Photo of Michigan ballot with bubble. (image: Palast Investigative Fund, 2016)
19 December 16
ichigan
officials declared in late November that Trump won the state's count by
10,704 votes. But hold on – a record 75,355 ballots were not counted.
The uncounted ballots came mostly from Detroit and Flint, majority-Black cities that vote Democratic.
According to the machines that read their ballots,
these voters waited in line, sometimes for hours, yet did not choose a
president. Really?
This week, I drove through a snowstorm to Lansing to
hear the official explanation from Ruth Johnson, the Republican
secretary of state. I was directed to official flack-catcher Fred
Woodhams who told me, "You know, I think when you look at the
unfavorability ratings that were reported for both major-party
candidates, it's probably not that surprising."
Sleuthing about in Detroit, I found another explanation: bubbles.
Bubbles?
Michigan votes on paper ballots. If you don't fill the
bubble completely, the machine records that you didn't vote for
president.
Susan, a systems analyst who took part in the hand
recount initiated by Jill Stein, told me, "I saw a lot of red ink. I saw
a lot of checkmarks. We saw a lot of ballots that weren't originally
counted, because those don't scan into the machine." (I can only use her
first name because she's terrified of retribution from Trump followers
in the white suburb where she lives.)
Other ballots were not counted because the machines thought the voter chose two presidential candidates.
How come more ballots were uncounted in Detroit and
Flint than in the white 'burbs and rural counties? Are the machines
themselves racist?
No, but they are old, and in some cases, busted. An
astonishing 87 machines broke down in Detroit, responsible for counting
tens of thousands of ballots. Many more were simply faulty and
uncalibrated.
I met with Carlos Garcia, University of Michigan
multimedia specialist, who, on Election Day, joined a crowd waiting over
two hours for the busted machine to be fixed.
Some voters left; others filled out ballots that were
chucked, uncounted, into the bottom of machine. When the machine was
fixed, Carlos explained, "Any new scanned ballots were falling in on top
of the old ones." It would not be possible to recount those dumped
ballots.
This is not an unheard of phenomenon: I know two
voters who lost their vote in another state (California) because they
didn't fill in the bubble – my parents! Meet mom and dad in my film, The
Best Democracy Money Can Buy:
How did Detroit end up with the crap machines?
Detroit is bankrupt, so every expenditure must be
approved by "emergency" overlords appointed by the Republican governor.
The GOP operatives refused the city's pre-election pleas to fix and
replace the busted machines.
"We had the rollout [of new machines] in our budget,"
Detroit City Clerk Janice Winfrey said. "No money was appropriated by
the state."
Same in Flint. GOP state officials cut the budget for
water service there, resulting in the contamination of the city's water
supply with lead. The budget cuts also poisoned the presidential race.
The Human Eye Count
There is, however, an extraordinary machine that can
read the ballots, whether the bubbles are filled or checked, whether in
black ink or red, to determine the voters' intent: the human eye.
That's why Dr. Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate,
paid millions of dollars for a human eyeball count of the uncounted
votes. While labeled a "recount," its real purpose is to count the
75,355 votes never counted in the first place.
Count those ballots, mostly in Detroit and Flint, and Trump's victory could vanish.
Adding to the pile of uncounted ballots are the large
numbers of invalidated straight-ticket votes in Detroit. In Michigan,
you can choose to make one mark that casts your vote for every Democrat
(or Republican) for every office. Voters know that they can vote the
Democratic ballot but write in a protest name – popular were "Bernie
Sanders" and "Mickey Mouse" – but their ballot, they knew, would count
for Clinton.
However, the Detroit machines simply invalidated the
ballots with protest write-ins because the old Opti-Scans wrongly
tallied these as "over-votes" (i.e., voting for two candidates). The
human eye would catch this mistake.
But Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette stymied
Stein's human eye count. The Republican pol issued an order saying that
no one could look at the ballots cast in precincts where the number of
votes and voters did not match – exactly the places where you'd want to
look for the missing votes. He also ordered a ban on counting ballots
from precincts where the seals on the machines had been broken – in
other words, where there is evidence of tampering. Again, those are the
machines that most need investigating. The result: The recount crews
were denied access to more than half of all Detroit precincts (59
percent).
I met with Stein, who told me she was stunned by this
overt sabotage of the recount. "It's shocking to think that the
discounting of these votes may be making the critical difference in the
outcome of the election," she said.
This story was repeated in Wisconsin, which uses the
same Opti-Scan system as Michigan. There, the uncounted votes, sometimes
called "spoiled" or "invalidated" ballots, were concentrated in
Black-majority Milwaukee. Stein put up over $3 million of donated funds
for the human eye review in Wisconsin, but GOP state officials
authorized Milwaukee County to recount simply by running the ballots
through the same blind machines. Not surprisingly, this instant replay
produced the same questionable result.
Adding Un-Votes to the Uncounted
Stein was also disturbed by the number of voters who
never got to cast ballots. "Whether it's because of the chaos [because]
some polling centers are closed, and then some are moved, and there's
all kinds of mix-ups," she said. "So, a lot of people are filling out
provisional ballots, or they were being tossed off the voter rolls by
Interstate Crosscheck."
Interstate Crosscheck is a list that was created by
Donald Trump supporter and Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach to hunt
down and imprison voters who illegally voted or registered in two
states in one election.
An eye-popping 449,092 Michiganders are on the
Crosscheck suspect list. The list, which my team uncovered in an
investigation for Rolling Stone, cost at least 50,000 of the state's
voters their registrations. Disproportionately, the purged voters were
Blacks, Latinos and that other solid Democratic demographic, Muslim
Americans. Dearborn, Michigan, has the highest concentration of Arab
Americans in the US.
The Michigan Secretary of State's spokesman Woodhams
told me the purpose of the mass purge was, "to clean our voter lists and
ensure that there's no vulnerability for fraud. We've been very
aggressive in closing vulnerabilities and loopholes to fraud."
While Woodhams did not know of a single conviction for
double-voting in Michigan, the "aggression" in purging the lists was
clear. I showed him part of the Michigan purge list that he thought was
confidential. The "double voters" are found by simply matching first and
last names. Michael Bernard Brown is supposed to be the same voter as
Michael Anthony Brown. Michael Timothy Brown is supposed to be the same
voter as Michael Johnnie Brown.
Woodhams assured me the GOP used the Trump-Kobach list
with care, more or less. He said, "I'm sure that there are some false
positives. But we go through it thoroughly, and we're not just canceling
people."
As to the racial profiling inherent in the list? Did
he agree with our experts that by tagging thousands of voters named Jose
Garcia and Michael Brown there would be a bias in his purge list?
The GOP spokesman replied, "I've known a lot of white Browns."
Jill Stein didn't buy it. Responding to both
Michigan's and Trump's claim that voter rolls are loaded with fraudulent
double voters, Stein said, "It's the opposite of what he is saying: not
people who are voting fraudulently and illegally, but actually
legitimate voters who have had their right to vote taken away from them
by Kris Kobach and by Donald Trump."
Crosscheck likely cost tens of thousands their vote in
Pennsylvania as well. "It is a Jim Crow system, and it all needs to be
fixed," Stein concluded. "It's not rocket science. This is just plain,
basic democracy."
A note in the snow
Last week, I flew to Detroit with my team at the
request of a major west coast publication. When I landed, they got cold
feet; assignment cancelled. Without funding to continue, I should have
headed home. But I was getting tips of nasty doings with the ballots in
Motown. I could get the evidence that Trump’s victory was as real as his
tan.
So I tucked my long-johns under my suit, put on my
fedora, and headed out to meet the witnesses, see the evidence and film
an investigative report on the Theft of Michigan. With almost no sleep
(and no pay), my producer David Ambrose and I put together an
investigative film—and donated it, no charge, to Democracy Now! and
several other outlets.
As to the airfares, hotels, cars, camera batteries,
sound equipment, local assistants and the rest, the bills have piled
high as the snow and uncounted ballots. So, here I was, literally out in
the cold, hoping you'd see the value of top-flight investigative
reporting.
So, buddy, can you spare a dime? Or $100 or so? For
that, I’ll send you my new film, the one that, back in September, told
you exactly how Trump would steal it. Or a signed copy of the book that
goes with it: The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, a tale of billionaires
and ballot bandits.
I want to thank all of you who donated to get me to
Washington DC to testify at the ad hoc Congressional hearing and to
speak with the Justice Department about the suppression of minority
votes.
(On Monday, I was joined at the Washington Press Club
by the nation’s top voting rights attorney, Barbara Arnwine; civil
rights legend Ruby Sales; Muslim activist Sameera Khan. They announced
plans to take legal and political action against Crosscheck, the
Trumpistas’ latest Jim Crow tactic, the one our team uncovered for
Rolling Stone. Khan joined me at Justice to present them 50,000
signatures (we unloaded reams of paper on them) gathered by 18 Million
Rising, the Asian American advocacy group, to light a fire under
Justice.
On Tuesday, I joined the presidents of the NAACP
chapters of Michigan and Wisconsin and other front-line voting rights
leaders, to plan next steps for this week, for this year, for this
decade.
My presentation to Justice, to Congressmen and rights
advocates, to the press, was so much more powerful because I arrived in
DC with the goods, the evidence, the film, the facts from Michigan, from
the scene of the electoral crime.
So, in the end, my assignment wasn’t cancelled: I went
to work for YOU. Because I have faith that my readers agree that this
work is important, that I’m not on some fool’s errand.
The US media doesn’t want to cover the vote
theft—because, hey, the count is over—and we should get over it. I am
not over it. I am standing my ground. Let me know if you think I’ve made
the right decision. Feed the team. I have nothing to offer you in
return except some signed discs and books (or the Combo)— and the facts. – Greg Palast
Greg Palast has been called the "most important
investigative reporter of our time - up there with Woodward and
Bernstein" (The Guardian). Palast has broken front-page stories for BBC
Television Newsnight, The Guardian, The Nation Magazine, Rolling Stone,
and Harper's Magazine. He is the author of the New York Times
bestsellers Billionaires & Ballot Bandits, Armed Madhouse, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, and the highly acclaimed Vultures' Picnic,
named Book of the Year 2012 on BBC Newsnight Review. His books have
been translated into two dozen languages. His brand new film of his
documentary reports for BBC Newsnight and Democracy Now! is called Vultures and Vote Rustlers.
1 comment:
Friend in Detroit stood in line to vote against his home tax rate going up.
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