Greg Palast's Blog, page 66
March 30, 2018
Kobach Behind Scheme to Ask Citizenship in Census
By Greg Palast
Tom Hartmann and Palast discuss the implications of the new citizenship question on the 2020 census.
As soon as I heard Trump was adding the question about whether you have a non-citizen in your household to the census I smelled Kobach. He'd already suggested it in a secret memo that we caught a glimpse of during a meeting in November, 2016 with Trump.
The GOP's basically turning the census into a giant caging operation to get rid of real citizen voters by asking if you have a non-citizen in your household. They want to scare people off from voting and they want to scare people off from filling out the census.
The census controls the size of the congressional delegation of states and they know this will adversely affect California, New York, and New Jersey, who have large immigrant populations. They know it’s going to shrink the Democratic congressional delegation — and shrink the number of Democratic electoral votes for president.
The census shouldn’t be used as a tool for harassing immigrants. It shouldn’t be used to cut the legs off the political power of New York and California. It shouldn’t be used to cleanse the voter rolls of New Mexico and Arizona. They want to weaponize the census and there couldn’t be anything worse.
For more on Kobach and his long history of racist policies, watch The Best Democracy Money Can Buy: The Movie — available to download with a $20 minimum tax-deductible donation to support our work.
Become A Kobach Litigation Supporter
[image error]Help us fund our mass litigation operation against Kris Kobach (Trump’s Vote-Thief-in-Chief). For now, details must remain confidential.Click here to make a tax-deductible donation.
* * * * *Before turning to journalism as an investigative reporter for The Guardian and BBC Television, Greg Palast was an investigator of fraud and racketeering for governments and labor unions worldwide. Known as the reporter who exposed how Katherine Harris and Jeb Bush purged thousands of Black voters from Florida rolls to steal the 2000 election for George Bush, Palast has written four New York Times bestsellers, including Armed Madhouse, Billionaires & Ballot Bandits, and The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, now a major non-fiction movie. The post-election update of the movie, subtitled The Case of the Stole Election, has just been released on Amazon — and can be streamed for FREE by Prime members!
Stay informed, get the signed DVD of the updated, post-election edition of The Best Democracy Money Can Buy: The Case of The Stolen Election, a signed copy of the companion book — or better still, get the Book & DVD combo.
Visit the Palast Investigative Fund store or simply make a tax-deductible contribution to keep our work alive! Alternatively, become a monthly contributor and automatically receive Palast's new films and books when they're released!
Or support the The Palast Investigative Fund (a project of The Sustainable Markets Foundation) by shopping with Amazon Smile. If you use Smile, Amazon will donate 0.5% of your purchases to the Palast Fund — and you get a tax-deduction! Click here for more info.
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The post Kobach Behind Scheme to
Ask Citizenship in Census appeared first on Greg Palast.
Kris Kobach’s Bid To Weaponize The Census
By Greg Palast
Tom Hartmann and Palast discuss the implications of the new citizenship question on the 2020 census.
As soon as I heard Trump was adding the question about whether you have a non-citizen in your household to the census I smelled Kobach. He'd already suggested it in a secret memo that we caught a glimpse of during a meeting in November, 2016 with Trump.
The GOP's basically turning the census into a giant caging operation to get rid of real citizen voters by asking if you have a non-citizen in your household. They want to scare people off from voting and they want to scare people off from filling out the census.
The census controls the size of the congressional delegation of states and they know this will adversely affect California, New York, and New Jersey, who have large immigrant populations. They know it’s going to shrink the Democratic congressional delegation — and shrink the number of Democratic electoral votes for president.
The census shouldn’t be used as a tool for harassing immigrants. It shouldn’t be used to cut the legs off the political power of New York and California. It shouldn’t be used to cleanse the voter rolls of New Mexico and Arizona. They want to weaponize the census and there couldn’t be anything worse.
For more on Kobach and his long history of racist policies, watch The Best Democracy Money Can Buy: The Movie — available to download with a $20 minimum tax-deductible donation to support our work.
Become A Kobach Litigation Supporter
[image error]Help us fund our mass litigation operation against Kris Kobach (Trump’s Vote-Thief-in-Chief). For now, details must remain confidential.
Click here to make a tax-deductible donation.
* * * * *Before turning to journalism as an investigative reporter for The Guardian and BBC Television, Greg Palast was an investigator of fraud and racketeering for governments and labor unions worldwide. Known as the reporter who exposed how Katherine Harris and Jeb Bush purged thousands of Black voters from Florida rolls to steal the 2000 election for George Bush, Palast has written four New York Times bestsellers, including Armed Madhouse, Billionaires & Ballot Bandits, and The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, now a major non-fiction movie. The post-election update of the movie, subtitled The Case of the Stole Election, has just been released on Amazon — and can be streamed for FREE by Prime members!
Stay informed, get the signed DVD of the updated, post-election edition of The Best Democracy Money Can Buy: The Case of The Stolen Election, a signed copy of the companion book — or better still, get the Book & DVD combo.
Visit the Palast Investigative Fund store or simply make a tax-deductible contribution to keep our work alive! Alternatively, become a monthly contributor and automatically receive Palast's new films and books when they're released!
Or support the The Palast Investigative Fund (a project of The Sustainable Markets Foundation) by shopping with Amazon Smile. If you use Smile, Amazon will donate 0.5% of your purchases to the Palast Fund — and you get a tax-deduction! Click here for more info.
Subscribe to Palast's Newsletter. Follow Palast on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
The post Kris Kobach’s Bid To Weaponize The Census appeared first on Greg Palast.
March 19, 2018
Cambridge Analytica Ain’t Nuthin: Look Out For i360 and DataTrust
By Greg Palast
There are two dangers in the media howl over Trump’s computer gurus Cambridge Analytica, the data-driven psy-ops company founded by billionaire brown-shirts, the Mercer Family.
The story is that Cambridge Analytica, once directed by Steve Bannon, by shoplifting Facebook profiles to bend your brain, is some unique "bad apple" of the cyber world.
That's a dangerously narrow view. In fact, the dark art of dynamic psychometric manipulation in politics was not pioneered by Cambridge Analytica for Trump, but by i360 Themis, the operation founded by… no points for guessing… the Brothers Koch.
Mark Swedlund, himself an expert in these tools, explained in the film The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, that i360 dynamically tracks you on 1800 behaviors, or as Swedlund graphically puts it [see clip above],
"They know the last time you downloaded porn and
whether you ordered Chinese food before you voted."
Swedlund adds his expert conclusion: "I think that’s creepy."
The Koch operation and its competitor, DataTrust, use your credit card purchases, cable TV choices and other personal info — which is far more revealing about your inner life than the BS you put on your Facebook profile. Don’t trust DataTrust: This cyber-monster is operated by Karl Rove, "Bush’s Brain," who is principally funded by Paul Singer, the far Right financier better known as The Vulture.
Way too much is made of the importance of Cambridge Analytica stealing data through a phony app. If you’ve ever filled out an online survey, Swedlund told me, they’ve got you — legally.
The second danger is to forget that the GOP has been using computer power to erase the voting rights of Black and Hispanic voters for years — by "caging," "Crosscheck," citizenship challenges based on last name (Garcia? Not American!!), the list goes on — a far more effective use of cyberpower than manipulating your behavior through Facebook ads.
Just last week, Kris Kobach, Secretary of State of Kansas and Trump's chief voting law advisor, defended his method of hunting alleged "aliens" on voter rolls against a legal challenge by the ALCU. Kobach's expert, Jessie Richman, uses a computer algorithm that can locate "foreign" names on voter rolls. He identified, for example, one "Carlos Murguia" as a potential alien voter. Murguia is a Kansas-born judge who presides in a nearby courtroom.
It would be a joke, except that Kobach's "alien" hunt has blocked one in seven new (i.e. young) voters from registering in the state. If Kobach wins, it will, like his Crosscheck purge program and voter ID laws, almost certainly spread to other GOP controlled states. This could ultimately block one million new voters, exactly what Trump had in mind by pushing the alien-voter hysteria.
Become A Kobach Litigation Supporter
[image error]Help us fund our mass litigation operation against Kris Kobach (Trump’s Vote-Thief-in-Chief). For now, details must remain confidential.
Click here to make a tax-deductible donation.
The Cambridge Analytica story was first reported by The Guardian and Observer in 2015. Did we listen? Did any US paper carry the story the British paper worked on for years? So, my first reaction reading this story was nostalgia — for the time when I was a reporter with The Guardian and Observer investigations team. We could spend a year digging deep into complex stories, working with crazy insiders. There, in 2000, I uncovered another cyber-crime: Using database matching to purge felons from Florida voter rolls. (None, in fact, were felons; most were Democrats.)
I moved back to America, but found I had to give up any hope of doing true, deep investigative reports for newspapers in my own country. US papers will sometimes re-report Guardian news, but American media almost never initiates deep investigation. And THAT, fear of digging out the truth, is a greater threat to America than Steve Bannon.
* * * * *Before turning to journalism as an investigative reporter for The Guardian and BBC Television, Greg Palast was an investigator of fraud and racketeering for governments and labor unions worldwide. Known as the reporter who exposed how Katherine Harris and Jeb Bush purged thousands of Black voters from Florida rolls to steal the 2000 election for George Bush, Palast has written four New York Times bestsellers, including Armed Madhouse, Billionaires & Ballot Bandits, and The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, now a major non-fiction movie. The post-election update of the movie, subtitled The Case of the Stole Election, has just been released on Amazon — and can be streamed for FREE by Prime members!
Stay informed, get the signed DVD of the updated, post-election edition of The Best Democracy Money Can Buy: The Case of The Stolen Election, a signed copy of the companion book — or better still, get the Book & DVD combo.
Visit the Palast Investigative Fund store or simply make a tax-deductible contribution to keep our work alive! Alternatively, become a monthly contributor and automatically receive Palast's new films and books when they're released!
Or support the The Palast Investigative Fund (a project of The Sustainable Markets Foundation) by shopping with Amazon Smile. If you use Smile, Amazon will donate 0.5% of your purchases to the Palast Fund — and you get a tax-deduction! Click here for more info.
Subscribe to Palast's Newsletter. Follow Palast on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
The post Cambridge Analytica Ain’t Nuthin:
Look Out For i360 and DataTrust appeared first on Greg Palast.
ACLU v Kobach Trial Ends With Confession From Trump’s Vote-Thief-in-Chief
By Greg Palast
ACLU v Kobach trial ends with Trump's vote "sheriff" confessing via deposition of scheme given to Trump to block new voters nationwide.
[Pages 10 and 11 of Kris Kobach's deposition — see the full redacted deposition here.]
Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach blocked ONE IN SEVEN Kansans from registering to vote because they could not provide passports or certified birth certificates. Almost all those blocked were new young voters and older poor voters — i.e. Democrats.
Kobach could not identify a single one of these as a non-citizen.
This blockade of mostly Democratic voters is justified by Kobach’s (and Donald Trump’s) claim that the number of non-citizen voters he found (5 over twenty years out of a BILLION ballots cast), is just the "tip of the iceberg."
Dale Ho of the ACLU ended his closing argument: “The iceberg, on close inspection, your honor, is more of an ice cube.”
[Pages 12 and 13 of Kris Kobach's deposition — see the full redacted deposition here.]
The ACLU also released a copy of Kris Kobach’s deposition in which he confesses that, as the Palast team charged in January 2017, that he proposed to Trump a scheme to change the National Voter Registration Act to allow this Kansas passport-or-birth certificate rule to become national law. That would, our experts calculate, cost nearly one million new voters to lose their vote by the 2020 Presidential election.
Become A Kobach Litigation Supporter
[image error]
Help us fund our mass litigation operation against Kris Kobach (Trump’s Vote-Thief-in-Chief). For now, details must remain confidential.
Click here to make a tax-deductible donation.
* * * * *Before turning to journalism as an investigative reporter for The Guardian and BBC Television, Greg Palast was an investigator of fraud and racketeering for governments and labor unions worldwide. Known as the reporter who exposed how Katherine Harris and Jeb Bush purged thousands of Black voters from Florida rolls to steal the 2000 election for George Bush, Palast has written four New York Times bestsellers, including Armed Madhouse, Billionaires & Ballot Bandits, and The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, now a major non-fiction movie. The post-election update of the movie, subtitled The Case of the Stole Election, has just been released on Amazon — and can be streamed for FREE by Prime members!
Stay informed, get the signed DVD of the updated, post-election edition of The Best Democracy Money Can Buy: The Case of The Stolen Election, a signed copy of the companion book — or better still, get the Book & DVD combo.
Visit the Palast Investigative Fund store or simply make a tax-deductible contribution to keep our work alive! Alternatively, become a monthly contributor and automatically receive Palast's new films and books when they're released!
Or support the The Palast Investigative Fund (a project of The Sustainable Markets Foundation) by shopping with Amazon Smile. If you use Smile, Amazon will donate 0.5% of your purchases to the Palast Fund — and you get a tax-deduction! Click here for more info.
Subscribe to Palast's Newsletter. Follow Palast on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
The post ACLU v Kobach Trial Ends With Confession From Trump’s Vote-Thief-in-Chief appeared first on Greg Palast.
March 18, 2018
The Dangers In The Blow-Up Over Cambridge Analytica, Trump’s Computer Gurus
By Greg Palast
There are two dangers in the media howl over Trump’s computer gurus Cambridge Analytica, the data-driven psy-ops company founded by billionaire brown-shirts, the Mercer Family.
The story is that Cambridge Analytica, once directed by Steve Bannon, by shoplifting Facebook profiles to bend your brain, is some unique “bad apple” of the cyber world.
That’s a dangerously narrow view. In fact, the dark art of dynamic psychometric manipulation in politics was not pioneered by Cambridge Analytica for Trump, but by i360 Themis, the operation founded by… no points for guessing… the Brothers Koch.
Mark Swedlund, himself an expert in these tools, explained in The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, that i360 dynamically tracks you on 1800 behaviors, or as Swedlund graphically puts it [see clip above],
“They know the last time you downloaded porn and
whether you ordered Chinese food before you voted.”
Swedlund adds his expert conclusion: "I think that’s creepy."
The Koch operation and its competitor, Data Trust, use your credit card purchases, cable TV choices and other personal info — which is far more revealing about your inner life than the BS you put on your Facebook profile. Don’t trust Data Trust: This cyber-monster is operated by Karl Rove, “Bush’s Brain,” who is principally funded by Paul Singer, the far Right financier better known as The Vulture.
Way too much is made of the importance of Cambridge Analytica stealing data through a phony app. If you’ve ever filled out an online survey, Swedlund told me, they’ve got you — legally.
The second danger is to forget that the GOP has been using computer power to wipe away voting rights of Black and Hispanic voters for years — by "caging," "Crosscheck," citizenship challenges based on last name (Garcia? Not American!?!), the list goes on — a far more effective use of cyberpower than manipulating your behavior through Facebook ads.
Just last week, Kris Kobach, Secretary of State of Kansas and Trump’s chief voting law advisor, defended his method of hunting alleged “aliens” on voter rolls against a legal challenge by the ALCU. His expert, Jessie Richman, uses a computer algorithm that can locate “foreign” names on voter rolls. He identified, for example, one “Carlos Murguia” as a potential alien voter. Murguia is a Kansas-born judge who presides in a nearby courtroom.
It would be a joke, except that Kobach’s “alien” hunt has blocked one in seven new (i.e. young) voters from registering in the state. If he wins in court, it will endanger no less than a million new voters as his system, like the voter ID laws before it, spreads to GOP controlled states.
Become A Kobach Litigation Supporter
[image error]
Help us fund our mass litigation operation against Kris Kobach (Trump’s Vote-Thief-in-Chief). For now, details must remain confidential.
Click here to make a tax-deductible donation.
The Cambridge Analytica story was first reported by The Guardian and Observer in 2015. Did we listen? Did any US paper carry the story the British paper worked on for years? So, my first reaction reading this story was nostalgia — for the time when I was a reporter with The Guardian and Observer investigations team. We could spend a year digging deep into complex stories, working with crazy insiders. There, in 2000, I uncovered another cyber-crime: Using database matching to purge felons from Florida voter rolls. (None, in fact, were felons; most were Democrats.)
I moved back to America, but found I had to give up any hope of doing true, deep investigative reports in my own country. US papers will re-report Guardian news, because American media truly fear initiating deep investigation. And THAT, fear of digging out the truth, is a greater threat to America than Steve Bannon.
* * * * *Before turning to journalism as an investigative reporter for The Guardian and BBC Television, Greg Palast was an investigator of fraud and racketeering for governments and labor unions worldwide. Known as the reporter who exposed how Katherine Harris and Jeb Bush purged thousands of Black voters from Florida rolls to steal the 2000 election for George Bush, Palast has written four New York Times bestsellers, including Armed Madhouse, Billionaires & Ballot Bandits, and The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, now a major non-fiction movie. The post-election update of the movie, subtitled The Case of the Stole Election, has just been released on Amazon — and can be streamed for FREE by Prime members!
Stay informed, get the signed DVD of the updated, post-election edition of The Best Democracy Money Can Buy: The Case of The Stolen Election, a signed copy of the companion book — or better still, get the Book & DVD combo.
Visit the Palast Investigative Fund store or simply make a tax-deductible contribution to keep our work alive! Alternatively, become a monthly contributor and automatically receive Palast's new films and books when they're released!
Or support the The Palast Investigative Fund (a project of The Sustainable Markets Foundation) by shopping with Amazon Smile. If you use Smile, Amazon will donate 0.5% of your purchases to the Palast Fund — and you get a tax-deduction! Click here for more info.
Subscribe to Palast's Newsletter. Follow Palast on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
The post The Dangers In The Blow-Up Over Cambridge Analytica, Trump’s Computer Gurus appeared first on Greg Palast.
3 Dangers In The Blow-Up Over Cambridge Analytica, Trump’s Computer Gurus
By Greg Palast
There are three dangers in the blow-up over Trump’s computer gurus Cambridge Analytica.
First, this is not a "bad apple" story. The dark art of dynamic psychometric manipulation in politics was not pioneered by Cambridge Analytica for Trump, but by i360 Themis, the operation founded by the Koch brothers. That’s why Mark Swedlund, himself an expert in these tools, explained in our film that i360 dynamically tracks you on 1800 behaviors, or as Swedlund graphically puts it, “they know the last time you downloaded porn and whether you ordered Chinese food before you voted.“ Swedlund adds his expert conclusion: "I think that’s creepy."
By focusing solely on Steve Bannon and Cambridge Analytica and their cyber thieving, we lose the fact that bigger players like the Kochs and Karl Rove, with his monster Data Trust program funded by right-wing billionaire Paul "The Vulture" Singer, are also committing serious vote manipulation evils.
Way too much is made of the importance of stealing data through a phony app. If you’ve ever filled out an online survey, Swedlund told me, they’ve got you — legally.
The second danger is to forget that the GOP has been using computer power to wipe away voting rights of Black and Hispanic voters for years — by "caging," "Crosscheck," citizenship challenges based on last name (Garcia? Not American!?!) and more — a far more effective use of cyberpower than unconsciously manipulating your behavior through Facebook ads.
The third danger is to overplay the important of cyberwar techniques in elections. Cambridge Analytica worked for Ted Cruz in the GOP primary AGAINST Trump — and what happened. That Hillary Clinton arrogantly defended NAFTA in Michigan, did not deign to visit Wisconsin once during the campaign, never visited or met with jobless auto workers at a closed plant in Ohio, as Trump did — this had more to do with her loss than computer geeks playing mad scientist in Britain.
* * * * *
The story, of course, was reported by The Guardian and Observer in 2015 — when Cambridge Analytica was working AGAINST Trump. Did we listen? Did any US paper carry the story? So, my first reaction reading this story was nostalgia — for the time when I was a reporter with The Guardian and Observer investigations team. When you could spend a year digging deep into complex stories, working with crazy insiders. By moving back to America, I had to give up any work with US papers. They truly fear deep investigation. And THAT, fear of digging out the truth, is a greater threat to America than Steve Bannan.
* * * * *Before turning to journalism as an investigative reporter for The Guardian and BBC Television, Greg Palast was an investigator of fraud and racketeering for governments and labor unions worldwide. Known as the reporter who exposed how Katherine Harris and Jeb Bush purged thousands of Black voters from Florida rolls to steal the 2000 election for George Bush, Palast has written four New York Times bestsellers, including Armed Madhouse, Billionaires & Ballot Bandits, and The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, now a major non-fiction movie. The post-election update of the movie, subtitled The Case of the Stole Election, has just been released on Amazon — and can be streamed for FREE by Prime members!
Stay informed, get the signed DVD of the updated, post-election edition of The Best Democracy Money Can Buy: The Case of The Stolen Election, a signed copy of the companion book — or better still, get the Book & DVD combo.
Visit the Palast Investigative Fund store or simply make a tax-deductible contribution to keep our work alive! Alternatively, become a monthly contributor and automatically receive Palast's new films and books when they're released!
Or support the The Palast Investigative Fund (a project of The Sustainable Markets Foundation) by shopping with Amazon Smile. If you use Smile, Amazon will donate 0.5% of your purchases to the Palast Fund — and you get a tax-deduction! Click here for more info.
Subscribe to Palast's Newsletter. Follow Palast on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
The post 3 Dangers In The Blow-Up Over Cambridge Analytica, Trump’s Computer Gurus appeared first on Greg Palast.
March 8, 2018
Become A Kobach Litigation Supporter
[image error]
Help us fund our mass litigation operation against Kris Kobach (Trump’s Vote Thief in Chief). For now, details must remain confidential.
The post Become A Kobach Litigation Supporter appeared first on Greg Palast.
Kobach Litigation Supporter
[image error]
Help us fund our mass litigation operation against Kris Kobach (Trump’s Vote Thief in Chief). For now, details must remain confidential.
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Trump’s Alien Voter Claim Goes To Court Kobach Rule That Blocks 1 in 7 New Voters Could Decide 2018 & 2020 Races
By Greg Palast for Alternet
The mainstream media has simply missed the voting rights trial whose outcome could unleash the newest mass vote suppression weapon, the invention of Donald Trump’s chief vote suppression tactician, Kris Kobach of Kansas.
Clip from Palast's film The Best Democracy Money Can Buy
On Tuesday, the trial of the lawsuit by the League of Women Voters against Kobach, Kansas’ Republican Secretary of State, began in a Kansas City courtroom. The League has sued to block the state’s law, drafted by Kobach, requiring all new voters to show proof of citizenship.
Kobach’s law has blocked an astonishing 1 in 7 new registrants from voting in the state because they did not satisfy his citizenship paperwork requirement.
The ACLU, which represents the League, has sent in its top litigators, led by its voting rights director Dale Ho, because of the nationwide implications of the case. If Kobach’s law is upheld and spreads to other GOP controlled states, just over one million Americans could lose their right to vote by 2020.
[image error]
Oddly, Kobach has chosen a lawyer with little courtroom experience — himself.
Judge Julie Robinson was not amused by what many see as a publicity stunt. Robinson, the chief justice of the federal district for Kansas, excoriated Kobach for not knowing “Evidence 101,” and curtly coached Kobach’s amateur team on the correct procedure for cross-examination.
Buffoonish antics in the courtroom drew some laughter. But the partisan result of Kobach’s law is deadly serious. According to the ACLU’s expert witness, University of Florida professor Michael McDonald, nearly half (44.6%) of the voters blocked are young, 18 to 29 years old.
It cannot be lost on Kobach, former Chairman of the Kansas GOP, that young Americans voted overwhelmingly Democratic, 55% for Clinton and only 36% for Trump in 2016.
To justify the paper proof-of-citizenship requirement, Kobach told the court the requirement has blocked 30,000 non-citizens from voting in Kansas. However, he has been unable to prove that even a single one of the 35,314 voters blocked by the law is an alien.
Kobach’s Alien Voter Hunt
Just after the 2016 election, Secretary Kobach called me to confirm he was the source of Donald Trump’s claim that a million aliens voted in the 2016 election. (Kobach also confirmed it was his idea to force Mexico to pay for Trump’s border wall.)
Noting to Kobach that he is the nation’s only Secretary of State with the power to prosecute illegal voters, I asked if he planned mass arrests of alien voters. (Kobach had claimed on Fox News, for example, that “50 Somalians are stealing my vote!”)
Kobach told me, “Just wait! Convictions are coming.”
I’ve waited. But so far, his manhunt, begun five years ago, has produced just a single conviction of a non-citizen voter out of 1.8 million Kansas registrants. Nevertheless, tens of thousands of Kansans are blocked because they cannot produce the evidence — an original birth certificate or passport or naturalization papers — his law requires.
I haven’t asked for nearly a year, but I must: We are running low on funds — just as we’re about to launch a mass litigation operation against Kobach with the help of the ACLU and others. For now, details need to remain confidential. Make it happen!
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Call From the Prison Parking Lot?
Not surprisingly, lower-income voters are less likely to hold these documents — and less likely to vote Republican. Voters earning less than $50,000 per year voted 53% to 41% against Trump.
And no, neither a driver’s license nor a Social Security card proves citizenship. The alternative, obtaining a birth certificate, can be a costly paper chase, as plaintiff Donna Bucci testified. Bucci, who gets by on the limited income she earns working in a local prison cafeteria, told the court Tuesday that she could not pay both her rent and the $50-$60 total cost to obtain her birth certificate from Maryland.
Kobach cross-examined her, hoping to get Bucci to admit to simple laziness. Kobach asked her why she didn’t call during work hours to arrange a special hearing before a state agency. Bucci replied that no cell phones are allowed inside prisons. Kobach attacked, asking why she couldn’t have run to her car during a break and phoned from the parking lot.
But even if Bucci had reached officials and obtained a hearing date, it would cost her a day of work, assuming she would be allowed the day off, to attend the hearing.
Judge Robinson will have to determine whether this bureaucratic rigmarole constitutes an unfair obstacle to voting. The National Voter Registration Act permits states to require only the “minimum amount” of information from a voter.
Up to now, “minimum” has meant checking the box on a registration form by which you swear, under penalty of imprisonment, that you are a citizen, and signing your name, to complete the registration form.
Neither Kobach nor his spokeswoman has responded to our requests for comment.
The jury-less bench trial is expected to run through Friday.
* * * * *
The Palast investigations team has been on Kobach and his fraudulent vote hunting scam since 2013 — long before he became Donald Trump’s official vote fraud hunter. Here is a clip (see above) from our film, out this week on Amazon and FREE on Prime!
Before turning to journalism as an investigative reporter for The Guardian and BBC Television, Greg Palast was an investigator of fraud and racketeering for governments and labor unions worldwide.
Known as the reporter who exposed how Katherine Harris and Jeb Bush purged thousands of Black voters from Florida rolls to steal the 2000 election for George Bush, Palast has written four New York Timesbestsellers, including Armed Madhouse, Billionaires & Ballot Bandits, and The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, a major non-fiction movie.
The post-election update of the movie, subtitled The Case of the Stole Election, is now available on Amazon — and can be streamed for FREE by Prime members!
Stay informed, get the signed DVD of the updated, post-election edition of The Best Democracy Money Can Buy: The Case of The Stolen Election, a signed copy of the companion book — or better still, get the Book & DVD combo.
Visit the Palast Investigative Fund store or simply make a tax-deductible contribution to keep our work alive! Alternatively, become a monthly contributor and automatically receive Palast's new films and books when they're released!
Or support the The Palast Investigative Fund (a project of The Sustainable Markets Foundation) by shopping with Amazon Smile. If you use Smile, Amazon will donate 0.5% of your purchases to The Sustainable Markets Foundation for the benefit of the Palast Fund — and you get a tax-deduction! Click here for more info.
Subscribe to Palast's Newsletter. Follow Palast on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
The post Trump’s Alien Voter Claim Goes To Court
Kobach Rule That Blocks 1 in 7 New Voters
Could Decide 2018 & 2020 Races appeared first on Greg Palast.
March 6, 2018
Kobach Citizenship ProofVoting Requirement Goes To Court
March 6 – Catch Greg Palast on the Thom Hartmann show, 1pm ET (10am PT) Wednesday. Palast will report on the trial of the ACLU and League of Women voters versus Kris Kobach, Secretary of State of Kansas, which began today.
Clip from Palast's Film The Best Democracy Money Can Buy
Kris Kobach claims that MILLIONS of aliens voted in the last election. To stop the Alien Invasion, Kobach, Kansas Secretary of State, wrote and passed a law in the state requiring proof of citizenship. The effect: to knock out one in seven new voters — 22,000 so far — not because they come from another planet or nation, but because they don’t have a passport or original birth certificate to prove they’re citizens.
The lawsuit against Kobach was brought by the ACLU on behalf of the League of Women Voters and five Kansans — including two Air Force vets — who were denied the right to vote because they did not have proof of citizenship on hand. One of the plaintiffs testified today that she could not afford the $50 to $60 to obtain her out-of-state birth certificate.
It’s all vicious politics: Most of the Kansans who lost their right to vote are students, first time voters. Nope: a driver’s license or social security card is NOT proof of citizenship. Of the millions of votes cast in Kansas since Kobach began his alien hunt, he’s found only one single non-citizen voter — while knocking out tens of thousands of innocent Americans. The majority are students and those without passports (not the rich!)…i.e. Democrats.
The Palast investigations team has been on Kobach and his fraudulent vote hunting scam since 2013 — long before he became Donald Trump’s official vote fraud hunter. Here is a clip from our film, out this week on Amazon — FREE on Prime!
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Before turning to journalism as an investigative reporter for The Guardian and BBC Television, Greg Palast was an investigator of fraud and racketeering for governments and labor unions worldwide.
Known as the reporter who exposed how Katherine Harris and Jeb Bush purged thousands of Black voters from Florida rolls to steal the 2000 election for George Bush, Palast has written four New York Timesbestsellers, including Armed Madhouse, Billionaires & Ballot Bandits, and The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, a major non-fiction movie.
The post-election update of the movie, subtitled The Case of the Stole Election, is now available on Amazon — and can be streamed for FREE by Prime members!
Stay informed, get the signed DVD of the updated, post-election edition of The Best Democracy Money Can Buy: The Case of The Stolen Election, a signed copy of the companion book — or better still, get the Book & DVD combo.
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Voting Requirement Goes To Court appeared first on Greg Palast.
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