance Commission reported over 19 million names purged from voter rolls. While many were valid (deceased or moved), at least 4.47 million were blocked from voting due to bureaucratic tricks like “failure to return confirmation notices,” a tactic voting rights lawyers call “caging.”

In Georgia, Palast’s team working with the ACLU found that 63.3% of voters purged via caging were wrongly removed. Many were African-American.

Georgia’s GOP Secretary of State proudly doubled down in 2023, targeting 875,000 voters, and that’s just one state.

Thirty states now use an error-ridden system called ERIC for voter purging. Not accurate enough? Trump’s legal henchwoman, Cleta Mitchell, is pushing for a new program called EagleAI, the modern version of the GOP’s 1960s “Eagle Eye” voter intimidation operation.

If that wasn’t enough, Republicans have introduced the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act, which would force every newly registered or updated voter to present proof of citizenship in person. And if the name on your birth certificate is different from your passport or driver’s license, you can’t register or vote.

According to Michael Waldman of the Brennan Center, over 21 million Americans don’t have those documents readily available. And 69 million women don’t have their married name on their birth certificate. Many Americans don’t know where their passport or birth certificate is, especially those living in poverty, moving frequently, or serving overseas.

And let’s be clear about the excuse for this law: A racist myth. The Heritage Foundation, pushing the SAVE Act, claims millions of undocumented immigrants vote. But even Kris Kobach, the Kansas Secretary of State who made it his mission to arrest illegal voters, found exactly zero in court. In fact, his law blocked 36,000 legal Kansas voters and was thrown out for being unconstitutional.

And now they’re bragging that they just purged 5 million new names so far this year, according to Judicial Watch.

Still, these tactics persist. Why? Because they work.

In 2000, George W. Bush won Florida by just 537 votes after tens of thousands of Black voters were falsely labeled as felons and purged by George’s brother, then-Florida Governor Jeb Bush. Today’s tactics are far more sophisticated and widespread, and with a Trumpified Supreme Court, far harder to stop.

Under Trump, the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division — once the bulwark against voter suppression — has become complicit. Don’t expect any help from the feds if your name goes missing from the rolls.

In fact, Georgia’s Secretary of State has already requested access to DHS’s SAVE database — a tool used to track deported immigrants — to cross-reference voters. When Florida tried this in 2012, they removed 172,000 voters but only found one actual non-citizen: an Austrian Republican. But thousands of Hispanic voters were wrongly barred because they had common names like Jose Garcia.

That’s not election security. That’s systemic suppression.

While official channels do their damage, Trump’s allies are also organizing a private MAGA militia of self-appointed “fraud hunters.” In 2024, these vigilantes challenged over one million ballots. In 2026, Palast reports, they’re gearing up to challenge even more, targeting key swing states like Georgia and Pennsylvania.

And if state officials don’t comply with Trump’s purge lists, Mitchell promises her army will go door-to-door, one voter at a time.

Remember, all of this happens before a single vote is cast.

And if that doesn’t work? Now that Congress has funded ICE to become the largest (secret, masked) police agency in America with a network of concentration camps across the country, answerable only to Donald Trump, pretty much anything is possible.

Carville may sound alarmist when he talks about martial law, but let’s remember: Trump tried to overturn the 2020 election, summoned a mob to the Capitol, and flirted with using the Insurrection Act to deploy the military against protestors, who he had asked his generals to “shoot in the legs.”

He’s mused to his followers, “You won’t have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians.” That’s not subtle. That’s a warning.

And while right-wing pundits like Bill O’Reilly chuckle and offer “18 muffalettas” in mockery, the groundwork for a democratic backslide is already laid, through legal loopholes, voter suppression, intimidation of Republican legislators like we saw yesterday, misinformation, and judicial capture.

Martial law may not arrive with tanks. It may come in the form of a national emergency declaration, a manufactured riot, or the pretense of mass fraud. Trump doesn’t have to cancel the election; he just has to delegitimize it enough to override it.

So what do we do?

As Palast warns: don’t despair. “They can’t steal all the votes all of the time.” But they sure as hell can steal enough.

We need:

Massive voter education on how to confirm your registration and re-register early.

Lawsuits and court challenges in every state adopting suppression tactics.

Federal action, if not from the Justice Department, then from an organized, relentless citizenry.

Election monitoring from independent and international groups.

And, when Democrats are again in power (G-d willing), a law that explicitly says we have a right to vote. It’s insane that government has to get a court order (thanks, Supreme Court) to take away your gun, but doesn’t even have to notify you when they take away your vote.

If Trump succeeds in today’s massive purge of largely Democratic voters and delegitimizing results, he won’t need martial law. The authoritarian train won’t arrive with a bang; it’ll glide in silently, on rails we failed to see being laid down this year.

So yes, James Carville is right to sound the alarm. And Greg Palast has done the reporting to prove it.

Now it’s up to us to stop it. Pass it along.

NOW READ: The Supreme Court just made it so that you can no longer look away

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an

Inside the GOP plot to silence Texas voters

Texas Governor Greg Abbott (Not Pictured) speaks alongside U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) (L), Attorney General Ken Paxton (2nd R), Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick (R) hold a joint press conference February 18, 2015 in Austin, Texas. (Photo by Erich Schlegel/Getty Images)

Thom Hartmann August 12, 2024

Last week I documented how in Georgia both Governor and former Secretary of State Brian Kemp and current Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger have been actively purging millions of Georgians, particularly Black voters, from voter rolls for years. How Kemp purged over 100,000 Georgia voters and then “beat” Stacy Abrams by about 50,000.

A similar scheme has been underway in Ohio ever since Republicans took over that state, and also operates in most other Red states that have large Blue cities.

The purges that started in a big way under Republicans in Ohio gained both notoriety and lawsuits, one going all the way to the Supreme Court.

They did, however, produce a significant blowback: people got pissed off when they showed up to vote and were told that they’d been removed from the voting rolls by the Republican administration of their state.

READ: Why isn't the media reporting on Trump's increasing dementia?

So, Republicans in Texas have come up with a new twist that’s designed to avoid directly confronting and angering voters. You could call it “passive aggressive vote suppression.”

Instead of purging people off the rolls entirely, they’re putting voters they consider suspicious on what they call a “suspense” list.

As of last week, according to The Dallas Morning News, “Nearly 12% of Texas’ roughly 18 million voters are on the suspense list.”

If you’re running a state and want to hang onto your office, even if your policies are not popular and you’re so incompetent you can’t even keep the power on, the easiest way to stay in office — to “win” elections — is to pre-rig them by making sure some people’s ballots are simply never counted.

The Texas GOP has turned this into an art form; in a state where elections at the statewide level are often won by a single point or two, muting the votes of 12% of the state’s voters can give you a real edge. Here’s how it works:

Being on the suspense list means that when you show up to vote, you’ll be given a “provisional ballot.”

What’s a provisional ballot?

Former BBC and Guardian reporter Greg Palast calls them “placebo ballots,” and with good reason. You mark the ballot with your voting choices, hand it in, and walk away feeling like you actually voted. You tell exit pollsters and your friends that you voted. You believe that you voted, and that your vote will be counted.

But, because it’s a provisional ballot, it goes into a separate box and is not counted on election day. Many provisional ballots are never counted, in fact, because for a provisional ballot to be counted in most states (including Texas) the voter must, within 6 days of the election, present themselves at the Secretary of State’s office with ID and proof of citizenship and residence.

If you don’t take the day off work to do this, your ballot is not counted. And often people don’t even realize what’s happened to their vote.

Provisional “placebo” ballots came about in 2002 as a result of The Help America Vote Act that was signed into law that year by George W. Bush.

That legislation, written in large part by former Representative Bob Ney, R-Ohio, contains a provision requiring people who show up to vote — even if they’ve been purged from the voting lists — to be given something new called a “provisional ballot.”

“The main reason we did that,” the former congressman told me, “was because, particularly across the Deep South, people were simply being turned away at the polls. In most cases it was because they were Black, but in many cases it was also being done in districts where the opposition party controlled most of the election apparatus, typically Republicans turning away people in Democratic districts.

“We wanted to make sure,” he added, “that every eligible voter had both a chance to vote and some level of certainty that his or her vote would be counted after they went to all the trouble of voting.”

The parable about the road to hell being paved with good intentions is worthy of citing here. The HAVA law was passed on a bipartisan basis, after the hanging-chad disaster in Florida in the 2000 election.

But the giant loophole it created for GOP vote suppressors was based in the simple reality that provisional ballots are often not counted.

Rules vary from state to state, but usually if voters are given a provisional ballot, they must then, within a few days of the election, present themselves in person at a state or county office to prove that they are who they say they are and that they were legally registered to vote and were purged incorrectly.

The HAVA law requires that voters getting provisional ballots be told that they can “cure” their ballots, but in actual practice in Republican-controlled states this is almost never the case. (Although, even when it is, the percentage of people who’d be willing or able to take time off work to jump through all these hoops is tiny.)

Independent investigative reporter Greg Palast, found this to be very much the case (and worse) when he accompanied Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s 92-year-old cousin, Christine Jordan, to the polls in Georgia, and poll workers repeatedly refused to give her even a provisional ballot until Palast intervened.

After voting for half a century in the same place, she’d been purged from the rolls by Secretary of State and gubernatorial candidate Brian Kemp in the run-up to his contest with Stacey Abrams. Eventually, after multiple tries with Palast threatening lawsuits and making a scene on camera at the polling place, Jordan got a provisional ballot, although it almost certainly was never counted.

In Texas, to have the provisional ballot of a person on the suspense list counted, the state’s website explains:

“[I]n order to have the provisional ballot counted, the voter will be required to visit the voter registrar’s office within six calendar days of the date of the election to either present one of the acceptable forms of photo ID OR submit one of the temporary affidavits (e.g., religious objection or natural disaster) in the presence of the county voter registrar OR submit the required paperwork and sign the required statement to qualify for a permanent disability exemption in the presence of the county voter registrar, in order for the provisional ballot to count.” (emphasis added)

Fully twelve percent of Texas’ voters are now on the suspense list, although — as far as I can tell with a pretty thorough web search — the state doesn’t disclose who they all are, where they live, how they previously voted, or even how they got on the list.

In America, five Republicans on the Supreme Court have ruled repeatedly that you have a right to own a gun and carry it pretty much wherever you want. If a state government wants to take your gun away, because the Supreme Court has defined gun ownership as a “right” rather than a privilege, they must go to court and prove their case before a judge.

On the other hand, the Republicans on the Supreme Court have repeatedly ruled, none of us have a “right” to vote. Even though the 1993 National Voter Registration Act(sometimes called the Motor Voter Act) explicitly says, repeatedly, that “voting is a right” in America, Republicans on the Supreme Court have blocked our access to that right.

In 2001, in the case where five Republicans on the Court stopped the Florida recount and handed the election to its loser, George W. Bush, Chief Justice Rehnquist was explicit, writing for the majority, “The individual citizen has no federal constitutional right to vote for electors for the President of the United States…”

They must go to court to take away your gun, but Republicans can — and routinely do — take away our votes without even informing us.

And then they make you take a day off work and drive a hundred miles to the Secretary of State’s office to prove that you’re still who you’d already proved you were when you first registered, before you’d been bounced onto the suspense list.

That’s just wrong. And America is the only country in the developed world other than Hungary where this is the case. The rest of the democratic world looks at us like we’re some kind of freaks.

First poor white men (1790s), then African Americans and other minorities (1860s), and finally women (1920) fought, went to jail, and even died for the right to vote for more than two centuries.

And yet still there is no universal right for American citizens to vote, which is why Texas, Georgia, Florida, and other Red states can play these games with our votes.

In her Philadelphia speech yesterday, Vice President Harris referenced this bizarre situation, saying that when she’s president the first bill she wants to sign is the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, which will make the right to vote explicit in a way Republicans on the Supreme Court can’t ignore.

It’s about damn time.

AN 7 24

Do you know about Donald J. Trump’s Executive Order 13950? If you don’t, be afraid. Be very afraid.

Just weeks before he was fired by America’s voters in 2020, President Trump issued this piece of nastiness which was quickly rescinded by just-inaugurated President Biden.

The Executive Order is a “DCL,” what the right-wing brilliantly calls a, “Divisive Concepts Law.” These DCL’s terrorize teachers with the threat of losing their jobs if they dare teach the truth of America’s racial history: That white people enslaved Africans, that the Klan enforced racial vote suppression with the hanging rope. And God forbid, they teach that women were banned from the vote until the 20th Century. The Executive Order bans teaching any historical facts if,

“….any individual should feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race or sex….”

As a practical matter, it means teaching the truth of America’s racial stain will get you fired. In 2021, Tennessee high school teacher Matt Hawn lost his job because a student accused him of teaching—cover your children’s ears—“Critical Race Theory.” Hawn said he’d never heard of Critical Race Theory when he was canned.

(Critical Race Theory, taught in law schools, says many of America’s laws and their enforcement, contain a racial bias. Well, D’oh!].

On Thursday, Vice-President Harris told the American Federation of Teachers convention in Houston, epicenter of the anti-CRT hysteria,

“While you teach students about our nation's past, these extremists attack the freedom to learn and acknowledge our nation's true and full history; including book bans! Book bans — in this year 2024! Just think about it: we want to ban assault weapons and they want to ban books.”

It was a century ago, that Tennessee was the laughingstock of the nation for prosecuting a schoolteacher for telling his class about human evolution, a story recounted in the film, Inherit the Wind. Now, a hundred years later, Trumpsters are again passing wind over Tennessee.

And he’s baaaaack! Trump has put his fixation with censoring “divisive concepts” into the GOP platform. Details are provided in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 master plan for the master race.

This ill wind originated in Georgia when Gov. Brian Kemp signed HB1084, threatening the jobs of teachers for teaching ‘divisive concepts’ that could make a white child feel “discomfort.”

Who would feel “discomfort” about the uncensored history of Georgia? Well, maybe it’s Gov. Kemp himself. Because it was the Kemp family, then known as the Habershams, that first brought Africans in chains to Georgia.

Maybe Kemp and family should feel a bit of discomfort. I spoke with Janie Banse, who told me she is she is heartsick that her cousin, Gov. Kemp, won’t admit that their family’s wealth originated in the African slave trade. Kemp’s ancestors held the largest auction of human beings in American history, still remembered by Black Georgians today as “Weeping Time,” when 436 men, women and their children were separated and sold.

Georgia’s HB 1084, passed in 2022,

Prohibit[s] the use of curricula that addresses the topics of slavery, racial oppression, racial segregation, or racial discrimination, including topics relating to the enactment and enforcement of laws resulting in racial oppression, segregation, and discrimination in a professionally and academically appropriate manner and without espousing personal political beliefs;

And what if a teacher expresses a personal distaste for slavery?

Since Georgia was among the first to pass a “DCL,” and at least 16 states have followed.

In Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis, dubbed his DCL the “Stop WOKE Act.”

He banned the College Board’s AP African American Studies course and supported new Black history standards that include the requirement to teach, “how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.”

I can’t make this up.

Since 2021, at least 27 states have imposed or proposed bans or restrictions on teaching topics related to race and gender. Mississippi, Alabama, Arizona and Oklahoma all passed these Divisive Concepts laws. What do these states have in common? According to rankings by US News and World Report, they are all in the nation’s bottom third in educational achievement. Apparently, they won’t teach uncensored history—but then, it’s not clear that they teach much history at all.

Trump’s DLC brigade is not just putting a blindfold over students regarding slavery and Jim Crow. Oklahoma’s Divisive Concepts Law has effectively silenced the true story of the state that was once known officially as, “Indian Territory.”

Jim Gray, former Principal Chief of the Osage Nation, told me that teachers throughout the state have been yanking copies of David Grann’s book Killers of the Flower Moon off their classroom shelves. Killers, on which the Martin Scorsese/Leonardo DiCaprio movie is based, tells the true story about how, in the 1920s, over 100 Oklahoma Osage were murdered for their oil rights.

The insidious brilliance of the Oklahoma law is that it has a fuzzy general prohibition on “divisive” concepts—with teachers facing loss of their teaching credentials and the entire school district losing funding. Because teachers have to guess which books or films will get them fired, the result is mass self-censorship, with Killers culled from classrooms across the state.

A RAND corporation study found that a breathtaking two out of three K-12 teachers, “have decided on their own to limit instruction about political and social issues in the classroom.” Can you blame them?

Any student or parent can put a legal gun to a school principal’s head. But when the law says, “students,” as a practical matter, they don’t mean young kids on the Reservation. Every year, on April 22, Oklahoma celebrates “Sooner Rush Day”, the day in 1889, when any white man could simply stand on a plot of land and seize the surrounding 160 acres of what was, by treaty, Indian Territory. Indigenous kids have to re-enact the theft of their property whether they feel discomfort or not.

I have included this story of the Sooner Rush land grab in my documentary, Long Knife: the Osage Nation, Koch Oil and the new Killers of the Flower Moon. And for that alone, says Chief Gray, the chance it will screen in an Oklahoma school, even a state university, is zilch.

But some states are not shy about creating Black Lists of books to ban. Assigning anti-racist classics Huckleberry Finn or To Kill a Mockingbird, could kill a teacher’s career. PEN America counted 3,132 books banned in nine states in the 2022-23 school year.

Cui Bono? Who benefits from historical amnesia? Kemp alone was not the only white boy to make his fortune from a slaver’s whip. Historic amnesia is a profit center covering many historic misdeeds from Jim Crow to union busting to corporate corruption.

I found this out when I was physically ejected from the Georgia Historical Society in Savannah. I was having a polite interview with the Society’s in-house historian, Dr. Stan Deaton, who was explaining that the Klan took over control of the South when, in 1876, Republicans lost both the popular vote and the Electoral vote—yet a pact between the Klan-backed Southern Democrats and northern Republicans used a sly maneuver to overturn the vote and install the GOP candidate as President. It came down to one official, Dr. Deaton noted, then added, “We saw Mike Pence in that situation recently.”

The second the historian uttered the words, “Mike Pence,” the door flew open and the Society’s PR man halted the interview and expelled me from the building, saying, “We have to protect the new corporate donors on our board.”

I was curious. Who were these “donors” needing protection from history? I found their gala dinner on YouTube with their tuxedoed corporate money men: Georgia Pacific (owned by Koch Industries), Home Depot (owned by right-wing union buster Ken Langone), and Southern Company, whom I investigated some years ago for racketeering and the inexplicable death of whistleblowers. And the Chairman of the Historical Society? Gov. Brian Kemp.

Just below Savannah, at the Kemp family’s old plantation, I spoke with caretaker and Councilman Griffin Lotson whose own great-grandmother was sold at Weeping Time by Kemp’s progenitors.

Lotson emphasizes the connection between this legally enforced historical amnesia and the fight for voting rights. He says, “Suppressing history is suppressing the vote.”

Back in Oklahoma, the current Principal Chief of the Osage, Geoffrey Standing Bear, explained that if Oklahoma were to admit that its “Sooner Rush” was simply theft from the indigenous owners of the land, then it would force open eyes to what he calls, the “military occupation [of Native land] that continues today.”

Napoleon famously said, “History is a set of lies agreed upon.” Trump’s DCL crusade sees history as a set of truths silenced.

*Greg Palast (Rolling Stone, Guardian, BBC) is the author of The New York Times bestsellers including The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. His latest film is Vigilantes Inc.: America’s New Vote Suppression Hitmen to be released in September. GregPalast.com

---

salon cdv

https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/election-theft-expert-says-trump-has-a-plan-to-steal-the-election-legally-and-the-usps-isnt-the-problem

Donald Trump is interfering with the U.S. Postal Service, in an apparent attempt to steal the 2020 election. He has repeatedly and publicly confessed to this scheme. For example, Trump has said that the post office must be denied additional funding because it would help facilitate mail-in voting — which he has previously said would hurt his chances of re-election chances. Trump has also said that mail-in voting is fraudulent and must be stopped. (There is virtually no evidence of such fraud.) He has also said that mail-in ballots may not be counted for “months or years” — a gesture toward his evident desire to remain president indefinitely.

This is one of many examples when Trump has shown himself to be an authoritarian who does not respect democracy: He has threatened not to leave office if he loses the 2020 presidential election, wants to extend the number of years he can be president and has floated the idea of delaying the date of the election if he believes that will help him “win.” During his speech on Monday before the Republican National Convention, Donald Trump said again that he wants to stay in office for 12 more years. He also said that mail-in voting is one of the biggest “scams” in human history and once again suggested that the only way Joe Biden and the Democrats can defeat him is by cheating. With such wild claims Trump is, again, creating a pretext for a “Reichstag fire” event which he will try to use to nullify the 2020 Election.

Trump is also threatening to dispatch 50,000 “poll watchers” in a Jim Crow-style campaign to prevent “fraud” by intimidating and harassing Democratic Party voters — a large proportion of them Black or brown — in major cities like Detroit and Milwaukee. Trump is never subtle in his schemes: Last week he told Fox News’ Sean Hannity that he would only send his “law enforcement” agents to “Democratic Party” areas.

Donald Trump’s efforts to steal the 2020 presidential election by interfering with mail delivery is being orchestrated by Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, a major Trump donor and Republican Party booster. DeJoy is also personally and financially invested in destroying the Postal Service because of his major investments in XPO, a competing delivery company. DeJoy has also previously invested in Amazon and UPS.

deJoy has ordered the removal of high-volume mail sorting machines, taken away mailboxes, ended overtime for postal workers and changed other rules and regulations which in some cases have caused weeks-long delays. His changes will cause a predictable delay in the delivery of mail-in ballots, which in many states will be discarded and not counted.

During his Senate hearing last Friday, DeJoy claimed that he would pause these disruptive damaging changes to the U.S. mail, and promised that mail-in ballots would be delivered on schedule

Like other Trump officials, DeJoy was at best being evasive and at worst lying in his testimony before Congress. Whistleblowers within the USPS as well as leaked memos indicate that he has no intentions of allowing the mail to proceed as normal in these weeks leading up to Election Day. There are also suggestions that DeJoy is targeting service delays to heavily Democratic areas, which would give Trump and even larger unfair advantage.

On Monday, DeJoy testified before the House Oversight Committee, where he proved incapable of answering basic questions about the Postal Service andadmitted to being in contact with the Trump 2020 campaign team through intermediaries. DeJoy also claimed that the damaging and disruptive changes to mail delivery began before he was appointed as postmaster general. When challenged with a chart which clearly showed that the delays corresponded with the beginning of his tenure, DeJoy had no sensible explanation.

In all, Donald Trump and his regime’s interference with the U.S. mail represents yet another crisis for the country and its failing democracy. Greg Palast, the investigative journalist and bestselling author who is one of the country’s foremost experts on vote rigging, vote fraud and election theft, believes that the Trump regime’s interference with the mail is largely a distraction from bigger problems with democracy and voting in America.

Palast is the author of several books, including “The Best Democracy Money Can Buy” and “Billionaires & Ballot Bandits.” His new book is “How Trump Stole 2020: The Hunt for America’s Vanished Voters.”

In our most recent conversation, Palast warned that the Trump regime and Republican Party and their agents are implementing a massive nationwide campaign to challenge the legitimacy of votes cast in support of Joe Biden. This is part of a plan that may also include intimidation and perhaps even coordinated violence and acts of terrorism by pro-Trump paramilitaries and other forces against post offices, polling stations and other election facilities. The goal is to create national chaos and a state of emergency in which millions of votes are left uncounted and the presidential election, under the 12th Amendment to the Constitution, is decided by the House of Representatives. The result of that, Palast predicts, will be the re-election of Donald Trump.

You can also listen to my conversation with Greg Palast on my podcast “The Truth Report” or through the player embedded below:

as usual, this interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What is actually happening with Donald Trump, the Postal Service, and his efforts to steal the 2020 election?

No. 1, we should thank Donald Trump and his postmaster general because he has woken people up to the fact that mail-in voting can be really dangerous. It is like playing Russian roulette with your voting ballot. Twenty-two percent of all mail-in votes never get counted.And that was under Barack Obama, when they were promoting mail-in voting. What is going to happen with Trump and the Republicans?

Mail-in voting has already been a disaster in America. One in 10 people who ask for absentee ballots do not get them. One in 10 people who do get their ballots and send them back have their ballots rejected, thrown out and not counted. Mail-in voting was a big problem before Trump decided to make it worse.

There have always been problems with the post office in its handling of mail-in ballots. But the post office is not the main problem with voter suppression and vote rigging in America. In many ways, focusing on Trump and the post office is a distraction.

There are eight states which require a person to have a witness signature. Three states require notarizing either the ballot or the request for a mail-in ballot. This was difficult before, but in a pandemic is problematic to the extreme. Very little of this has to do with the post office. The biggest reason why people don’t get their ballots is that they are not registered voters. What happened? Many of those people have been purged from the voter rolls. Seventeen million people have been purged during the last few years.

The real theft of the 2020 presidential election is not the lack of mailboxes that will stop people from mailing in their ballots or getting them. It’s not the lack of sorting machines. It is a lack of commitment to counting ballots by both parties.

The real danger of mail-in voting is that you do not get your ballot because some political functionary has decided to slow-walk your ballot to you or has removed your registration or decided they’re not going to send it because, for example, you are one of the several million people on what are called the “inactive voter” list. The post office is not responsible for that interference and trickery.

Is Trump’s sabotage of the U.S. mail an intentional distraction? Some type of sophisticated strategy?

Donald Trump and his agents are not that strategic. What they are doing with the mail is just one more thing among many that they are doing to try to keep the American people from voting in November.

Yes, if you tear apart the United States Postal Service the problems with voting are going to get worse. There is no question of that. Overtime is being eliminated by Trump’s postmaster. There are going to be 120 million mail-in ballots. How will those ballots get processed if overtime is reduced? Trump’s postmaster is also eliminating the requirement that mail comes in and goes out the same day. That is a longstanding post office rule. So yes, what is happening with Trump and the post office is very destructive and dangerous and will make it harder for people to vote. But, again, it is not the worst part of how mail-in voting, and voting more generally, in this country is being undermined. The whole system of voting in America needs to be fixed.

Why is Donald Trump being so bold as to publicly admit that he is sabotaging the mail so that he can win the 2020 election?

It is quite brilliant. But again, it is not Donald Trump being brilliant, but rather the people around him who are directing these efforts to interfere in the 2020 presidential election. Trump’s advisers are creating a situation where they will challenge the vote in November. Mail-in ballots are going to be central to the scheme. About half of all ballots cast, about 60 million, are going to be challenged. If there are 120 million mail-in votes, 26 million of them will not be counted.

My big fear is that Donald Trump is establishing the grounds for making a claim that mail-in ballots are fraudulent. Moreover, they will focus on black people as part of that strategy. This is an old lie and stereotype in America — that black people somehow vote twice. Watch the film “Birth of a Nation” and you will see that racist stereotype’s origins.Trump has repeatedly said that people of color are going to be sending in multiple ballots.

If Trump and the Republicans cannot win by challenging all those votes because Biden is too far ahead, then we will see some version of what happened in Florida in 2000 with Gore and Bush.

Then Roger Stone led $600-an-hour consultants who went crazy in the Miami-Dade County voting officesand stopped the counting of the ballots that the machines could not read. The result was that Bush became president by 537 votes. If you had counted all those votes in Miami, George W. Bush would likely not have been elected president. This time the Republicans and their operatives are going to say, “That building is filled with fraudulent ballots. That post office building has a million ballots from Bolivia or what have you that should not be counted!”

I believe there is a good chance that right-wing paramilitaries such as the Boogaloo Boys, the Proud Boys or other similar people are going to burn down the post offices. They are going to attack county offices. The riot this time will not be consultants wearing suits, like in 2000, but instead men armed with assault rifles. I also believe there are going to be large-scale protests on Election Day because of the interference with the vote. I really believe that there is a good chance that this nation will be on fire on Election Day. If Donald Trump is behind in the vote there are going to be massive attacks on polling places.

People are not going to get their mail-in ballots. They are going to have to wait in line during a pandemic. I am worried that the lines will be attacked by right-wingers trying to protect Trump and keep him in office. I am very worried that places such as Miami, Detroit, Milwaukee and Washington, D.C., will be in flames. In that scenario for example, the Florida legislature says, “There are a million mail-in ballots stuck in the post office. We believe they are fraudulent. We are getting word that there are huge numbers of questionable signatures. We cannot finish counting the votes on time and therefore we cannot certify the vote on time.”

What happens then? Florida does not certify the vote. The Republican-controlled legislature in Michigan does not certify the vote. Wisconsin does the same. Neither Biden or Trump gets 270 votes in the Electoral College as a result. Now the election is resolved under the 12th Amendment, which says it goes to the House of Representatives where Nancy Pelosi will call for a single vote from each state. Trump will win, 30-20. In that scenario, Donald Trump will be constitutionally elected by a right-wing riot and the burning of people’s votes.

The Republican Party, Trump and the right-wing propaganda media have spent years developing and circulating the lie that there is massive “vote theft” or “fake ballots” cast by Democrats. Of course, Republicans have actually been arrested for trying to rig elections using those means. Why don’t Republican operatives simply print up their own fake ballots, mail them in, and then claim that there is massive voter fraud? Create the “crime” that you later discover.

Exactly. That is an obvious trick, where fraudulent votes are sent in by the same right-wing operatives who then claim to “discover” them. I would not put such a plot past the likes of Roger Stone. Photocopy 1,000 ballots and mail them in and then say, “Look at all these fraudulent ballots!”

Donald Trump is threatening to use his own army of 50,000 “poll watchers” against Democratic voters. Trump has said he will deploy law enforcement agents in heavily Democratic communities as a way of ensuring that there is no “voter fraud,” but will not be sending law enforcement to Republican-controlled areas. Trump and William Barr also now have a secret police force which ran amok in Portland and elsewhere, and will certainly be used against the American people on Election Day.

The 50,000 volunteers that Trump has called for are not intimidation forces. I stood in line with the Souls to the Polls for five hours. I have stood in long lines in places such as Georgia and Milwaukee. I do not believe that a single person in those lines would be intimidated by anyone, even one of Trump’s people with an AK-47. The real issue will be that Trump’s poll watchers are going to challenge every ballot. So it’s not intimidation. The issue will be that they will go in as poll watchers and challenge every ballot.

What type of America are Donald Trump, William Barr, Stephen Miller and the Republican Party as a whole trying to create? To what end is their vote-rigging, vote suppression and other means of interference in the people’s will being directed?

There is apartheid in American voting. Let’s begin with that basic premise. The votes of nonwhite people are not being fully counted. This is because of the smart people around Donald Trump who have implemented many tactics and strategies to suppress and otherwise stop Democratic voters and their ballots from even being counted.

According to the Elections Assistance Commission, in the 2016 election 1,913,369 ballots cast in person were rejected, thrown out. In addition, 925,973 people were forced to cast provisional ballots which were not counted. In other words, roughly 1 million provisional ballots cast and rejected, 2 million in-precinct ballots cast and rejected, and then 3 million mail-in ballots which were either never received or were rejected. That comes to nearly 5.9 million ballots cast and not counted. And that was 2016. That is what elected Donald Trump. Nothing has been done to protect the American people’s votes.

Why don’t the Democrats make it clear to Donald Trump and the Republicans, “We’re going to challenge every single one of your votes”?

What I would like the Democrats to do is to challenge the Republican Party’s challenges to the votes. In Michigan, and this is very important, Republicans challenged every Hillary Clinton vote. The Democrats did not challenge a single Trump vote.

In response to your question, we should not answer the Republican Party’s attack on American democracy with another attack on democracy. Every vote should be counted. Voters’ intent should count — whether it is for Trump or whomever. If Donald Trump has 50,000 Boogaloo Boys or other right-wingers challenging votes, then the Democrats need 50,000 patriots — and they do not even have to be Democrats, just people who believe in democracy who will go in and say, “No, you cannot challenge those ballots. No, you can’t say that that signature is wrong. You have no expertise in signatures. Count that ballot!”

I believe in a true “We the people” democracy. That having been said, in terms of realpolitik why don’t the Democratic Party’s leaders tell the Republicans, “Whatever you do to stop our voters we are going to do yours 10 times worse unless you play it straight and fair.”

I really do not like the idea of mass challenges of votes. I do not want anyone playing that game. It would be sufficient for the Democrats to have people to challenge the challenges. I want Democrats to go to court and say, “Count the ballots. We need those ballots counted.” We also know that the chance a ballot will be challenged is 900 percent higher if a voter is black than if they are white.

We also need to go to the courts and demand an end to that discrimination. The Republicans also try to stop young people from voting. That should be challenged in court as well. Let me tell you, we still do have a Voting Rights Act in America. It may be weakened, it may be gasping for life, but we have it and we need to start enforcing it and demanding it.

I want the Democratic Party to be ready to challenge this attack on democracy. Trump and the Republicans are going to continue suppressing the votes of nonwhite people, young people, and others who support the Democratic Party. That is going to happen regardless of how much the Democrats put into the U.S. Post Office. Yes, the Postal Service should be protected, but that cannot be the main focus of stopping the theft of the 2020 election by Donald Trump.

What should people do if they are stopped or otherwise interfered with by one of Trump’s enforcers at a polling place? Would it be viable for the Democrats and other people of conscience to have their own security — a 21st-century version of the Deacons for Defense and Justice — to stop such interference and intimidation?

The American people do not need a vigilante force. We do need people who are vigilant and organized. For example, young people, who as a group are less susceptible to the pandemic, could volunteer to be poll watchers. They need to be there to challenge Trump and the Republican Party’s efforts to interfere with people’s votes. They must also know the rules. For example, 64% of all African-,American males are asked for their voter ID even in states which prohibit asking for a voter ID. If you’re a Black man, you’re going to be asked for your ID, even though it’s illegal to ask you for your ID.

Some people lose their vote because they do not have the acceptable ID. We need people at the polls to say, “No, you may not ask for that ID.” We have to know those rules and then we have to have people who will stay after the polls close for the opening of the mail-in ballots.

These trained observers would be watching for things such as when votes are disqualified because the “wrong” color ink was used. Our poll watchers must say, “No, that vote must count.”

What is the best-case scenario on Election Day in November — and what is the worst?

The best-case scenario is that the vote is so overwhelming against Trump that the Republicans and other Trumpists cannot steal the election. The voters make it such a defeat for Trump the outcome cannot be changed. The worst-case scenario is that the United States is in flames and the vote is not certified in several key states and then Trump wins through the 12th Amendment. I am very worried about massive violence and not the shutdown of the election per se, but rather using the violence as an excuse to go to the 12th Amendment.

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85% of most common name, slavery and colonialsism, ppl color

palast  https://kpfa.org/episode/talkies-october-17-2018/

kobach stole primary from gov,  same techs used by kemp in GA

challenged a million  signatures?! caneled ballots, 10k provisional/placebo ballot

nevada

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2020

https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/investigative-reporter-breaks-down-the-real-reason-republicans-threw-a-fit-in-wisconsin-trumps-gop-is-canceling-the-american-peoples-right-to-vote/

no lnx

Investigative reporter breaks down the real reason Republicans ‘threw a fit in Wisconsin’: Trump’s GOP is ‘canceling the American people’s right to vote’

President Donald J. Trump and Vice President Mike Pence walk with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and Senator Roy Blunt, R-Mo., Tuesday, March 10, 2020, upon their arrival to the U.S. Capitol for a Senate Republican policy lunch. (Official White House Photo by D. Myles Cullen)

Written by Chauncey DeVega / Salon April 12, 2020

Encouraged by the pain, suffering, misery and distraction caused by the coronavirus pandemic, Donald Trump is continuing his assault on American democracy and the rule of law.

His most recent move: removing at least seven inspectors general who provide independent oversight within various departments of the United States government.

Trump is a malignant narcissist with authoritarian tendencies and may well be a sociopath. Like a Mafia boss, he views personal loyalty as more important than loyalty to the Constitution and the rule of law. Aided by Attorney General William Barr, Trump appears poised to loot the coronavirus relief funds passed by Congress, harass and silence his political enemies, speed up the country’s downward slide into failed democracy, and unleash more cruelty against those Americans he deems to be insufficiently loyal or otherwise “undesirable.”

On Twitter, Walter Shaub, former director of the Office of Government Ethics, summarized recent developments:

A last line of defense in this war on ethics and law is the Inspector General community. They’re the eyes of the American people, objective investigators traditionally freed to pursue accountability by the safeguard of bipartisan congressional protection.

What began with the fall of the ethics program is entering the end game with the potential fall of the Inspector General community. The government is failing us, safeguards that took two centuries to build have crumbled, and fascism is eyeing this republic like lunch.

Shaub is perhaps being optimistic: Donald Trump and his allies, both foreign and domestic, are already gorging on democracy. Trump makes no effort to hide his contempt for American democracy. He is obvious and unapologetic.

Last week, Trump admitted that “You’d never have a Republican elected in this country again” if Americans were universally permitted to vote by mail.

Trump is just channeling a belief that has long been expressed both in private and in public by Republicans and other members of the right-wing movement. On this, Trump and the Republicans are correct: According to public opinion polls and other research, the American people overwhelmingly reject their policies and goals.

Because democracy is antithetical to today’s Republican Party, Donald Trump has repeatedly condemned voting by mail because he believes it will be disadvantageous to his chances of winning another presidential term in 2020. In the final analysis, Republicans want to make voting more difficult even if it means more Americans will fall ill and die from COVID-19.

Last Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court endorsed Trump and the Republicans’ ongoing assault on American democracy. In a 5-4 decision, the court’s “conservative” majority ordered that Wisconsin’s primary election could not be delayed because of the coronavirus pandemic, and no extension would be allowed for mail-in ballots. This decision forced the people of Wisconsin — most notably nonwhite people, students, young people, and other Democratic Party’s base in cities like Milwaukee and Madison — to choose between their lives and their constitutionally guaranteed right to vote.

The Democratic Party’s leaders have apparently decided that expanded mail-in voting is a necessary measure, and the best way to defeat Donald Trump in the context of the coronavirus pandemic.

In reality, matters are not so simple.

Greg Palast is an investigative journalist whose work has been featured by the BBC, the Guardian, the Nation, Rolling Stone, as well as on Salon.

He is the author of the bestselling books “Billionaires & Ballot Bandits” and “The Best Democracy Money Can Buy.” Palast is one of the country’s foremost experts on voter fraud and how elections are rigged to suppress and otherwise interfere with the will of the people in a democracy.

He warns that mail-in voting as it currently exists is likely to guarantee Donald Trump’s victory in the 2020 election. Palast also explains how the Supreme Court decision on the Wisconsin primary election was really about purging nonwhite voters in order to maximize Trump’s chances of winning that key battleground state.

Palast says, however, that the Democratic Party’s new mail-in voting proposals can be improved so that the will of the American people can be fully realized at the ballot box — which will likely ensure Trump’s defeat in November.

You can also listen to my conversation with Greg Palast on my podcast “The Truth Report” or through the player embedded below.

This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

What is democracy? What does it mean to you?

To me, it’s very simple: Every citizen gets to vote, and every vote gets counted. If you don’t have those two things, you don’t have a democracy.

Donald Trump has repeatedly said that he opposes mail-in ballots and if mail-in ballots are allowed that no Republican will ever get elected in the United States again. What were your thoughts when you heard the president of the United States making such bold and obvious threats against the country’s democracy?

Of course, it shows Donald Trump’s totalitarian mindset. My second thought is that the Democrats are making a mistake by thinking, “Well, if Trump says mail-in ballots are a bad idea, then let’s make sure all Americans mail in their ballots.”

Just the logic of it. Donald Trump says, “I hate mail-in ballots,” and the Democrats are saying we must have expanded mail-in ballots because of the coronavirus. But how do we work through the puzzle that the Republican Party actually does much better with mail-in voting? Shouldn’t Trump be encouraging that way of voting, because Republicans have great experience in suppressing votes and other ways of rigging elections?

Republicans know that they can just throw out the mail-in ballots.

Remember, when a person fills out a mail-in ballot it is not the simple task of just picking a candidate, sealing the envelope and then mailing it. You must have the right envelope. You have to answer questions on the outside of the envelope. You have to have the correct postage. You have to have all this information. In many states there has to be a witness or a notary, which is not easy to do. The mail-in ballots in many states are not postage-paid. This is a big problem because, for example, Ohio has a little square where it says, “Put your stamp here.” Well, that envelope requires two stamps. But if you were to look at the envelope, most people would assume it is just one stamp.

There is no question that Republicans do much better with mail-in voting than the Democrats. Republicans are better with mail-in voting because more of them do it. So there is a practical advantage with experience. Ultimately, there should not have been in-person voting and elections held in Wisconsin on Tuesday. To do such a thing is insane. There have to be other and better ways to vote, especially given the coronavirus. These solutions include early in-person voting and improved mail-in voting.

For example, in Hollywood there is drive-up voting where a person does not have to leave their car. There should also be drop-off boxes and other ways to get a ballot other than waiting for a card that a person may never even see or get. The Republicans are using this trope where mail-in voting is a bad thing — if it benefits Democrats. Do not forget that Republicans actually use mail-in voting more and they are defeating the Democrats using it.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the coronavirus pandemic does not constitute an emergency sufficient enough to delay voting in Wisconsin and that people should not be given more time to mail in their ballots. To a reasonable observer the court’s decision makes no sense and is obviously endangering the lives of voters. What was the real motivation here?

The basic logic is there are five Republicans on the U.S. Supreme Court who can tell the other justices “Screw you! Case closed!”

Here is their real argument: “We’re Republicans. This is what we want. Period.”

Consider what happened several weeks ago. Mike DeWine, the Republican governor of Ohio, did not want the vote to take place. The Democrats sued to force him to hold the primary. Being the governor, he said, “Screw you. I’m not holding the election.” He shut it down.

When the Republicans decide to delay or not have an election it is fine with the U.S. Supreme Court. The Democrats could not even get a hearing with the court about what DeWine did in Ohio. But when the Republicans wants to stop a delay in Wisconsin, the Supreme Court intervened.

The big picture: Why is this all happening? What is this fight really about? The Republicans do not care about Bernie Sanders versus Joe Biden. That is a settled issue, it’s over. The Republicans threw a fit in Wisconsin because the real issue is the Wisconsin State Supreme Court.

The Republican legislature voted that the state must remove 232,000 voters, who they claim have moved. That is not true, of course. Those voters have not moved. Most of the people on that list have never moved anywhere. They have not moved out of their county. The governor and lieutenant governor are Democrats and they are not going to purge those voters. The Republicans then went to court to force the Democrats to make those voters ineligible. Tuesday was also the general election for the Wisconsin Supreme Court. That was the real issue.

The Wisconsin Supreme Court is controlled by the Republicans, and the Democrats were trying to take it away from them. With the decision about the coronavirus and mail-in ballots, the Republican Party’s control of the Wisconsin Supreme Court is not locked in. The Republicans will be able to remove a quarter million people from the voting rolls — voters who are more likely to support the Democrats.

Donald Trump supposedly won Wisconsin by 22,000 votes in 2016. Now 10 times that number will be purged by Republicans. That will give Donald Trump the state of Wisconsin in 2020. That is what the controversy and the U.S. Supreme Court decision is really about.

This is all part of a much larger strategy where Republicans rig elections. In urban and predominantly black and brown areas of Wisconsin there were almost no voting machines. People were waiting in long lines and risking their lives because of the coronavirus pandemic.

In rural areas of Wisconsin, where the virus has not yet hit in a real way, there is in-person voting. Republicans are more likely to mail in their ballots than Democrats and so they’ve already voted. Rural areas are also not as crowded at the polls. That makes it safer. Poll workers are older and they’re high-risk. They are also not reckless.  There was a problem getting a sufficient number of polling officials and workers for Milwaukee. As such, the number of polling stations was reduced from 180 to three.

Because many people do not have cars, even getting to the polls in more populated urban areas during the coronavirus is dangerous. And there is the risk of going on mass transit as well. Tuesday’s election was a total fix by the Republicans. It was a joke of an election. The Republicans loved it. They do not want to expand mail-in voting.

On mail-in voting, make note of how Trump complained about the Democrats’ proposals. He was not complaining about mail-in voting in general. He was specifically condemning the Democrats’ proposals for mail-in voting. Trump knows that if instituted, the Democrats’ mail-in voting plan will wipe out the Republicans.

The Democrats want to make mail-in voting really work, and they want to extend early voting to a three-week period. That would also include evening voting. If the public is allowed to vote at different times, it will make it easier to keep a safe distance during the coronavirus epidemic. Voting will be much safer. What the Democrats want to implement about mail-in voting and other such changes is excellent.

But if there is mail-in voting as it is currently implemented in most states, Donald Trump cannot lose. The mail-in voting system as it exists will almost guarantee Trump and the Republican Party’s victory. Mail-in voting is a disaster for Democrats and it has always been a total disaster.

But Trump does have one thing right: If every eligible American votes then the Republicans are screwed.

If the Democrats know that they are heading for a mail-in election in 2020 because of the coronavirus, however, then they can improve the process and also have time to educate the public about this new and better system.

There is this hopelessly naïve and in many ways pathetic narrative being circulated by too many journalists and other political observers that any talk about Donald Trump canceling the 2020 presidential election is somehow ridiculous, that such a thing cannot happen in the United States. But many such people have zero credibility given that they also said that Donald Trump could not possibly be elected president. How do you evaluate these concerns?

What we are heading for in America is not Donald Trump canceling the 2020 presidential election but just canceling the American people’s right to vote.

Donald Trump can just hold a pretend election. America has a great deal of experience with doing such a thing. There is a massive system in place to purge voters. Many Americans will never receive their mail-in ballots. Ballots will never get counted. They also get disqualified for ridiculous reasons.

Every time there is an impediment to voting and registration in America it targets young people, black people and brown people. Low-income people are targeted. This is another version of Jim Crow racially segregated voter suppression and vote theft. Trump and the Republicans have many ways of holding an election and pretending that he was legitimately elected when, of course, he was not.

What are some specific tactics and strategies the Republican Party and Donald Trump’s agents can use to amplify their interference in the American people’s right to vote — and have their vote properly counted — in the 2020 election?

A study from MIT puts the loss of mail-in ballots at 22 percent. That is 25 million ballots if the United States goes to an 80 percent mail-in voting system.

The Republicans would not need to bring in new people or ramp up their voter suppression oppression. With the Electoral College, it is easy to steal an election. Stealing an election is much easier because in that system all one has to do is target the “battleground states” such as Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin.

Places that we don’t think of as “swing states” — North Carolina and Georgia, for example — are gradually becoming “minority majority.” The Republicans know they are in trouble in Georgia. How do they keep control of the South? They manipulate the vote by purges, gerrymandering, tricks with mail-in voting and other techniques. The Republicans have many ways of keeping people from having their vote counted. Again, if the Democrats fix the system, they can lessen the impact of Republican Party interference and thus make sure that votes in support of the Democratic Party are fully counted.

What is the role of the coronavirus pandemic in the 2020 presidential election?

The coronavirus is voting for Donald Trump. If in-person, in-precinct voting is required and the coronavirus is present in that community, then people are going to be afraid.

There may be lingering fear of the coronavirus even if it is “officially” gone because no one trusts Donald Trump and his administration. That fear of the coronavirus is going to massively hurt the urban vote for the Democrats. If that happens, Trump wins again in 2020. If the United States continues with the mail-in system it currently has, then Donald Trump wins again in 2020. The coronavirus votes for Donald Trump. It is really that simple. The vote won’t even be close.

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/02/how-trump-will-cheat-in-this-election-and-how-dems-may-bilk-bernie

no lnx

How Trump will cheat in this election — and how Dems may bilk Bernie

Written by Chauncey DeVega / Salon February 28, 2020

Rigging elections is as American as apple pie. To wit: Nonwhite people have been systematically denied the right to vote for most of the country’s history. Most notably, when black people won the right to vote following the Civil War, in practice that liberty was denied under Jim and Jane Crow and other white supremacist laws, both in the South and other parts of the country, for a full century. Voter registration laws themselves have a long and ugly history of being used to deny nonwhites, white ethnics and other “undesirables” the right to vote.

It’s also worth noting that the United States has a long and infamous history of sabotaging democratically elected governments in other countries.

Rigging elections so that they do not reflect the public’s democratic will was and remains a partisan tool. It can of course be tied to almost any ideology, but remains especially potent in the hands of the Republican Party and the conservative movement.

Such political skulduggery gave the Republican Party the White House on at least one previous occasion — in the 2000 election, when George W. Bush “defeated” Al Gore based on a deadlocked election in Florida, where all the votes were never counted. In 2016 Donald Trump and the Republican Party benefited from both voter intimidation, voter purges, gerrymandering and other tricks in key “battleground” states. During that same election campaign, Vladimir Putin and his agents also engaged in a widespread effort to install Donald Trump in office by manipulating the American people and their votes. In 2018, Republicans used a range of tactics, including racially motivated voter suppression and outright voter fraud, to sway Georgia’s gubernatorial election away from Stacey Abrams to Brian Kemp, the white Republican who began the campaign as Georgia’s secretary of state — the person responsible for managing fair elections.

At present, Donald Trump is openly soliciting illegal foreign interference in the 2020 presidential election in order to keep him in office — perhaps permanently.

Greg Palast is an investigative journalist whose work has been featured by the BBC, the Guardian, the Nation and Rolling Stone. He contributed several articles to Salon on the 2018 race in Georgia. He is also the author of the bestselling books “Billionaires & Ballot Bandits” and “The Best Democracy Money Can Buy.” Palast is one of the country’s foremost experts on voter fraud and the many other ways that elections are rigged — most often by Republicans — so as to prevent the American people from having their votes (and political preferences) fully counted.

In this conversation, Palast explains how Donald Trump, the Republican Party and their agents will try to steal the 2020 presidential election from the American people at the ballot box. Palast also warns that the Democratic Party’s leadership will try to stop Sen. Bernie Sanders by sabotaging the vote in the upcoming California primary. He also details the connections between Roger Stone, the 2000 Florida presidential election “recount” fiasco and the rise of Donald Trump.

This conversation has been edited for clarity and length. You can also listen to my conversation with Greg Palast on my podcast The Truth Report or through the player embedded below.

How do you make sense of Trump’s presidency? How did this all happen?

The nasty secret of American democracy is that we don’t count all the votes and we do not let all people vote. In the past two years, according to the federal government, 17 million Americans have been stripped of their right to vote. Some of it is quite legitimate. If someone’s dead, they should not be voting. If someone has left Georgia or Michigan, they should not be voting in Georgia or Michigan. But about half of that number, 9 million or so people, were removed from the voter rolls on a false premise. These potential voters are overwhelmingly young people and voters of color. Young people are the new target. There is a massive purge of voters in America and few people are talking about it.

What I’ve been doing is filing suits to get the lists and names and addresses and the reasons for everyone who has been purged from the voter rolls. One of the most important stories I have ever done was for Salon in 2018. From the lawsuit my organization filed, we discovered a massive number of people blocked from voting — again, overwhelmingly young people and voters of color. That means Democratic Party voters could have had a massive impact on the outcome in states such as Ohio and Georgia. Moreover, Georgia really should be a swing state because it is minority majority. White people are in the minority in Georgia, as of this year.

Michigan is another example. In the 2016 presidential election, 75,355 ballots were never counted. In Michigan, Trump won by 10,700. What is the state’s response? “We don’t know whose votes those were. These are disqualified ballots.” Why were they disqualified? Eighty-seven voting machines broke down in Detroit. Even though there were paper ballots, they had to be scanned by machines. The 87 machines could not read the ballots. Is Detroit Trump country? Of the 75,355 ballots that no one counted, most came out of Detroit. Who won Michigan?

This is what’s going on here. In California in 2016, 8.6 million people cast votes in the June 2016 primary. Add up the presidential total, and it comes to 7.3 million votes. This means 1.3 million people did not have their ballots counted for president of the United States in that primary.

In particular, this is the group known as NPP voters — “no party preference voters” — who have a right to vote in the Democratic primary, but the procedure is really complicated. So a big hunk of those voters, close to half of those voters in practice, were disqualified because they got the wrong ballot or they didn’t know the procedure. Because you have to use a special ballot if you’re a NPP voter — you can’t get a regular Democratic Party ballot. If you are given the regular party ballot it gets disqualified.

This procedure is so complicated that almost no one, even at the polling stations, knows what the rules are. So basically, a million people, mostly NPP voters, lose their vote. Now who did they vote for? NPP voters voted more than two to one for Bernie Sanders. Bernie Sanders won the California primary last time, and the Democratic Party leadership is going to try and take it away from him this time in 2020. [In the reported California results in 2016, Hillary Clinton defeated Sanders, 53 to 46 percent.]

How does one go about rigging an election?

Not the way people most people believe. It isn’t done by some guy pressing a lever and changing the vote from blue to red. Rigging an election is usually done by blocking people from casting ballots or not counting the ballots they cast. For example, and these are hard numbers from the federal government, more than 2 million provisional ballots were cast in the United States. Most white people, unless they live in California, have never heard of a provisional ballot, but those types of ballots are handed out like candy in black and Hispanic precincts. These provisional ballots are just what they sound like, “provisional.” A person’s name is not on the voter rolls. So rather than have a person scream and holler and pound the desk and say, “Why is my name missing? I’ve voted here for 50 years!” they are told, “Don’t worry. Here’s a provisional ballot. Fill this out and we’ll count that later.” But those votes are not counted later. Over a million provisional ballots were never counted in each of the last two presidential elections.

Absentee ballots are another problem. In the United States there are about 30 million people who mail in their ballots. This year that number will be closer to 60 million. Many of those ballots will never be counted. And then machines break down. Where do the machines break? Where everything breaks down. In the barrio, in the ghetto. Underresourced schools, bad hospitals — that all equals broken voting machines.

A person’s vote in those poor areas is not being changed. The U.S. Civil Rights Commission discovered that the chance your vote will “spoil’ is 900% higher if you’re black than if you’re white. The votes don’t get counted. People are not allowed to vote. It’s not random at all. This is a violently racial system.

Demographics are against the Republican Party. Their ideas are unpopular. Their solution is to maintain a type of American apartheid. The only way for Trump and his Republicans to stay in power is to keep nonwhites and other people who oppose them from voting. What are some specific examples of the Republican Party rigging elections to achieve their goals?

The following is very important. Georgia in 2018 was the test drive for the theft of 2020 by Donald Trump and the Republican Party. All across America — in 20 states and perhaps more — there is a new system of purging the voter rolls which will change the 2020 elections. There has been a massive increase in voter purges through an initiative called “use it or lose it.” So for example, in Georgia, if you miss a couple of elections and they mailed you a postcard and you didn’t return it, you lost your vote. That is a Jim Crow tactic which is illegal under the National Voter Registration Act. They used to stop black people from voting using such tactics.

What is happening in Georgia? How come Republicans are removing people who have not voted? The answer is they’re saying that not returning the postcard is evidence that a given voter moved. “They missed two elections. They didn’t return a card. Obviously, they’ve moved.” Is that true? For my Salon piece in 2018 I went to the No. 1 experts on demography and where people actually live. Who are the experts on that subject? Amazon, eBay and American Express. I asked those experts to look at the data and then to tell me who moved In Georgia.

The experts went through the Georgia purge list and found out that exactly 340,134 voters had not ever moved from their original registration address. Over a third of a million voters were removed for leaving Georgia, or leaving their county, and had never actually moved away at all. Stacey Abrams put up a ton of money to go even deeper and found another 100,000 people who were wrongly purged. You’re talking close to half a million people who were wrongly purged for moving. Based on my research, that is why Stacey Abrams said that she had won the governorship of Georgia — she just wouldn’t be inaugurated.

Now the Republicans are trying to do the same thing in Michigan, Ohio and Wisconsin. All over the country. The Republicans and Trump are going to steal 2020 by saying that millions of people have moved, don’t qualify for voting. They won’t know until they show up to vote. Then those voters will be given a provisional ballot that won’t get counted. These people will think they voted when  they have not — and they will lose their vote. If they send in an absentee ballot and they’re marked as having moved, their ballot will be thrown away.

This is a type of new Jim Crow. The Republicans are using gerrymandering and voter intimidation. Republicans are literally stuffing ballot boxes in favor of their candidates. There are false mailers being sent out. In terms of coordination, what does that look like?

Kris Kobach of Kansas — he was secretary of state in Kansas. Trump tried to appoint him to run his “Election Integrity Commission,” which was going to supposedly expose millions of fraudulent voters and then remove them from the voter rolls. Kobach is the mastermind of a great many of these dirty tricks. Are there others involved? I caught Karl Rove, when he was working for George W. Bush’s re-election campaign. Rove used a system called “caging” where his operatives would send letters to people’s registration addresses. If the mail came back undelivered, Rove’s people would say, “That’s a ghost voter! That person doesn’t live at their registration address.” They’d then lose their right to vote.

Rove and his cronies were sending these letters to soldiers of color stationed overseas. That is a federal crime. Karl Rove was blunt. He reportedly said, “If we can drop black turnout in states like North Carolina by a quarter of a percentage point, we win.”

Donald Trump and other Republicans — especially Fox News and the right-wing propaganda machine at large– are obsessed with these stories about nonwhites, especially black Americans, showing up to vote illegally to rig elections against white conservatives. What do we know about that strategic rhetoric?

It is strategic. Absolutely. I call it the “hysteria factory.” To kick people off the voter rolls using a system like Crosscheck won’t work unless you can claim that people are voting twice en masse. Trump and the Republicans have to create a hysteria that black people are voting twice if they want to be able to purge the votes. It’s not as though Kris Kobach or Donald Trump invented that strategy of racial rumor-mongering. Watch the movie “Birth of a Nation” from a hundred years ago and you will see black people shown breaking the law in terms of voting.

This is an old racist trope. And Trump has turned it into a hammer. Kobach turned it into the Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck program, which is supposed to find people that are voting in different states. In reality, if a person votes in two different states in the same election, they can go to prison for five years. Crosscheck is ostensibly chasing something that almost never happens. Kobach, Trump and other Republicans use a racial stereotype that people of color cheat when they vote. People of color vote as some type of horde,  and therefore we have to have all these laws to prevent black people, and now Hispanics, Asian-Americans and others, from doing the same thing.

Talk about Donald Trump’s recent pardons and the case of Roger Stone. How is that relationship a tale of election fraud and vote rigging?

I’m very concerned about this right-wing campaign of intimidation. It’s violent. It’s very important to understand that Roger Stone is going to prison for threatening a witness with death. And believe me, that’s a real threat.

In 2000, George W. Bush officially won the presidency by 537 votes in Florida. Just 537 votes. When they had the recount, most people really did not understand the details of what was happening.

First of all, 178,000 ballots were considered disqualified and unreadable. These were concentrated in Democratic and black areas such as Jacksonville, Gadsden County, Miami-Dade and Broward. Stone was the instigator of what the news media described as the “white-collar riot.” The 2020 election involved so-called “hanging chads.” People laughed about hanging chads, but it’s not something funny. This was all very important. A person punches a hole in a card for their candidate, but what they do not know is that on the back of that card, a little piece of paper is hanging there, literally by a corner.

What happens next is that a person puts their ballot through the voting machine, and it kicks it out. It says, “Oh, there’s something wrong with this ballot. The punched-out piece of paper is still attached.” Miami was recounting those ballots that were disqualified. People misunderstand what happened. This was not a “recount.” What really happened was counting ballots that were never actually counted in the first place. Those were overwhelmingly Gore ballots. Bush would have lost. The count was stopped. One way to stop the vote count in Miami was by having Roger Stone literally lead a riot where they were trying to break windows and smashing doors. It was white guys in suits, led by Roger Stone. One can only imagine how the Miami police would have reacted if black people were doing the same things.

Violence elected a president. The Republican operatives loved it. They said, “This guy will do anything we need.” And Roger Stone still does. It’s not cute. These are not “little dirty tricks.” It is deeply evil voter manipulation. It’s violent and it’s racist. And now Trump tried to get Roger Stone’s sentence reduced. Trump was successful. That sends a signal: “Do my work. I’ll protect you.” It has now been established that there’s a very good chance Trump will pardon his people. Stone will get minimal time. These guys have money, they’re violent, and they’ve got their personal stormtroopers.

Here is the scenario. Let’s say the 2020 presidential election is very close in several key states. How do Trump and his Republican operatives try to guarantee victory over the Democratic candidate?

If Trump loses, he’s going to scream and holler and then the question will be if there is a vote count in Republican-controlled states. Moreover, if the first count looks like Trump is losing, are these secretaries of state or other election officials — and I have no doubt that they will — going to start massively disqualifying ballots? And then say, “Well, on reconsideration, Trump won the 2020 election.”

I believe that most of the above will happen before there is an official announcement of any final vote count.

For example, in Ohio back in 2012, there was that moment when Karl Rove was freaking out on Fox News. They called Ohio for Obama in 2012 and Karl Rove had a meltdown on television. He was saying, “No, that’s not the right number. I’m talking to the secretary of state’s office.” I knew the real story behind his fit.

Seventy percent of black people in Ohio vote early. For the first time in Ohio history, no one who voted early was allowed to use a voting machine or a regular ballot. You had to fill out an absentee ballot form and an absentee ballot. I asked the county supervisor in Dayton, Ohio, “Why are we doing this?” He said, “It’s simple. You can challenge a paper absentee ballot. Once a person votes on a regular machine or they voted on a regular ballot, you can’t challenge it. The vote is a vote.”

Karl Rove and John Husted, who was the Republican secretary of state, came up with a scheme to make black people vote on absentee ballots. They have to fill out the ballots. They can’t make an error. Rove’s concept was that the Republicans were going to throw out 200,000 ballots, mostly cast by black voters — but the scheme got busted and it wasn’t successful. That is why Karl Rove was saying, “Don’t call Ohio!” He knew that they were going to try to disqualify enough ballots to flip the state to Mitt Romney and flip the election. That’s why Karl Rove was acting the way he did on Fox News.

These are very sophisticated strategies being used to not count votes. And when one talks about not counting ballots, no state comes close to California. None. Four years ago, over a million ballots were left uncounted in the primary. Not counting ballots and blocking voters and delayed vote counts is what I see happening in 2020. The Republicans are going to disqualify enough ballots until Trump can be declared the winner. That’s the danger.

What are your concerns about the California Democratic primary and Bernie Sanders?

As I said earlier, 1.3 million ballots were not counted four years ago. Most of those were non-party preference ballots, cast by independents who are allowed to vote in the Democratic Party. According to a YouGov poll, those voters favored Bernie Sanders more than two to one. There is an effort to stop independent voters from voting in the Democratic primary. There are more than 4 million registered independents in California. These numbers are not small.

They mostly vote Democratic even though they register independent. But the Democratic Party’s officials are going to do everything they can, as they did four years ago, to block that independent vote. That vote is Sanders’ vote. Those against Sanders in the Democratic leadership are also going to do what they can to reduce the Hispanic vote. It’s strange to me that we always talk about Biden and the black vote. What’s not talked about is that Sanders really owns the Hispanic vote, and in California that’s decisive. They’re doing everything they can to block Hispanic voters, young voters and independent voters who support Bernie Sanders. To be clear: I’m not for Sanders. I don’t have a dog in the fight. But the powers that be are moving heaven and earth in California to screw Bernie Sanders.

Your claim is that the Democratic Party’s leadership is basically saying “Hell no!” to Bernie Sanders….

Alex Padilla is California secretary of state, but unlike most Hispanics, he has endorsed Joe Biden. He’s got to deliver for Biden. He cannot let Sanders win California. At this point, I would say that it is going to be impossible for them to stop Sanders from winning California. His lead is so big there. However, California is not a winner-take-all state. What can happen is that those in the Democratic Party who are against Sanders can stop him from winning a lot of delegates. They can hurt his totals wherever they can. In my opinion, that is the establishment trick that will be used against Bernie Sanders.

What would you do to ensure that America’s elections are free, fair and open?

I would adopt the Swiss system — no registration. What’s registration for, except to remove people from the rolls that one party doesn’t like? In that system you walk in, you say you’re a citizen, then you vote. We don’t have people illegally voting in the United States. When we talk about fixing elections, the fact is that registration was created to stop black people and American citizen immigrants from voting. That is the real history of registration in the United States. We must also stop the voter purges. No one should ever lose their right to vote. That’s something that happens when you go to prison. There is absolutely no reason to be erasing people off the voter rolls, unless they ask to be erased. And the other exception is the death list, which is issued by the Social Security Administration. That’s it.

Chauncey DeVega is a politics staff writer for Salon. His essays can also be found at Chaunceydevega.com. He also hosts a weekly podcast, The Chauncey DeVega Show. Chauncey can be followed on Twitter and Facebook.

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palast fresno talk 2019

https://kpfa.org/episode/upfront-october-16-2019/

hired by stacey abrams effort

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http://www.democracynow.org/2016/3/11/the_vulture_how_billionaire_rubio_backer

Argentina has reached an agreement to pay U.S. hedge funds that have sought for 14 years to profit off the country’s debt. The hedge funds bought up Argentina’s debt for bargain prices after its financial crisis, then demanded full repayment. Former Argentine President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner had refused to pay the firms, calling them "vulture funds." But under new right-wing President Mauricio Macri, Argentina has agreed to pay $4.65 billion to four hedge funds, including Elliott Management, run by billionaire Paul Singer. The deal would see the hedge funds take about 75 percent of what they demanded from Argentina—several times more than what they actually paid for the debt. Singer’s fund itself netted $2.4 billion—10 to 15 times its original investment. We speak to journalist Greg Palast. His recent article is called "Rubio’s Billionaire Wins Ransom from Argentina."

...

GREG PALAST: Well, what happened is, is that Paul "The Vulture" Singer, who we’ve been—I’ve been following him for BBC and for Democracy Now! for about nine years. This is the guy who does—he’s called "The Vulture" not just by Argentina; he’s known by that by his friends in the banking industry. He grabs old debts of dying nations, dying companies, even dying people, and when there’s a famine or a war, for example, in Argentina, during the military dictatorship when Argentina went broke, he bought up old bonds for $50 million, just sold them back to the government of Argentina, a government he helped place in power, for two-and-a-half billion dollars. And he does this—he did this through what the Argentine government and the United States Treasury call extortion. He says, "If you don’t pay me, I’m going to stop you from borrowing money. I’m going to choke your nation to death." He even seized an Argentine naval ship on the high seas. I mean, he’s basically a privateer or pirate.

And his—what’s important about what’s coming up in this election, the reason he influenced the Argentine election was to get a puppet president who would write him a check, which would give him a 10,000 percent profit. He’s looking for the same in the United States. Paul "The Vulture" Singer is the number one donor to the Republican Party—not the Kochs, by the way; Paul Singer. He’s the number one donor to American Crossroads, run by Karl Rove, which is basically your racial-vote-suppression-on-an-industrial-scale operation.

So, he is—why is he involved in the U.S. elections? Because during his attack on Argentina, the secretary of state, working with the president, the secretary of state sent her lawyers into a U.S. federal court and said, "Don’t force Argentina to pay off this guy." She tried to stop the extortion on Argentina, and the president joined her and the U.S. Justice Department. And she even said, her lawyers said, that Paul Singer’s business model is a threat to the entire world financial order. This guy is like a kind of financial terrorist, actually. And that’s what Hillary Clinton accused him of. By the way, Bernie Sanders has taken a similar, very tough position against these vulture financiers.

So, Paul Singer—this issue of Argentina ain’t just 11,000 miles away, Amy and Juan. It is coming home to roost, literally, because he’s got to make sure that there is no Hillary president or President Bernie that will put him out of business. Hillary’s action probably cost him a half-billion or a billion dollars. And he’s going to—he wants blood. And he wants his guy in the White House, which means anyone but Bernie, anyone but Hillary.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, but, Greg, so why did he come behind Marco Rubio? Because, obviously—well, obviously, in Donald Trump, Trump is a candidate who’s never seen a bankruptcy he didn’t like. But what—on what basis did he go behind Rubio?

GREG PALAST: Well, Rubio did his work for him. Rubio made an unethical, frankly—it horrified a lot of people. He made direct approaches to the State Department on behalf of his top donor. Paul "The Vulture" Singer is the number one donor to Marco Rubio. And Rubio kept banging on the State Department to back his vulture donor against our ally, Argentina. This is just way out of line, even in a country where money talks. This was money screaming.

And the other thing is that, for example, Rubio was trying to help Puerto Rico by allowing Puerto Rico to have bankruptcy rights, like any American state, and then suddenly another vulture financier friend of Singer called Herenstein held a big fundraiser for Rubio. Rubio flipped around his position on Puerto Rico and said, "No, they shouldn’t have any rights. They should fire teachers and firemen and policemen, and cut pensions," rather than cut payments to vultures like Singer and Herenstein and his donors. He literally flipped, literally within days of being funded by these guys. So Rubio showed that he’s a perfect puppet.

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http://www.salon.com/2000/12/04/voter_file/

Monday, Dec 4, 2000 08:19 AM PST

Florida’s flawed “voter-cleansing” program

Secretary of State Katherine Harris hired a firm to vet the rolls for felons, but that may have wrongly kept thousands, particularly blacks, from casting ballots.

If Vice President Al Gore is wondering where his Florida votes went, rather than sift through a pile of chad, he might want to look at a “scrub list” of 173,000 names targeted to be knocked off the Florida voter registry by a division of the office of Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris. A close examination suggests thousands of voters may have lost their right to vote based on a flaw-ridden list that included purported “felons” provided by a private firm with tight Republican ties.

Early in the year, the company, ChoicePoint, gave Florida officials a list with the names of 8,000 ex-felons to “scrub” from their list of voters. But it turns out none on the list were guilty of felonies, only misdemeanors. The company acknowledged the error, and blamed it on the original source of the list — the state of Texas.

Florida officials moved to put those falsely accused by Texas back on voter rolls before the election. Nevertheless, the large number of errors uncovered in individual counties suggests that thousands of eligible voters may have been turned away at the polls.

Florida is the only state that pays a private company that promises to “cleanse” voter rolls.The state signed in 1998 a $4 million contract with DBT Online, since merged into ChoicePoint, of Atlanta. The creation of the scrub list, called the central voter file, was mandated by a 1998 state voter fraud law, which followed a tumultuous year that saw Miami’s mayor removed after voter fraud in the election, with dead people discovered to have cast ballots. The voter fraud law required all 67 counties to purge voter registries of duplicate registrations, deceased voters and felons, many of whom, but not all, are barred from voting in Florida.

In the process, however, the list invariably targets a minority population in Florida, where 31 percent of all black men cannot vote because of a ban on felons. In compiling a list by looking at felons from other states, Florida could, in the process, single out citizens who committed felons in other states but, after serving their time or successfully petitioning the courts, had their voting rights returned to them. According to Florida law, felons can vote once their voting rights have been reinstated.

And if this unfairly singled out minorities, it unfairly handicapped Gore: In Florida, 93 percent of African-Americans voted for the vice president....

Gregory Palast

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http://www.gregpalast.com/no-bs-info-on-japan-nuclearobama-invites-tokyo-electric-to-build-us-nukes-with-taxpayer-funds/

christie-koch:

6 mil $

http://truth-out.org/news/item/21258-gov-christie-and-david-koch-in-cahoots-its-time-to-subpoena-the-committee-for-our-childrens-future

shut down when busted by senate, brought back

restore our future, 3rd koch bill?

Far more insidious, more corrosive and dangerous than the Governor of New Jersey playing traffic warden is the story of Gov. Chris Christie's secret meetings with a gaggle of billionaires - and the legality of the spending by the front organization set up following these hidden hugger-muggers.

In 2012, a tax-exempt "social welfare organization" called Committee for Our Children's Future, CCF, ran a series of TV ads telling America that Governor Christie has performed more miracles in New Jersey than Jesus did with loaves and fish. The New York Times found some old college chums who said they set up the "Children's" crusade for Christie. But the ads cost about $6 million. The Times didn't ask how Christie's buddies, not wealthy guys, found the six big ones.

But CCF was not started in 2012. When I heard "Children's Future," my nose started twitching. I smelled Koch.

The whiff of sulfur took me back to seven thick investigation binders nearly two decades old - each one marked "KOCH."In Volume 3, I found it: CCF - Campaign for Our Children's Future.

Just days before the 1996 election, "Campaign for our Children's Future," previously unheard of, paid for some of the most vicious smear ads ever run. The nasty blast, disseminated in coordination with a mysterious operation called "Citizens United," accused one Democrat of associating with a child molester (false), another of being "a Jewess" (true) and so on.

Most of the 29 targeted Democrats, blindsided and unable to swing at the phantom "Children" and "Citizens," were creamed. The result, to everyone's surprise, was that the Republicans kept control of Congress......

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SHAW

Fukushima: They Knew

Monday, August 20, 2012

"Completely and Utterly Fail in an Earthquake"

The Fukushima story you didn't hear on CNN

by Greg Palast for FreePress.org

I've seen a lot of sick stuff in my career, but this was sick on a new level.

Here was the handwritten log kept by a senior engineer at the nuclear power plant:

Wiesel was very upset. He seemed very nervous. Very agitated. . . . In fact, the plant was riddled with problems that, no way on earth, could stand an earth- quake. The team of engineers sent in to inspect found that most of these components could "completely and utterly fail" during an earthquake.

"Utterly fail during an earthquake." And here in Japan was the quake and here is the utter failure.

The warning was in what the investigations team called The Notebook, which I'm not supposed to have.  Good thing I've kept a copy anyway, because the file cabinets went down with my office building ....

WORLD TRADE CENTER TOWER 1, FIFTY-SECOND FLOOR

NEW YORK, 1986

[This is an excerpt in FreePress.org from Vultures' Picnic: In Pursuit of Petroleum Pigs, Power Pirates and High-Finance Fraudsters, to be released this Monday.  Click here to get the videos and the book.]

Two senior nuclear plant engineers were spilling out their souls and files on our huge conference table, blowing away my government investigations team with the inside stuff about the construction of the Shoreham, New York, power station.

The meeting was secret. Very secret. Their courage could destroy their careers: No engineering firm wants to hire a snitch, even one who has saved thousands of lives. They could lose their jobs; they could lose everything. They did. That’s what happens. Have a nice day.

On March 12 this year, as I watched Fukushima melt, I knew:  the "SQ" had been faked.  Anderson Cooper said it would all be OK.  He'd flown to Japan, to suck up the radiation and official company bullshit.  The horror show was not the fault of Tokyo Electric, he said, because the plant was built to withstand only an 8.0 earthquake on the Richter scale, and this was 9.0.  Anderson must have been in the gym when they handed out the facts.  The 9.0 shake was in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, 90 miles away.  It was barely a tenth of that power at Fukushima.

I was ready to vomit.  Because I knew who had designed the plant, who had built it and whom Tokyo Electric Power was having rebuild it:  Shaw Construction.  The latest alias of Stone & Webster, the designated builder for every one of the four new nuclear plants that the Obama Administration has approved for billions in federal studies.

But I had The Notebook, the diaries of the earthquake inspector for the company.  I'd squirreled it out sometime before the Trade Center went down.  I shouldn't have done that.  Too bad.

All field engineers keep a diary. Gordon Dick, a supervisor, wasn’t sup- posed to show his to us. I asked him to show it to us and, reluctantly, he directed me to these notes about the “SQ” tests.

SQ is nuclear-speak for “Seismic Qualification.” A seismically qualified nuclear plant won’t melt down if you shake it. A “seismic event” can be an earthquake or a Christmas present from Al Qaeda. You can’t run a nuclear reactor in the USA or Europe or Japan without certified SQ.

This much is clear from his notebook: This nuclear plant will melt down in an earthquake. The plant dismally failed to meet the Seismic I (shaking) standards required by U.S. and international rules.

Here’s what we learned: Dick’s subordinate at the nuclear plant, Robert Wiesel, conducted the standard seismic review. Wiesel flunked his company. No good. Dick then ordered Wiesel to change his report to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, change it from failed to passed. Dick didn’t want to make Wiesel do it, but Dick was under the gun himself, acting on direct command from corporate chiefs. From The Notebook:

Wiesel was very upset. He seemed very nervous. Very agitated. [He said,] “I believe these are bad results and I believe it’s reportable,” and then he took the volume of federal regulations from the shelf and went to section 50.55(e), which describes reportable deficiencies at a nuclear plant and [they] read the section together, with Wiesel pointing to the appropriate paragraphs that federal law clearly required [them and the company] to report the Category II, Seismic I deficiencies.

Wiesel then expressed his concern that he was afraid that if he [Wiesel] reported the deficiencies, he would be fired, but that if he didn’t report the deficiencies, he would be breaking a federal law. . . .

The law is clear. It is a crime not to report a safety failure. I could imagine Wiesel standing there with that big, thick rule book in his hands, The Law. It must have been heavy. So was his paycheck. He weighed the choices: Break the law, possibly a jail-time crime, or keep his job.

What did Wiesel do? What would you do?

Why the hell would his company make this man walk the line? Why did they put the gun to his head, to make him conceal mortal danger? It was the money. It’s always the money. Fixing the seismic problem would have cost the plant’s owner half a billion dollars easy. A guy from corporate told Dick, “Bob is a good man. He’ll do what’s right. Don’t worry about Bob.”

That is, they thought Bob would save his job and career rather than rat out the company to the feds.

But I think we should all worry about Bob. The company he worked for, Stone & Webster Engineering, built or designed about a third of the nuclear plants in the United States.

From the fifty-second floor we could look at the Statue of Liberty. She didn’t look back.

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