Investigative reporter Greg Palast. (photo: Greg Palast's Website)
13 November 16
Before a single vote was cast, the election was fixed by GOP and Trump operatives.
tarting
in 2013 – just as the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act – a
coterie of Trump operatives, under the direction of Kris Kobach, Kansas
Secretary of State, created a system to purge 1.1 million Americans of
color from the voter rolls of GOP–controlled states.
The system, called Crosscheck, is detailed in my Rolling Stone report, “The GOP’s Stealth War on Voters,” 8/24/2016.
Crosscheck in action:
Trump victory margin in Michigan: 13,107 Michigan Crosscheck purge list: 449,922 Trump victory margin in Arizona: 85,257 Arizona Crosscheck purge list: 270,824 Trump victory margin in North Carolina: 177,008 North Carolina Crosscheck purge list: 589,393
On Tuesday, we saw Crosscheck elect a Republican
Senate and as President, Donald Trump. The electoral putsch was aided by
nine other methods of attacking the right to vote of Black, Latino and
Asian-American voters, methods detailed in my book and film, including
“Caging,” “purging,” blocking legitimate registrations, and wrongly
shunting millions to “provisional” ballots that will never be counted.
Trump signaled the use of “Crosscheck” when he claimed
the election is “rigged” because “people are voting many, many times.”
His operative Kobach, who also advised Trump on building a wall on the
southern border, devised a list of 7.2 million “potential” double
voters—1.1 million of which were removed from the voter rolls by
Tuesday. The list is loaded overwhelmingly with voters of color and the
poor.
Those accused of criminal double voting include, for
example, Donald Alexander Webster Jr. of Ohio who is accused of voting a
second time in Virginia as Donald EUGENE Webster SR.
No, not everyone on the list loses their vote. But
this was not the only racially poisonous tactic that accounted for this
purloined victory by Trump and GOP candidates.
For example, in the swing state of North Carolina, it
was reported that 6,700 Black folk lost their registrations because
their registrations had been challenged by a group called Voter
Integrity Project (VIP). VIP sent letters to households in Black
communities “do not forward.” If the voter had moved within the same
building, or somehow did not get their mail (e.g. if their name was not
on a mail box), they were challenged as “ghost” voters. GOP voting
officials happily complied with VIP with instant cancellation of
registrations.
The 6,700 identified in two counties were returned to
the rolls through a lawsuit. However, there was not one mention in the
press that VIP was also behind Crosscheck in North Carolina; nor that
its leader, Col. Jay Delancy, whom I’ve tracked for years
has previously used this vote thievery, known as “caging,” for years.
Doubtless the caging game was wider and deeper than reported. And by the
way, caging, as my Rolling Stone co-author, attorney Robert F. Kennedy
Jr., tells me, is “a felony, it’s illegal, and punishable by high fines
and even jail time.”
There is still much investigation to do. For example,
there are millions of “provisional” ballots, “spoiled” (invalidated)
ballots and ballots rejected from the approximately 30 million mailed
in. Unlike reporting in Britain, US media does not report the ballots
that are rejected and tossed out—because, after all, as Joe Biden says,
“Our elections are the envy of the world.” Only in Kazakhstan, Joe.
While there is a great deal of work to do, much
documentation still to analyze, we’ll have to pry it from partisan
voting chiefs who stamp the scrub lists, Crosscheck lists and ballot
records, “confidential.”
But, the evidence already in our hands makes me sadly confident in saying, Jim Crow, not the voters, elected Mr. Trump.
What about those exit polls?
Exit polls are the standard by which the US State
Department measures the honesty of foreign elections. Exit polling is,
historically, deadly accurate. The bane of pre-election polling is that
pollsters must adjust for the likelihood of a person voting. Exit polls
solve the problem.
But three times in US history, pollsters have had to
publicly flagellate themselves for their “errors.” In 2000, exit polls
gave Al Gore the win in Florida; in 2004, exit polls gave Kerry the win
in Ohio, and now, in swing states, exit polls gave the presidency to
Hillary Clinton.
So how could these multi-million-dollar Ph.d-directed statisticians with decades of experience get exit polls so wrong?
Answer: they didn’t. The polls in Florida in 2000 were
accurate. That’s because exit pollsters can only ask, “How did you
vote?” What they don’t ask, and can’t, is, “Was your vote counted.”
In 2000, in Florida, GOP Secretary of State Katherine
Harris officially rejected 181,173 ballots, as “spoiled” because their
chads were hung and other nonsense excuses. Those ballots overwhelmingly
were marked for Al Gore. The exit polls included those 181,173 people
who thought they had voted – but their vote didn’t count. In other
words, the exit polls accurately reflected whom the voters chose, not
what Katherine Harris chose.
In 2004, a similar number of votes were invalidated
(including an enormous pile of “provisional” ballots) by Ohio’s GOP
Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell. Again, the polls reflected that
Kerry was the choice of 51% of the voters. But the exit polls were
“wrong” because they didn’t reflect the ballots invalidated by
Blackwell.
Notably, two weeks after the 2004 US election, the US
State Department refused the recognize the Ukraine election results
because the official polls contradicted the exit polls.
And here we go again. 2016: Hillary wins among those
queried as they exit the polling station—yet Trump is declared winner in
GOP-controlled swings states. And, once again, the expert pollsters are
forced to apologize—when they should be screaming, “Fraud! Here’s the
evidence the vote was fixed!”
Now there’s a new trope to explain away the exit polls
that gave Clinton the win. Supposedly, Trump voters were ashamed to say
they voted for Trump. Really? ON WHAT PLANET? For Democracy Now! and
Rolling Stone I was out in several swing states. In Ohio, yes, a Black
voter may have been reluctant to state support for Trump. But a white
voter in the exurbs of Dayton, where the Trump signs grew on lawns like
weeds, and the pews of the evangelical mega churches were slathered with
Trump and GOP brochures, risked getting spat on if they even whispered,
“Hillary.”
This country is violently divided, but in the end,
there simply aren’t enough white guys to elect Trump nor a Republican
Senate. The only way they could win was to eliminate the votes of
non-white guys—and they did so by tossing Black provisional ballots into
the dumpster, ID laws that turn away students—the list goes on. It’s a
web of complex obstacles to voting by citizens of color topped by that
lying spider, Crosscheck.
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