Palast shows conclusive evidence that people who had been wrongfully purged from voter rolls were at least 400% more likely to be black or minorities. See also, Vigilantes Inc.
In some red states, for example, Georgia, they have laws on the books allowing any citizen to challenge the right to vote of any other citizen they don't like and have them removed from the voter polls with very little or no evidence, especially if the challenged person was black or some other minority not likely to vote Republican.
See also: Trump Lost. Vote Suppression Won.
Here are the numbers...
by Greg Palast for the Hartmann ReportJanuary 24, 2025
Trump lost. That is, if all legal voters were allowed to vote, if all legal ballots were counted, Trump would have lost the states of Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Georgia. Vice-President Kamala Harris would have won the Presidency with 286 electoral votes.
Unlike with Trump's claims, we have actual, solid evidence that Republicans have been diligently working to rig elections in their favor by massive, unlawful voter suppression.And, if not for the mass purge of voters of color, if not for the mass disqualification of provisional and mail-in ballots, if not for the new mass “vigilante” challenges in swing states, Harris would have gained at least another 3,565,000 votes, topping Trump’s official popular vote tally by 1.2 million.
This cannot be casually dismissed! How many votes were lost or not cast because of the fear of bomb threats? If I remember correctly, most, if not all, of the polling stations threatened by bomb threats were in Democrat dominant precincts.But if you’re expecting a sexy story about Elon Musk messing with vote-counting software from outer space, sorry, you won’t get that here.
As in Bush v. Gore in 2000, and in too many other miscarriages of Democracy, this election was determined by good old “vote suppression,” the polite term we use for shafting people of color out of their ballot. We used to call it Jim Crow.
Here are key numbers:
4,776,706 voters were wrongly purged from voter rolls according to US Elections Assistance Commission data.
By August of 2024, for the first time since 1946, self-proclaimed “vigilante” voter-fraud hunters challenged the rights of 317,886 voters. The NAACP of Georgia estimates that by Election Day, the challenges exceeded 200,000 in Georgia alone.
No less than 2,121,000 mail-in ballots were disqualified for minor clerical errors (e.g. postage due).
At least 585,000 ballots cast in-precinct were also disqualified.
1,216,000 “provisional” ballots were rejected, not counted.
3.24 million new registrations were rejected or not entered on the rolls in time to vote.
If the purges, challenges and ballot rejections were random, it wouldn’t matter. It’s anything but random. For example, an audit by the State of Washington found that a Black voter was 400% more likely than a white voter to have their mail-in ballot rejected. Rejection of Black in-person votes, according to a US Civil Rights Commission study in Florida, ran 14.3% or one in seven ballots cast.
There are also the uncountable effects of the explosive growth of voter intimidation tactics including the bomb threats that closed 31 polling stations in Atlanta on Election Day.
