Greg Palast's Blog, page 78

Crosscheck Is Not Just Crooked, It’s Criminal

After reading my report on the Kobach/Koch/Trump operation, which has removed tens of thousands of minority voters from the rolls in the swing states that surprisingly shifted to Trump, former federal judge (and now Congressman) Alcee Hastings told me Crosscheck is a criminal violation of federal law. Hastings has called for criminal indictments and written an official Congressional member letter to ask for investigation.

hastings-crosscheck-letter-to-ag-lynch

Hastings’ demand for justice is backed by a petition to expose and end Crosscheck’s racist attacks on voting rights. So far it's been signed by 50,000 people, including 29,507 members of 18 Million Rising, the Asian-American rights group. The group is joined by co-signers Rep. Keith Ellison, Bill Gallegos of Climate Justice, Martin Luther King III and others.

On Tuesday, December 13 I will join the leaders of 18 Million rising in Washington, D.C. to present the petition to Attorney General Loretta Lynch.

Stopping Crosscheck is the Standing Rock of racist vote suppression.  If we don’t open the investigations now, by January 21, Kris Kobach will be Homeland Security chief and Jeff Sessions Attorney General.

Demand an investigation into Crosscheck, sign our petition — and then share it!

For the full story, see the film, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, the story of my investigation of Crosscheck.

* * * * *

Greg Palast (Rolling Stone, Guardian, BBC) is the author of The New York Times bestsellers, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and Billionaires & Ballot Bandits, now out as major motion non-fiction movie.

Donate to the Palast Investigative Fund and get the signed DVD.

Download the FREE Movie Comic Book.

Rent or buy the film from Amazon or Vimeo.

Visit the Palast Investigative Fund store or simply make a tax-deductible contribution to keep our work alive! 

Or support the The Palast Investigative Fund (a project of The Sustainable Markets Foundation) by shopping with Amazon Smile. AmazonSmile will donate 0.5% of your purchases to the Palast Fund and you get a tax-deduction! More info.

The post Crosscheck Is Not Just Crooked,
It’s Criminal appeared first on Greg Palast.

The No-BS Inside Guide to the Presidential Recount Sorry, no Russian hacker hunt

by Greg Palast for Truthout

There's been so much complete nonsense since I first broke the news that the Green Party would file for a recount of the presidential vote, I am compelled to write a short guide to flush out the BS and get to just the facts, ma'am.

 

Nope, they’re not hunting for Russian hackers

To begin with, the main work of the recount hasn't a damn thing to do with finding out if the software programs for the voting machines have been hacked, whether by Putin’s agents or some guy in a cave flipping your vote from Hillary to The Donald.

The Green team does not yet even have the right to get into the codes. But that's just not the core of the work.

The ballots in the electoral “dumpster”

The nasty little secret of US elections, is that we don't count all the votes.

In Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania—and all over America—there were a massive number of votes that were simply rejected, invalidated, and spoiled. They were simply, not counted.  Officially, in a typical presidential election, at least three million votes end up rejected, often for picayune, absurd reasons.

The rejects fall into three big categories:  provisional ballots rejected, absentee and mail-in ballots invalidated and in-precinct votes “spoiled,” spit out by a machine or thrown out by a human reader as unreadable or mis-marked.

So, as Robert Fitrakis, lead lawyer for the recount tells me, their first job is to pull the votes out of the electoral dumpster—and, one by one, make the case for counting a rejected provisional, absentee or “spoiled” ballot.

Spoiled:  over-votes and under-votes

How does a vote spoil? Most fall in the categories of “over-votes” and “under-votes.”

In Michigan, the Green team has found a whole lot of people who voted for TWO candidates for President.  These are the “over-vote”—votes that will count for neither candidate.

How odd.  While the schools in Detroit are not stellar, its graduates do know that they can only have one president.

Then, some folks didn’t vote at all.  They are the “under-voter.”

But, Fitrakis and team suspect, many of these under- and over-voters meant to vote for a candidate but the robot reader couldn’t understand their choice.

Here’s how it happens.  Voters in Michigan and Wisconsin fill in bubbles next to their choice.  The cards, filled up with darkened bubbles for each race, are gathered and fed through an “optical scanner.” These robotic eyeballs mess up all the time.

This is what Fitrakis, an old hand at vote-machine failures (both deliberate and benign), calls “the calibration problem.”

Are machines calibrated with a Republican or Democratic bias? No, that's not how it works. But just as poor areas get the worst schools and hospitals, they also get the worst voting machines.

The key is an ugly statistic not taught in third grade civics class:  According to the US Civil Rights Commission, the chance your vote will be disqualified as “spoiled” is 900% more likely if you’re Black than if you’re white.

So the Green Party intends to review every single one of the six million bubble-filled cards. They’ll use the one instrument that can easily tell one bubble from two, or one bubble from none: the human eye.

As you can imagine, This will require several thousand eyes.  The good news is, Fitrakis reports, that well over a thousand volunteers have already signed up.  Training by Skype begins Tuesday morning.

Support the 2016 Stolen Election Investigation

The team and I are off to Ground Zero:  Michigan. Wisconsin. Pennsylvania. To report the REAL story of the recount.

I’m also responding to urgent requests in the recount states for our technical files and analysis. And then it’s on to Washington—to the Department of Justice—while there’s a bit of Justice left.

Join us by

Supporting the Stolen Election Investigation

Last stop for Democracy

Provisional or “placebo” ballots

According to the US Elections Assistance Commission (EAC), Americans cast 2.7 million provisional ballots in the last presidential election.  About a million were simply discarded.  What?!

Yes.  Discarded, not counted.  You show up at your normal polling station and they can’t find your name, or they don’t like your ID, or you’re supposed to vote in another precinct.  Instead of letting you vote on a regular ballot, you fill out a “provisional” ballot and place it in an envelope, sign your name, and under penalty of jail time for lying, affirm you’re a properly registered voter.

The polls close—then the magic begins.  It’s up to highly partisan election officials to decide if your vote counts.  Hillary Clinton only won one swing state, Virginia, notably, the only one where the vote count was controlled by Democrats.  She lost all swing states—Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Arizona, North Carolina and Florida—where the GOP set the rules for counting these ballots and their hacks acted as the judge and jury on whether a ballot should be counted.

Wisconsin generally rejects votes cast in the wrong precinct, even if they’re legal voters—and, says Fitrakis, “even if their official precinct was just another table in the same high school gym—and they were mis-directed by poll workers.”

(That’s why I sometimes call “provisional” ballots “placebo” ballots.  They let you feel you’ve voted, even if you haven’t.)

In Wisconsin, provisional ballots were handed to voters—mostly, it appears, students—who didn’t have the form of ID required under new Wisconsin law. These ballots were disqualified despite zero evidence even one voter was an identity thief.

Fitrakis says the Stein campaign will fight for each of these provisional votes where this is clearly no evidence the vote is fraudulent.

Mail-in, Early and Absentee Ballots go Absent

If you’ve gone postal in this election, good luck!  According to EAC data, at least half a million absentee ballots go absent, that is, just don’t get counted.  The cause: everything from postage due to “suspect signature.” Fitrakis told me that in his home state of Ohio, you need to put your driver’s license number on the envelope, “and if you don’t have a driver’s license and leave the line blank—instead of writing ‘no driver’s license’—they toss your ballot.

From Palast's book The Best Democracy Money Can Buy: A Tale of Billionaires & Ballot Bandits by Ted Rall

It’s a “gotcha!” system meant to knock out the ballots the officials don’t want to count.  (Remember, your mail-in ballot is anything but secret.)  Team Green will try to fight for each absentee ballot rejected for cockamamie reasons.

If the recount doesn’t change the outcome, can we feel assured the election was honest?

Sadly, no.  As Fitrakis says, “If a student is given a provisional ballot because they didn’t have the right ID, or the state simply lost their registration, we can fight for the ballot to be counted.  But most students who voted off campus didn’t know their right to get a provisional ballot and most probably didn’t get offered one.

Students and others were discouraged from voting because they lacked the proper ID (300,000 by the estimate of the experts with the ACLU—that’s thirty times Trump’s plurality).  But if you didn’t cast any ballot, provisional or otherwise, no one can fight for it.

And final decisions may come down to the vote of the Wisconsin Elections Commission, God forbid.  As Norman Stockwell, the editor of Madison-based The Progressive explained to me, formerly, elections law adjudications were made by a panel of non-partisan judges.  These were replaced by this new commission of partisan shills appointed by GOP Governor Scott Walker.

Trump says millions voted illegally. Is he crazy?

Crazy like a fox.  There’s a method in his madness that affects the recount.

While the media dismisses Trump’s claim that there are "millions of people that voted illegally," they have not paid attention to the details of his claim.  Trump explains that millions of people are “voting many, many times,” that is, voting in two states in the same election.

Trump’s claim is based on a list of “potential duplicate voters” created by his operative, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach.  Kobach (a top dog in Trump’s transition team)  directs a program for hunting down fraudulent voters using a computer system called, “Crosscheck.”

It’s quite a computer:  Crosscheck identified a breathtaking 449,922 Michiganders who are suspected of voting or registering in a second state, a felony crime, as are 371,923 in Pennsylvania.

I spent two years investigating the Trump/Kobach claim for Rolling Stone.  We obtained the “confidential” suspect list of several million citizens accused of voting twice.  In fact, it was no more than a list of common names—Maria Hernandez, James Brown, David Lee—that is, common to voters of color.  Read: Democrats.  A true and typical example: Michael James Brown of Michigan is supposed to be the same voter as Michael Kendrick Brown of Georgia.

Page from The Best Democracy Money Can Buy (FREE) Comic book penned by Keith Tucker

About 54,000 voters in Michigan, five times Trump’s plurality, lost their right to vote based on this nutty double-voter accusation.  In Pennsylvania, about 45,000 were purged.

The problem for Fitrakis:  While he eventually plans to file suit against Crosscheck purges, in the meantime, it’s not clear he can challenge someone whose lost their vote because of a false accusation of double voting.  And those who found their names missing and didn’t demand a provisional ballot—there’s no hope at all of recovering their vote.

Is Jill Stein going to get rich?

Fitrakis laughs at this one.  “The FEC [Federal Elections Commission] has very strict rules on recounts. The donations for the recount are sequestered in a specially designated account and all spending is restricted to the recount.”

The big problem is that the cost is somewhat out of Stein’s control.  Each state will bill the campaign for the “pro-rated salaries and benefits” of its county and state officials working on the recount.

To add to the cost and just plain drive the Green team crazy, the Wisconsin Election Board announced on Monday that each separate county elections clerk will decide if they’ll even let the Green volunteers directly view the ballots.  Fitrakis and partners will have to get a court order to get into each county.  How does one recount ballots without seeing them?  (Hmm, is the Wisconsin board, stooges appointed by the GOP Governor, fearful that the viewing the ballots will expose the game?)

Hillary joins the fray

What will the Clinton camp add to the recount? “Lawyers,” said Fitrakis, though he’s yet to see them.  The Clinton campaign is apparently helping find one voter in each Pennsylvania county, as one is required in each jurisdiction to file for a recount of that state.

And what about that hack job?

While Fitrakis is not looking for Russkies in the computer code, he says, “We’re more concerned with the private companies that control the keys to the kingdom—to match what’s on paper to the official count.”  The “keys” are the little machines, memory cards and other electronic gewgaws that are used to suck the data from the voting machine—which are carried off to another state for tabulation by a private contractor.  Will these tabulations at each step match what the volunteers find in the on-the-ground recount?

One problem is that the tabulation software is “proprietary.”  A private company owns the code to the count—and the privateers will fight fiercely, with GOP help, to keep the ballot counting code their commercial secret.

Push and Pray Pennsylvania

In the end, the single biggest impediment to a full and fair recount is that 70 percent of Pennsylvania voters used what are called, “Push and Pray” voting machines—Direct Recording Electronic touch-screens.  Push the screen next to your choice and pray it gets recorded. Pennsylvania is one of the only states that has yet to require some form of VVPAT (“vee-pat”) or voter-verified paper audit trail that creates an ATM-style receipt.

Therefore, the Keystone State recount will have to rely on hopes of access to the code, statistical comparisons to counties that used paper ballots—and prayer.

Maybe it IS the Russians

The possibility that a Putin pal hacked the machines was championed by University of Michigan computer sciences professor J. Alex Halderman who proposed, “The attackers would probe election offices well in advance in order to find ways to break into their computers…and spread malware into voting machines.”

I imagine some squat, middle-pay-scale civil servant in chinos and a pocket protector who works in the Michigan Secretary of State’s office approached, one late overtime night, by some FSB agent in high heels and a slinky dress split halfway up her thigh. The svelte spy would lean against the bureaucrat provocatively and whisper, “My handsome dahling, would you mind sticking this little thumb drive into that big old computer of yours?”

Professor Halderman, if you want to help the recount, put down the James Bond novels and pick up some Opti-Scan ballots.  We’ve got a lot of bubbles to read.  End

PLEASE, say, "Count me in to count the votes" by supporting the 2016 Stolen Election Investigation for a donation of any size no matter how small or large


Stay informed and get a signed DVD of my film The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, a signed copy of the book with the same title or better still - get the Book & DVD combo


Be listed as a producer ($1,000) or co-producer ($500) in the credits of the broadcast version of the updated, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy:  THE THEFT OF 2016.

* * * * *

Greg Palast (Rolling Stone, Guardian, BBC) is the author of The New York Times bestsellers, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and Billionaires & Ballot Bandits, now out as major motion non-fiction movie.

Donate to the Palast Investigative Fund and get the signed DVD.

Download the FREE Movie Comic Book.

Rent or buy the film from Amazon or Vimeo.

Visit the Palast Investigative Fund store or simply make a tax-deductible contribution to keep our work alive! 

Or support the The Palast Investigative Fund (a project of The Sustainable Markets Foundation) by shopping with Amazon Smile. AmazonSmile will donate 0.5% of your purchases to the Palast Fund and you get a tax-deduction! More info.

GregPalast.com

 

The post The No-BS Inside Guide to
the Presidential Recount
Sorry, no Russian hacker hunt appeared first on Greg Palast.

Exclusive: Jill Stein just called… Green Party filing for recount in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania

by Greg Palast

Jill Stein just called to say that I am the first one to be informed that the Green Party is formally petitioning for a recount in 3 states, Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania.

Trump’s margin is less than 11,600 in Michigan, 27,200 in Wisconsin and 68,000 in Pennsylvania.

Support the 2016 Stolen Election Investigation

If just a few thousand votes are found in Wisconsin and Michigan, Hillary Clinton becomes president by 276 electoral votes verses 264 for Trump.

Stein told me “We’re filing in Wisconsin Friday because the votes were cast on proven hack-prone machines. This has been a hack-ridden election.” She said that it will be most difficult to recount the machines in Pennsylvania. When asked why the democrats are not bringing this action, Stein told this reporter that “Democrats do not act to protect the vote even when there is dramatic evidence” of tampering.

The Green Party told us that Stein will be represented by experienced voting rights attorney’s John Bonifaz, Boston, MA and Robert Fitrakis, Columbus, OH.

Stein said, “our voting system is on life support.” The presidential candidate also said, “The Green Party will continue to be the go to advocate for voting rights. That includes fighting vote suppression tactics such as the Interstate Crosscheck system.”

Interstate Crosscheck is the program which wrongly purged hundreds of thousand of minority voters in this election, according to the investigation this reporter fro Rolling Stone Magazine.

Stein received 50,700 votes in Michigan, five times Trump’s winning plurality, and 30,980 in Wisconsin, more than Trump’s margin. When asked the "Nader" question, "Isn’t it true that your votes in Wisconsin and Michigan, if they went to Clinton, would have blocked Trump?", Stein answered, "Not at all. Our polls showed that 61% of our voters would have simply sat out the election, and one-third of the remaining voters would have voted Trump." The candidate insisted, "We are the ‘un-spoilers.’"

Stein said she acted when Clinton turned silent because, "Only candidates may formally demand a re-count and we have standing."

* * * * *

Greg Palast (Rolling Stone, Guardian, BBC) is the author of The New York Times bestsellers, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and Billionaires & Ballot Bandits, now out as major motion non-fiction movie.

Donate to the Palast Investigative Fund and get the signed DVD.

Download the FREE Movie Comic Book.

Rent or buy the film from Amazon or Vimeo.

Visit the Palast Investigative Fund store or simply make a tax-deductible contribution to keep our work alive! 

Or support the The Palast Investigative Fund (a project of The Sustainable Markets Foundation) by shopping with Amazon Smile. AmazonSmile will donate 0.5% of your purchases to the Palast Fund and you get a tax-deduction! More info.

GregPalast.com

 

The post Exclusive: Jill Stein just called…
Green Party filing for recount
in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania appeared first on Greg Palast.

Here’s what we do now A personal note by Greg Palast

Being right never felt so horrid.

“This is the story of the theft of the 2016 election.

It’s a crime still in progress.”

So opens my film, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy.

And on Election night I waited for the returns to make a fool of me.

Instead, the returns made the fool a President.

And so, my vacation’s cancelled. My life’s cancelled; that is, a life of anything but sleuthing and exposing the details of the heist of our democracy.

What’s at stake?

No way around it, this is one frightening moment.

Decades of progress created with sweat and determination face destruction.  Within the next six months, we may see the Voting Rights Act repealed—and civil rights set back 50 years; the entirety of our environmental protection laws burnt in a coal pit; police cruelty made our urban policy; the Education Department closed to give billionaires a tax holiday; and a howling anti-Semite as White House Senior Counselor.

But the horror we face is countered by this one hard and hopeful fact:  Donald Trump did NOT win this election.

Trump not only lost the popular vote by millions — he did not legitimately win the swing states of the Electoral College.

Michigan, Florida, North Carolina, Arizona, Ohio:  every one was stolen through sophisticated, and sickeningly racist vote suppression tactics.

If you saw my report for Democracy Now! on election morning, it revealed that Ohio GOP officials turned off anti-hacking software on voting machines, forced Black voters to wait hours in line (while whites had no wait).

And, crucially, I confirmed that purged tens of thousands of minority voters on fake accusations they’d voted twice.  I first exposed this bogus double-voter blacklist called Crosscheck, in Rolling Stone. It’s the sick excrescence crafted by Kris Kobach, the Trump transition team's maven who also created the Muslim-tracker software he’s bringing to the Trump administration.

What can we do now?

I have been INUNDATED with requests for my factual reports and findings by media and, most important, the front-line activist groups preparing for the fierce fight to protect our votes. Some examples:

Rev. William Barber of the NAACP filed a suit based in North Carolina,  hoping to overturn the Trump "victory" — and protect the tiny margin of the Democrat’s win of the Governor’s mansion.  The NAACP cites my discovery of "Crosscheck" — in which North Carolina removed upwards of 190,000 voters on false charges they voted twice.

They now need my facts.

Congressmen Keith Ellison and Alcee Hastings of the Congressional Black Caucus, personally presented Attorney General Loretta Lynch with my investigative reports and demanded investigation — "and indictments."  That investigation must kick off immediately.

They now need my facts.

The Asian-American civil rights group 18 Million Rising has gathered 50,000 signatures to push the Justice Department to investigate my evidence of a massive attack on the Asian-American vote.

They now need my facts.

In Michigan, the ACLU is ready to take action on the purge scheme I uncovered, "Crosscheck," that wrongly gave the state to Trump. In Ohio, voting rights attorney Robert Fitrakis is going into court with evidence, much that I uncovered, of racist voting games — from 5-hour-long lines in Black precincts to shutting off ballot security measures on the voting machines.

The team need my facts.

I expect to be in Washington at the Justice Dept and meeting with civil rights groups in December before the Electoral College meets.

Information—plus film, video, investigative reports

And beyond the voluminous files and confidential documents my team has uncovered that is sought by activists, we are deluged with requests for our film, videos, writings and more.

And now we have US networks, even major comedy shows, asking for our material and, of course, new investigative findings.

Information and facts make a difference

With our investigative reports, with our hard and unassailable evidence, we can challenge the legitimacy of the Trump "election."  Most important, we must begin the difficult but necessary work of protecting and restoring voting rights.  The 2018 Election — and the threat of more stolen elections — is upon us.

What we need to keep going... 

Your extraordinary support and faith in our work funded my film The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, which is now more relevant than ever and being seen by ever more audiences.

Now we need your financial support again to keep this fight going. We just did not budget for the GOP's in-your-face steal of the Congress and White House.  All our resources went into raising the alarm before the election.

So, now, I have to re-hire the staff, hit the road again. Ohio, North Carolina, Washington DC and who knows where, retain attorneys—and retain our team of technicians from cameramen to outreach organizers.

Can this new work be done?

Is there any choice?

Honestly and personally, I was hoping for some rest and time off.

But a lifetime of your work and mine is now in the balance.

● PLEASE, say, "Count me in to count the votes" by supporting the 2016 Stolen Election Investigation for a donation of any size no matter how small or large


● Be listed as a producer ($1,000) or co-producer ($500) in the credits of the broadcast version of my film The Best Democracy Money Can Buy


● Stay informed and get a signed DVD of my film The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, a signed copy of the book with the same title or better still - get the Book & DVD combo.

And does an angel have the $8K needed for our Washington work and filming?  If so, flap your wings.

I can't thank you enough for all the years of support. Alas... our work is not done.

Greg Palast

and the Palast Investigations Team

* * * * *

Greg Palast (Rolling Stone, Guardian, BBC) is the author of The New York Times bestsellers, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and Billionaires & Ballot Bandits, now out as major motion non-fiction movie.

Donate to the Palast Investigative Fund and get the signed DVD.

Download the FREE Movie Comic Book.

Rent or buy the film from Amazon or Vimeo.

Visit the Palast Investigative Fund store or simply make a tax-deductible contribution to keep our work alive! 

Or support the The Palast Investigative Fund (a project of The Sustainable Markets Foundation) by shopping with Amazon Smile. AmazonSmile will donate 0.5% of your purchases to the Palast Fund and you get a tax-deduction! More info.

GregPalast.com

 

The post Here’s what we do now
A personal note by Greg Palast appeared first on Greg Palast.

Ethnic Votes Stolen in Crucial States Help Fix US Election For Trump Reveals Greg Palast

By Ben Gelblum | The London Economic

Throughout the US election campaign one of The Donald’s main refrains was “this election is rigged.”

Turns out this particular Trump election rallying cry wasn’t a lie… Well, not entirely.

Veteran election investigator Greg Palast has uncovered the sickening truth. I spoke to Palast about evidence of widespread systemic election rigging, robbing black, hispanic and asian American voters of their right to vote in crucial states. – Enough votes to swing the election away from the Hillary Clinton victory predicted in polls – explaining suspicious exit polls inconsistencies – and towards a shock result for Trump and Republican victory in the Senate.

“Before a single vote was even cast, the election was already fixed by Trump operatives,” explains Palast.

“This country is violently divided. 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, new strict voter ID laws that saw students and low income voters turned away—the list goes on.”

Palast has spent the past decade and a half investigating and identifying several techniques used to suppress ethnic minority and young votes – the voters that statistically vote Democrat.

And this is surely the biggest and most unreported scandal of the most bizarre election any of us can recall.

According to The Guardian, Palast is the “most important investigative reporter of our time – up there with Woodward and Bernstein.” The fast-talking fedora-topped reporter has investigated election irregularities for publications such as The Guardian, Rolling Stone, and BBC’s Newsnight, ever since the controversial Bush v Gore election in 2000.

The 2000 election was too close to call without Florida, where votes were counted and recounted for weeks before George W Bush won the state by a margin of just 537 votes out of almost 6 million, and as a result the presidency. Palast uncovered the purge of 56,000 black voters in Florida – wrongly deleted from voter rolls as ex-felons.

Now Palast’s investigative team are certain that vote suppression techniques were instrumental in last week’s Republican presidential and Senate victory.

“For years I have been following the American election process which is nothing like in England,” says Palast. “Election manipulation is a very big factor in US elections. I found we had a massive problem in Florida in 2000, similarly in 2004 in Ohio with tens of thousands of invalidated votes. And now we are back at it again.”

So why were Trump and his acolytes constantly drawing attention to vote rigging during the campaign?

Trump was constantly banging on about debunked claims of large scale voter fraud, urging supporters to volunteer to monitor the polls, and creating an atmosphere where hysteria and conspiracy theories abounded.

Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, talked about busloads of people voting numerous times in some big cities. He also quipped that “dead people generally vote for Democrats, rather than Republicans.”

Yet truly, you are more likely to be struck by lightning in the next year (a one in 1,042,000 chance, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) than to find a case of voter fraud by impersonation (31 in over a billion ballots cast from 2000 to 2014, according to Loyola law school’s research).

Trump allies often cited the fact that Mitt Romney failed to win a single vote in 59 out of 1,687 Philadelphia precincts that happened to be almost entirely black. But with their demographic make up it’s no surprise why and investigations by Philadelphia’s Republican Party and the Philadelphia Inquirer found nothing untoward. Nationwide, 93% of black voters voted for Barack Obama that year.

In 2012, an Arizona State University study concluded: “while fraud has occurred, the rate is infinitesimal, and in-person voter impersonation on Election Day, which prompted 37 state legislatures to enact or consider tough voter ID laws, is virtually non-existent.”

Yet despite the lack of evidence or convictions for the crime of multiple voting, certain Republican figures devised draconian systems to prevent it, which have also served to deny electorally significant sections of the population of their right to vote. – Disproportionately ethnic votes, which are way more likely to be Democrats.

And now the election is over, according to Palast, Trump’s increasing hysteria about vote rigging served as the ultimate smokescreen for a systematic denial of hundreds of thousands of crucial votes in the name of preventing fraud.

– A ‘bigly’ enough scam to win Trump the Whitehouse.

Palast started investigating Donald Trump’s increasingly hysterical claims that the election was rigged by people voting many times for Rolling Stone Magazine, and made some shocking discoveries in his report last August: The GOP’s Stealth War Against Voters.

As a response to constant paranoia about voter fraud, 30 mainly Republican states have adopted a system called the Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck Program (Crosscheck), according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

This system was devised in 2005 by Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, better known as the anti-immigration fanatic responsible for Trump’s idea of building a wall on the US / Mexico border and getting Mexico to pay for it. Kobach, like Trump, has given lip service to conspiracy theories, especially ones that bolster fears of the growing influence of racial and ethnic minorities in the U.S. And now, interestingly he has been rewarded by Trump with a job on his Transition Team as adviser on immigration.

Kobach convinced other states, including crucial swing states such as Michigan and North Carolina, to share their voter lists to look for the same name potentially registered to vote in more than one state. Crosscheck supposedly matches first, middle and last name, plus birth date, and provides the last four digits of a Social Security number for additional verification.

Seems like a sensible method to stop people voting more than once in separate states. Only it soon became clear that Crosschecking was neither accurate nor fair and was not being used as it should. Some states including Florida dropped out of the program due to doubts about the reliability of its data — though others joined despite them.

Palast’s team discovered Crosscheck had amassed a list of 7.2 million voters accused of being potential double voters. 

Yet despite such an enormous list of suspects, there has only been four arrests.

“It is a crime to deliberately register to vote twice,” says Palast. “You go to jail for five years. And to organise double voting on a significant scale is practically impossible. They are basically arresting no one – about four arrests out of a list which identified around seven million potential double voters, and I doubt these arrests are even due to the list.”

Palast’s team managed (legally) to get hold of over 2 million names identified as potential double voters and soon began to spot obvious mistakes. The failsafes of National Insurance number and date of birth meant to make the system foolproof were not attached and appeared to have been ignored.

“The most common name in the world is Mohamed Mohamed,” explains Palast, scanning through the list of names, “so for example under this Trump hit list, Mohamed Said Mohamed is supposed to be the same voter as Mohamed Osman Mohamed – in fact about one out of four middle names don’t match and Jr and Sr don’t match – so for example with James Brown a very common black name – they are matching James Brown Sr to James Brown Jr and saying it’s the same voter and then the middle names don’t even match.”

U.S. Census data shows that minorities are overrepresented in 85 of 100 of the most common last names. “If your name is Washington, there’s an 89 percent chance you’re African-American,” says Palast. “If your last name is Hernandez, there’s a 94 percent chance you’re Hispanic.”

This inherent bias results in an astonishing one in six Hispanics, one in seven Asian-Americans and one in nine African-Americans in Crosscheck states landing on what Palast dubs “Trump’s hit list.” 

Potential double registrants were sent a postcard and asked to verify their address by mailing it back. “The junk mail experts we spoke to said this postcard is meant not to be returned. It’s inscrutable small print, doesn’t mean anything. It doesn’t even say you’re accused of voting twice. It just says, please confirm your voting address,” explains Palast, “and most people of colour, poor voters don’t respond to this sort of mailing and they know that.”

According to the Census Bureau, white voters are 21 percent more likely than blacks or Hispanics to respond to official requests; homeowners are 32 percent more likely to respond than renters; and the young are 74 percent less likely than the old to respond. Those on the move – students and the poor, who often shift apartments while hunting for work – might not get the mail in the first place.

So if a few older white people, more likely to vote Republican were caught up in the mainly ethnic hit list, they were more likely to return the card and retain their right to vote. If you do not reply to the missive, state officials have discretion over what to do next, and the process varies from state to state. What Palast’s investigation made clear is ethnic voters were disproportionately likely to be targeted and purged from voter lists.

All this despite other states choosing a more reliable system to prevent double voting: the Electronic Registration Information Center, (ERIC) – adopted by 20 member states plus the District of Columbia, according to its website. A 2013 report found ERIC actually boosted voter registration and turnout and eliminated errors in voter files.

Palast’s investigators calculated 1.1 million people, many spread over crucial swing states were deprived of their right to vote last Tuesday. 

According to the exit polls last Tuesday, 88% of black voters voted for Hillary Clinton, as well as  65% of hispanic and asian American voters.

“The list is loaded overwhelmingly with voters of colour and the poor,” says Palast. “Many didn’t discover that their vote was stolen until they turned up last Tuesday and found their name missing. In the US they are given something called a provisional ballot, but if your name is not on the voter roll, you can fill out all the provisional votes you like they’re not going to count your vote. – They can’t even if you’re wrongly removed.

“Trump’s victory margin in Michigan was 13,107 and the Michigan Crosscheck purge list was 449,922. Trump’s victory margin in Arizona- 85,257, Arizona Crosscheck purge list- 270,824;. Trump’s victory margin in North Carolina was 177,008 and the North Carolina Crosscheck purge list had 589,393 people on it.”

Crosscheck was by no means the only method that came to light to disenfranchise voters more likely to vote Democrat.

Palast also cites statistics on vote spoilage – “In the UK, glitches, spoiled or empty ballots are random,  but here, the US Civil Rights Commission found in Florida you are 900% more likely to lose your vote to spoilage if you are black than if you are white.” Statistician Philip Clinker author of the study, has said that this is typical nationwide, and according to Palast, if anything, the situation has got worse since the 2000 study.

In 2013, the Supreme Court overturned part of the Voting Rights Act enacted in 1965 at the heart of the Civil Right Movement to prohibit racial discrimination in voting. This allowed all kinds of shenanigans in the lead up to last week that previously could have been challenged by the Department of Justice.

In North Carolina, for example, Republicans even bragged: “African American Early Voting is Down.”

– This after a federal court federal court found their voting restrictions “target African-Americans with almost surgical precision.”

States, particularly those controlled by Republicans, made several changes this year, such as stricter voter ID laws and restricting polling booths, to make voting harder in a way that targeted generally Democrat-voting ethnic minority voters. There were reports of ridiculously long queues. As this is not the first election this has happened in, it appears to be a deliberate tactic.

Harvard’s Stephen Pettigrew who studies polling lines found that ethnic minority voters were six times more likely to have to stand in line for over an hour. And losing out on work from disproportionately long queues costs people in ethnic minority areas proportionately more in lost income, which also puts them off voting next time. Pettigrew estimated that 200,000 people did not vote in 2014 because of queues encountered in 2012.

“Election day was marred by long lines due to cuts in early voting and  868 fewer polling places ,” adds Palast, “to say nothing of the untold millions who were unable to vote due to restrictive voter ID and felon disenfranchisement laws.”

During the election last week, Palast also made a shocking discovery about voting machines in Ohio – one of the states in which he found many black voters were disenfranchised by a mixture of the Crosscheck and other systems, and exit polls differed markedly from the counted votes.

“In the state of Ohio they have fancy new machines which can record an image of your vote and an anti-hacking function. They were turned off,” explains Palast. “I went to court with Bob Fitrakis a law professor in Ohio to have this overturned. I went into the judge’s chamber, and there the Republicans did not deny that it was turned off but they said to turn it back on would create havoc. – This after the FBI had issued a warning that they feared the machines would be hacked.

“If you get such a warning, why would you turn off the anti-hacking mechanism? All this means we will never know if the machines were hacked and how many votes were lost if there was a challenge as there was no image of the vote recorded.”

Greg Palast’s documentary and book The Best Democracy Money Can Buy  further details his warnings about voter suppression techniques we haven’t even mentioned in this article.

“I stuck my neck out last year, saying they would steal this election, and I really hoped I would be left looking like an idiot. 

“Turns out I was right though,” he adds. “The problem with the electoral college is a few thousand votes in tiny states can flip an election.”

– An election President Elect Donald J Trump won despite still trailing nationwide in the popular vote. – A problem Donald Trump railed about too in the past, calling it “a disaster for democracy.”

Civil rights organisation NAACP, which nine times managed to see off voter suppression of hundreds of thousands of votes in the federal courts over the past few months, is now mounting a legal battle to reinstate fully the Voter Registration Act.

Palast and his team are certain that the chicanery they and others uncovered more than explains the difference between the outcome polls predicted and the result of the presidential and senate elections – especially when it comes to the exit polls taken as people had just voted.

“Crosscheck does not account for all the shoplifting, but if you put it together with the other nine methods to steal votes that I identified, there’s little question that the exit polls were correct and Hillary Clinton won, or at least more voters voted for her in the swing states. Obviously she won the popular vote, but we have an electoral college system. If they counted all the votes in all the swing states the traditionally highly accurate exit polls would have been accurate,” adds Palast.

Electoral Integrity blogger Theodore de Macedo Soares drew attention to the bizarre discrepancy between computer counted official vote counts and exit polls last week, writing: “According to the exit polls conducted by Edison Research, Clinton won four key battleground states (NC, PA, WI, and FL) in the 2016 Presidential Election that she went on to lose in the computerized vote counts.  With these states Clinton wins the Electoral College with a count of 302 versus 205 for Trump.  Clinton also won the national exit poll by 3.2% and holds a narrow lead in the national vote count still in progress. Exit polls were conducted in 28 states. In 23 states the discrepancies between the exit polls and the vote count favored Trump. In 13 of these states the discrepancies favoring Trump exceeded the margin of error of the state.”

Palast believes such discrepancies, some far greater than any acceptable margin of error are indicative of systematic electoral rigging to steal Democrat votes:

“The bane of pre-election polling is that pollsters must adjust for the likelihood of a person voting.  Exit polls solve the problem. The US State Department uses exit polling to determine whether you accept the outcome of a foreign election. The Brexit exit polls were extremely accurate. Yet in the Ukraine the US does not accept the result of the 2004 election because of the exit poll mismatch with the final official count.

“And here for example in North Carolina we have the exit poll raw data at 2.1% favouring victory by Clinton, yet she loses by 3.8% in the final count. In Pennsylvania 4.4% victory suddenly became a 1.2 % loss; Wisconsin: 3.9% victory becomes a 1% loss; Florida: 1.1% victory becomes a 1% loss.

“In the swing States we have this massive red shift because when people come out of the votes, exit pollsters can only ask, “How did you vote?” What they don’t ask, and can’t, is, “Was your vote counted?””

Kris Kobach did not give us a comment, but a statement from Kris Kobach’s office on the Crosscheck program said the Crosscheck program had been used for over a decade, and insisted “merely appearing as a potential match does not subject a voter to removal from a participating states’ voter registration roll/record.  Ineligible and/or unqualified persons who are registered voters are only removed from a states’ voter registration roll/record if the person is subject to removal pursuant to applicable state and federal elections provisions.”

 

 

 

 

 

The post Ethnic Votes Stolen in Crucial States
Help Fix US Election For Trump
Reveals Greg Palast appeared first on Greg Palast.

The Election was Stolen – Here’s How…

Before a single vote was cast, the election was fixed by GOP and Trump operatives.

Starting 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. Here's a sample of the list

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.

Note: Watch the four-minute video summary of Crosscheck. The investigation and explanation of these methods of fixing the vote can be found in my book and film, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy: a Tale of Billionaires & Ballot Bandits (2016).

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.

*****

Rent it or buy Greg Palast's movie from Amazon or Vimeo.

Greg Palast (Rolling Stone, Guardian, BBC) is the author of The New York Times bestsellers, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and Billionaires & Ballot Bandits, now out as major motion non-fiction movie.

Donate to the Palast Investigative Fund and get the signed DVD.

Download the FREE Movie Comic Book.

Rent or buy the film from Amazon or Vimeo.

Visit the Palast Investigative Fund store or simply make a tax-deductible contribution to keep our work alive! 

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The post The Election was Stolen – Here’s How… appeared first on Greg Palast.

Democracy Now: How they’re stealing Ohio Vote machines audit function disabled—and worse

Greg Palast on the ground in the battleground state of Ohio: where he finds three ways the vote is, indeed, “rigged” – but FOR the GOP.

 

 

Last day, now more relevant than ever, stream Palast’s new movie for free, “The Best Democracy Money Can Buy:  a tale of Billionaires & Ballot Bandits.’  [Otherwise get it from Amazon or Vimeo]

[Election Day, 2016 in Columbus, Ohio] For two decades, computer touch-screen voting machines have been derided as “push and pray” voting. You had to take it on faith that the machine records your vote as you intend. The machines lacked a “paper record” to audit and recount.

So, voting rights attorney Robert Fitrakis was thrilled to learn that many of Ohio’s voting machines would, for this election, have a brand-new anti-hacking capability. The computers could now take a photo of every voter card loaded in, time stamp each marking, and keep the images in an order that allows an audit and recount.

But there’s one thing wrong with the new tamper-proof voting machines. “They’ve decided to TURN OFF the security.”

What? In 2004, Ohio’s “push-and-pray” machines produced suspect tallies that won President George W. Bush’s re-election victory over Sen. John Kerry — although Kerry had a comfortable lead in exit polls. And in this year’s contest, the FBI has raised fears of fiddling these machines by Russian hackers.

Yet, the Republican Secretary of State of Ohio, Jon Husted, is allowing county officials to simply turn off these security functions — with no explanation as to why.

The counties, Fitrakis discovered, “bought state-of-the-art equipment and turned off the security,” both the ballot imaging function and the audit application that can detect and record evidence of machine tampering.

Fitrakis, Green Party candidate for Franklin County Prosecutor, sought a temporary restraining order to require voting officials to simply turn on the ballot integrity functions on the machines. As a reporter for Democracy Now, I was permitted to observe, though not film, the hearing in the judge’s chamber in the Franklin County Court of Common Pleas in Columbus, Ohio’s capital.

Lawyers for the Republican Secretary of State as well as county officials from around the state gave no reason for turning off the ballot protection functions on the machines. Instead, they pleaded that turning them on “would cause havoc.”

Fitrakis, armed with a copy of the machine’s instructions noted that the “havoc” was no more than clicking on a drop-down computer menu and choosing “record” images instead of “do not record.” The menu has a similar yes/no option for the audit application.

Nevertheless, Judge David Cain, a Republican, ruled that Fitrakis’ demand was “borderline frivolous.” Counsel for the state’s GOP Attorney General argued, successfully, that Fitrakis would have to return after the election and prove the election was stolen. Of course, he’d have no audit trail nor ballot images with which to make the case.

Fitrakis told me, “It’s Catch-22. It’s Ohio.”

And the stakes are high. This is the ultimate swing state that could decide not only the Presidency but the balance in the US Senate.

Long Lines for Black Votes; Zero Lines for whites

On Sunday, I joined the members of the Freedom Faith Missionary Baptist Church of Dayton for early voting. All over Ohio, churches bus the faithful to the polls for early voting. Nearly 70% of Ohio’s African-Americans vote on “Souls-to-the-Polls” Sunday as many do not have the transport nor the day off to vote on Tuesday.

They arrived at the one and only early polling station and waited. And waited. And waited. And waited. The lines for several thousand voters at the one poll snaked up and down three floors of the county building and spiraled through the multi-story garage. At the end of the line they were given numbers to wait in an auditorium to be called to vote.

Yet, today, on Election Day Tuesday, when the majority of white Ohioans vote, there will be 176 polling stations in Montgomery County (Dayton) alone. For many whites the lines are not short — they are non-existent, with more poll workers than voters.

The system was created by that same GOP official, Jon Husted, who had permitted counties to turn off ballot protection applications on the voting machines. Husted had wanted to eliminate Sunday voting completely.

But Husted ran into resistance. I located Dennis Lieberman, until recently, a Dayton County elections board member. Lieberman told me, “We had voted, both Republicans and Democrats, for long [voting] hours on weekends so that people, like this” — he gestured to the church groups — could come and vote.”

But Secretary Husted was none too pleased.

“After we did that [voted for Saturday and Sunday voting], we were told by the Secretary of State that if we didn’t change our vote, that he would fire us.”

Lieberman and the others refused to give in.  And, as a result, said the voting official, “I got fired.”

Secretary Husted has refused several requests for an interview.

The Purge begins of half a million suspected “duplicate” voters

Donald Trump claims that, the election is “rigged”— specifically because, “You have people… voting many, many times.”

Trump’s accusations simply repeat the claim of more than two dozen Republican state voting chiefs, who have created a secret list of those suspected of voting twice or registering twice with the intent of voting a second time. Altogether, there are an astonishing 7.2 million names on the GOP blacklist, labeled “Crosscheck” by Republican operatives.

Ohio’s Secretary of State has a whopping 497,000 suspects on his list in that one state — and he is systematically removing them. Of these, approximately 60,000 Ohioans will find their names simply removed from the swing state’s voter rolls — and they will have no idea of the accusation against them.

Crucially, the list is racially loaded — tagging an astounding one in six voters of color in the GOP states using Crosscheck.

Voting twice is a felony crime — and, despite the humongous list, only one Ohioan has been convicted. Yet thousands are losing their vote.

Although it is “confidential,” our team obtained over 100,000 of Ohio’s blacklisted voters facing disenfranchisement. We spoke to several — and one, Donald Webster, agreed to speak to us on camera.

Donald Alexander Webster Jr. of Dayton, Ohio, is accused of having registered a second time in Virginia as Donald Eugene Webster Sr.

He claims that he never used the name “Eugene” — and he can’t imagine why someone would vote a second time when, to fix an election, he would have had to conspire with thousands of others.

So I asked, “Well, do you?  Are you part of a large conspiracy?”

“No, no.  No I am not, sir.”

Yet he and the other Donald Webster are at risk of losing their vote — and will not know why.

Rights attorney Fitrakis said of Husted’s “Crosscheck” game, “He knows what he’s doing is illegal. What he’s doing is counting on bigotry to get away with it. He’s picking first and last names only because he doesn’t want to actually [catch double voters]. He wants to purge Blacks and Hispanics. And he’s trying to make Ohio winnable in the only way he knows how: by stealing American citizens’ votes.”

*****

Watch the tale of the hunt for the Crosscheck lists – and the billionaires behind Donald Trump and the GOP vote suppression game – and to meet Donald Alexander Webster, download a copy of Greg Palast’s new film, “The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, A Tale of Billionaires and Ballot Bandits.” Watch free of charge for the next 24 hours – after that, rent it or buy it from Amazon or Vimeo.

*****

Greg Palast (Rolling Stone, Guardian, BBC) is the author of The New York Times bestsellers, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and Billionaires & Ballot Bandits, now out as major motion non-fiction movie.

Donate to the Palast Investigative Fund and get the signed DVD.

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Visit the Palast Investigative Fund store or simply make a tax-deductible contribution to keep our work alive! Or support the The Palast Investigative Fund (a project of The Sustainable Markets Foundation) by shopping with Amazon Smile. AmazonSmile will donate 0.5% of your purchases to the Palast Fund and you get a tax-deduction! More info.

The post Democracy Now:
How they’re stealing Ohio
Vote machines audit function disabled—and worse appeared first on Greg Palast.

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Greg Palast.

‘Colonel’ behind the “caging” attack on Black voters in N Carolina exposed RFK Jr.:“A felony crime.” The bigger purge by same group could flip the US Senate.

by Greg Palast

Investigative reporter Palast wrote Rolling Stone’s recent exposé,

“The GOP's Stealth War Against Voters.”

While the rest of the press is shocked that white North Carolina vigilantes are using racially-poisonous trickery to knock more than 6,700 Black citizens off the voter rolls, we already have the ringleader of the scheme on camera boasting of his election-snatching tactics.

The NAACP has identified the Voter Integrity Project of Raleigh, North Carolina, as the organization directing the mass mailings to voters in minority communities.  When the letters marked “Do Not Forward” were returned to vigilante citizens guided by VIP, the group’s frontmen then challenged the Black citizens' right to vote.   Republican officials then quickly removed these voters from the rolls despite the lack of any evidence that any are fraudulent voters.

“Colonel” DeLancy’s caging operation

VIP is headed by "Colonel" Jay DeLancy. DeLancy admitted to this reporter, on camera, that he’s previously used the mailing trap, called “caging,” in attempts to remove the rights of voters he considers “aliens” or “dead” or otherwise illegally registered.

Get the full story on Jay DeLancy, interstate Crosscheck and the billionaires behind them, …. in The Best Democracy Money Can Buy: A Tale of Billionaires & Ballot Bandits, now a major motion picture by Greg Palast.

Rent it (now available for international streaming), buy it or donate for a signed copy of the DVD. Or support The Palast Investigative Fund with a donation of any size.

While DeLancy has not found a single illegal voter, not one zombie from Mexico, he did create enough media hysteria about chimerical “fraudulent” voters to successfully push North Carolina to adopt draconian voting laws.

RFK Jr:  Caging is a felony

DeLancy told me of his efforts to eliminate voters' rights, despite lacking convincing evidence of fraud, had caused a storm of protest regarding its racial effect.  DeLancy grinned from ear to ear when he said, "And you would think that Jim Crow rose from the dead," then chuckled.

Indeed, that was the conclusion of a federal court that in July struck down some of these VIP-promoted laws which, the court concluded, “target African-Americans with almost surgical precision.”

Law professor and voting rights attorney Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who joined me in the investigation for Rolling Stone and BBC Television Newsnight, has said that this kind of mailing is known as “caging” to experts. If it targets voters of color, “caging is a felony crime punishable by high fines and even prison time under several laws including the Voting Rights Act of 1965.”

The biggest purge yet: “Interstate Crosscheck”

DeLancy, often seen on Fox TV declaring that thousands vote fraudulently in his state, was the chief lobbyist who pushed for the state to adopt a vote purging scheme which has targeted more than 35,750 voters that DeLancy and GOP state officials accused of the felony crime of voting twice.

Rolling Stone’s extensive investigation of this DeLancy/GOP purge program, called, “Interstate Crosscheck,” revealed that, in fact, Carolina did not convict a single voter of committing the crime of voting twice—yet has removed tens of thousands of voters through the program.

Rolling Stone’s experts calculated that one in seven minority voters in the state were targeted by the Crosscheck program promoted by DeLancy.  North Carolina Board of Elections chief Kim Strach testified to her legislature that 35,750 voters are “registered in North Carolina and another state and voted in both in the 2012 general election,” a fact promoted by DeLancy but quickly debunked by law enforcement.

The Crosscheck purge of up to one million voters in several swing states could, "flip the outcome of the US Senate races" in North Carolina, Ohio, Arizona and other states according to Voting Rights attorney Robert Fitrakis of Columbus, Ohio.  Fitrakis has represented both the the Republican and Democratic parties in litigation.

The mass purge by Crosscheck was unknown and therefore unchallenged by the NAACP in the lawsuit which successfully challenged other so-called voter-fraud-prevention procedures.

I urgently need your HELP to go to North Carolina, Ohio and to edit a broadcast version of "The Best Democracy Money Can Buy". With a larger audience seeing the film, more people will be able to combat these pernicious voter disenfranchisement programs such as Interstate Crosscheck. This fight continues past the election.

Ion Sancho, respected voting expert with the non-partisan Verified Voting Foundation states that the “Colonel’s” Voter Integrity Project, “is a North Carolina offshoot of True the Vote, a national movement that purports to combat election fraud by challenging voter registration of those they believe should not be on the voter rolls” – though they found no evidence to convict the voters whom they victimize.

True the Vote, in turn, is affiliated with the Heritage Foundation’s Hans von Spakovsky who is funded by the right wing think tank backed by conservative billionaires included the Mellon and Koch families.

* * * * * *

Greg Palast (Rolling Stone, Guardian, BBC) is the author of The New York Times bestsellers, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and Billionaires & Ballot Bandits, now out as major motion non-fiction movie.

Donate to the Palast Investigative Fund and get the signed DVD.

Download the FREE Movie Comic Book.

Rent or buy the film from Amazon or Vimeo.

Check for Movie Screenings in your area.

Visit the Palast Investigative Fund store or simply make a tax-deductible contribution to keep our work alive!

Or support the The Palast Investigative Fund (a project of The Sustainable Markets Foundation) by shopping with Amazon Smile.

AmazonSmile will donate 0.5% of your purchases to the Palast Fund and you get a tax-deduction! More info.

GregPalast.com

The post ‘Colonel’ behind the “caging” attack
on Black voters in N Carolina exposed
RFK Jr.:“A felony crime.”
The bigger purge by same group
could flip the US Senate. appeared first on Greg Palast.

Watch The Best Democracy… Movie Right now for only $2.99

Right now, this minute, you can watch The Best Democracy Money Can Buy on Amazon from $2.99, or if you prefer get a lifetime stream from Vimeo.

See the Film that Jesse Jackson is bringing to 200 churches before election day.

“A must-see in America”
- The Popcorn Reel

Follow me as I bust the New Klux Klan – the billionaire bandits that are behind a scheme to purge one million voters of color on election day.

Boo!!! The Hysteria Factory is in full effect peddling stories about dead voters, ghost voters, double voters and other absurd claims of fraudulent voting and the media eats it up.

Watch the Hysteria Factory Clip from the Movie

With the help of Willie Nelson, Rosario Dawson, and detectives Ice-T and Richard Belzer, I track down the secret billionaires behind Donald Trump and the guys who are gaming our voter rolls and funding this voter fraud Hysteria Factory.

Don't want to watch the movie on your own?

Want to throw a house party? Show the movie in your neighborhood? Are you part of a grassroots group, activist group or non-profit organization? Take advantage of our Grassroots Special which gets you 5 DVDs that include a free screening license for only $50. You can't beat that!

This week, you can also catch the movie in DC (until Thursday), Denver (tonight), Chicago on Tuesday for no admission at Jesse Jackson's Rainbow PUSH HQ, Houston (Thursday) and New Jersey (Friday).

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Greg Palast (Rolling Stone, Guardian, BBC) is the author of The New York Times bestsellers, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and Billionaires & Ballot Bandits, now out as major motion non-fiction movie.

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