“Hell, you can’t get people to vote once, let alone twice.”
– Santiago Juarez, League of United Latin American Citizens
“Your chance of having your vote spoiled is 900% higher if you’re Black than if you’re white.”
– US Civil Rights Commission
We were warned about an imminent threat on Pearl Harbor before the attack. We were certainly warned about an imminent bin Laden-led attack before 9/11. Sadly, we were clearly alerted to the likelihood of a pandemic costing millions of lives, years before Covid-19. We’ve been told to expect a Pearl Harbor attack on the Internet, the global communication system gifted to the world by the Department of Defense. No conspiracy, no paranoia. Just the facts, ma’am, as Joe Friday used to say on Dragnet.
But nothing’s been more pearlharbored, especially since 9/11, than the electoral system that is the foundation of our once-exceptional democracy. Time after time, it’s been shown that voters are being disenfranchised on a massive scale; old machines continue to break down; newer machines, incomprehensibly, remain open to easy hacking. In 2000, 2004, 2008, 2012, 2016 and 2018, our state and national elections have been rigged, according Greg Palast, in his new book, How Trump Stole 2020: The Hunt for America’s Vanished Voters. And Palast shows us the Who, What, Where and Why. Just the facts, ma’am. Then, Palast points to how, despite the disastrous disarray of his presidency, Trump will steal it again, if we let them. Basta! to that, warcries Palast.
Let’s look together: We continue to be plagued by racially-motivated violence; mass shootings in a land where there’s more guns (est. 400 million) than people; a homeless epidemic; dwindling healthcare, when the trend needs to be the opposite; public education that’s totally lost its way as a provider of critical thinking skills for the masses and preparation for autonomous university study; middle class people sliding into food stamp territory; valued jobs on the decline in a gig economy, in which many people need two jobs to survive; mortgages, rents gone unpaid; trillion dollar student debt, enforced by master credit reports that promise ruin; and a two-party political system, now generally acknowledged to be a choice between the lesser of two evils, and has us looking in at them on the boob tube, like at the end of Animal Farm, wondering which is which. Never mind Covid-19 and climate change to follow.
These are some critical issues. And the only way they can be tackled is by electing genuinely gifted leaders with that vision thang, who can work with other such leaders, to pass the legislation required to tackle these issues. It is literally a matter of life-and-death for the Republic, and maybe even the planet. Look at the above paragraph again — that’s what people from overseas see now, where once they sought the Way Forward from our so-called, and perhaps once-upon-time legitimate, exceptional democracy. Without a functioning system in place to elect such leaders, we are doomed.
And Palast makes it clear that the 2020 presidential election is make or break, and while it’s tough enough imagining Joe “Ain’t Black” Biden as president, it’s impossible to see anything standing with four more years of Trump. Let’s not forget that from December 18, 2019 to February 5, 2020, the period when Covid-19 was just making its way around the world (21 nations infected by January 30,), but not yet in America, we were totally absorbed by the inane impeachment hearings to the point that by the end everyone just wanted to chill out watching the $500 million Super Bowl in Miami, where Covid-19 may have been as free-flowing as the beer in the rah-rah ejectility in the stands and acting as a staging point for its spread, as people returned home all over the country.
Over and over, year after year, Palast returns us to the scene of the electoral crimes. The mother of all of them was Florida 2000. Everything about the Florida election stank. Given that the state was governed by the Republican 
nominee’s brother, who had just prior to the election publicly “guaranteed” GWB’s victory, a recount should have been automatic, no Supreme Court needed. Then Secretary of State Katherine Harris “flushed 97,000 voters from registration rolls—most of them Black—tagging them as felons, ex-cons, who can’t vote. In fact, the number of illegal ex-con voters? Zero,” writes Palast. (Not quite true, Greg: CREEP felon Charles Colson was allowed to vote.) Add lynching chads, voter ID laws, “disqualified” votes, uncounted provisionals, and lost mail-ins. What a mess. Then toss in Nader, and Gore’s inability to win Tennessee, his home state. Yuck. What did we step in?
Then we got totally disoriented by 9/11. By the time 2004 rolled around, we were deked and contused, and nobody seemed to care when Palast pointed out that John Kerry had had the presidency stolen from him. Palast writes:
…John Kerry lost the presidency by a few votes in Ohio. Kerry would have been president except that Black voters, some waiting 7 or 8 hours in the rain, found polling station doors closed in their faces at the 7:30 p.m. cut-off.
But with his trademark humor, Palast also points out that in Ohio 2004, exit polls showed that
John Kerry had won Ohio’s female voters 53% to 47%. Among male voters, Kerry won Ohio by 51% to 49%. But CNN’s exit polls of all voters showed Bush the winner in Ohio, and thereby the re-elected President. OK, class, what third sex put Bush over the top?
But that’s not all, in New Mexico, native American votes were ignored. “More ballots are spoiled or disqualified in pueblos and reservations than in any other community” writes Palast.
In 2012, Fox analyst at the time Karl Rove, George W. Bush’s “brain” and tenderly referred to by the president as “Turd Blossom,” unwilling to accept Fox’s calling of the Ohio election for President Obama, and thus being re-elected, made a phone call, in a last-ditch effort to “disqualify” enough votes to reverse the count.
Rove knew, says Palast, that “early voters were not allowed to vote on regular ballots or on voting machines. Instead, they were handed an absentee mail-in ballot [application],” while they were at the polling station (!), and then handed a number and told to wait, like at a deli counter in supermarket, then took the application for an absentee ballot, filled it in, and posted it in a box, right there, at the polling station. Palast was curious:
I asked the County Clerk why voters were going through this mad rigmarole to get “absentee” ballots when they weren’t absent.
He said, “Because absentee ballots can be disqualified.”
What?
And so it goes, as Linda Ellerbee used to say. Only a Palast-inspired court order averted Rove’s subterfuge. Basta!
Well, in 2016, we know what happened: The Russians stole the election for Donald J. Trump. Whoa, Nellie! “Kris Kobach was more responsible than any other person in America for putting Donald Trump into the White House,” writes Palast. The Secretary of State for Kansas Kris Kolbach (KKK?) declared that the electoral system was being over-run by doppelgängers intent on destroying America from within — by voting twice! (see opening quote) Employing a system called Interstate Crosscheck, which was adopted by 27 states, including the so-called swing states, which resulted in the purging of scores of registered voters.
Greg Palast is flabbergasted and angry. He writes of Kris Kobach that
By the time I shook his hand in 2016, one of his schemes—Crosscheck (we’ll get to that)—had already purged 1.1 million from the rolls, too many of them Black, Hispanic and Asian-American, quite silently, in Michigan, Ohio, North Carolina and 26 other states, a stealth purge crucial to Trump’s victory.
Kobach is still at it with his purge lists and hoping to work with Trump in 2020. Ominously, Palast adds, “ In 2020, Kobach may choose our president for us again.”
But Kobach isn’t the only problem; swing state Wisconsin has had some serious voter issues, too. “In 2016, Trump officially won Wisconsin by a dinky 22,748 votes out of 3 million cast,” writes Palast. Had then-Governor Scott Walker not purged 182,000 student votes from the 2016 election, most of them overwhelmingly Democratic-leaning, then Trump would not be president. Walker has been ousted from office, but racist the Wisconsin Legislature has more than picked up the slack. At the end of 2019, they ended “Soul-To-the-Polls Day when most African-Americans vote.” No more early voting.
Palast said that he knew there was trouble in Milwaukee when he met with Sequanna Taylor, who told him she’d been purged from the voter registration rolls. This despite the inconvenient fact that she was Milwaukee’s County Supervisor. Palast adds, “Her name is on the ballot. Only a tip-off from a Milwaukee Sentinel reporter allowed her to save her right to vote for herself.” In all, the Legislature, so far, has managed to purge “232,597 voters from the rolls in 2020, ten times Trump’s 2016 margin.” Palast contacted Wisconsin’s Elections Commissioner Ann Jacobs who explained to him that the reason for the purges was simple:
This massive purge is clearly an attempt to gain an advantage in Wisconsin for the Republicans, particularly for the presidential race that’s coming up.
Apparently, swinging Wisconsin likes the swagger that comes with being the Big Cheese.
Palast puts special emphasis on what happened in Georgia in 2018. As corrupt as the system seems to many, even on the surface, what Brian Kemp did in Georgia breaks new ground. Serving as secretary of state, while running for governor, was entirely unethical and, given what he ended up doing, probably grounds for felony prosecution. As secretary, Kemp got to decide which votes counted, and which didn’t. When Stacey Abrams lost the gubernatorial race to Kemp, she refused to go the route of Al Gore and Hillary Clinton and merely accept the outcome. She started a non-partisan group called Fair Fight, who hired Palast’s investigative team to dig into “the math” of the purges.
They found that Kemp, employing the tactic of declaring people who had “moved” as scrubbable from the rolls, had led to thousands of suddenly disenfranchised people:
Of the half million voters Kemp purged for supposedly moving their residence, 340,134 had never moved an inch. But now, the Lenser team found nearly 100,000 more who had moved within their county—and therefore, they too should never have been purged. The total of wrongfully scrubbed voters was now over 400,000.
Palast is quick, however, to point out that Kemp borrowed this criminal idea (it’s literally a violation of the National Voting Registration Act of 1993) from Republican Secretary of State, Jon Husted of Ohio. And so successful has it been that this formula has been adopted by a cabal of Republican secretaries of states. In this way, writes Palast, “millions [have been] blocked from voting . . . and they don’t know it.”
But we needn’t delude ourselves into thinking it’s all about Republicans and their evil will-to-power shenanigans; Democrats can do the ‘ol you-call-that-a-noif routine just as well. California Secretary of State Alex Padilla, a campaign backer of both Clinton and Joe Biden, went to extraordinary lengths to fuck the 5.3 million young voters (mostly Latino) who chose to vote as independents (NPP) rather join the Democratic party. Why? They didn’t like the “lesser evil” offered up, and, in this instance, writes Palast, they overwhelmingly preferred “Tio Bernie” to Biden this year, “Tio Bernie” to Clinton in 2016.
Using the “disenfranchisement by postcard” method, just before Christmas last year, Padilla sent out cards to NPP voters. The cards were designed to look like “junk mail” and, writes Palast, “91% of voters threw them out.” Those who ‘got it’ had to go to a polling station and literally ask for a “Democratic Crossover” ballot. If they didn’t use that specific language. Poll workers were instructed not to help them. Other poll workers, writes Palast, were themselves confused by the process:
Many confused poll workers gave the NPP voters Democratic ballots, not ones marked “CROSSOVER,” not realizing that, in most counties, those ballots would be tossed out, disqualified.
Other ‘anomalies’ led to Sanders’ primary campaign being sabotaged by Party insiders determined to make sure Biden received California’s huge pot of electoral delegates.
And there are many other players that Palast names and excoriates. There’s Ohio secretary of state Jon Husted’s reduction of polling stations in Black precincts that led to looooooooooooong lines. There’s Hans “The Fox” von Spakovsky Prove- you-are-a-citizen game (BTW, Why is there a space between Lyons and Spikovsky? See film: Fallen). Kim Strach, North Carolina’s elections board director, favored “Ballot Harvesting”to cull undesired votes. GOP secretary of state Ruth Johnson blocked a hand count of 75000 votes that hadn’t been processed by broken scanning machines — which would have given Michigan to Clinton. Paul “The Vulture” Singer gutted the Voting Rights Act by lobbying with funds earmarked for cholera relief in Africa.
In a trustworthy political world, efficient, well-oiled machines could take the sinful, human factor out of the process that is, after all, the glue of a functioning democracy. But even here, we find failure. We keep using old voting machines (in minority areas) that we know will break down. But even newer machines are suspect. Palast didn’t cover it specifically, but “Voter Village” a September 2018 DefCon voter hacking event (it’s annual), ironically supported by Alex Padilla, found four key vulnerabilities: Supply Chain Insecurity (machine parts manufactured overseas could come pre-hacked; through compromised chips whole classes of machines could be hacked across the U.S., remotely, all at once ), Remote Attacks Proven, Hacking Faster Than Voting (in under 2 minutes), Hacks Don’t Get Fixed. Startling stuff, well worth reviewing.
In addition to all the wise and witty writing in How Trump Stole 2020, Palast pads the otherwise short book with three insertions: An Emergency Alert section (“Coronavirus Causes Outbreak of Mail-in Madness”) which warns readers that, in 2016, “512,696 mail-in ballots—over half a million—were simply rejected, not counted. That’s official, from the EAC.”; the second extra insert is an extended interview with Stacey Abrams regarding the 2018 Georgia debacle; and, my favorite, a 48-page Ted Rall comic book version of Palast’s detailed assertions, which is funny and spot-on — a great add-on to the book.
Palast is a hip guy, and he’s not afraid to let the reader know just how hip he is. He’s got a rip-snorting (at times) sense of humor, without allowing it to degrade his argument or observations. He is a former professor of statistics, which lends authority to his reads of numbers. He’s a former gumshoe. And he’s an award-winning journalist. Palast writes that Republicans have done everything they can since Eisenhower (remember that hilarious MIC warning he gave to the public in his last speech as president) to get in power and stay there — including stealing elections — because they see themselves as champions of the MIC and proud defenders of America’s manifest destiny. While Palast definitely blames Republicans for the current state of electoral disrepair, he boldly notes where Democrats, too, have let American democracy down.
As Palast sees it, the answer is Power; simple as that. The more power you have, the more you crave it, like greed; and as Nobel peace prize winner Henry Kissinger once said, power is “the ultimate aphrodisiac.” So, we don’t fix the dysfunctional system, and may even make it worse, because it suits the corruption it takes to keep hold of power. We’ve all watched enough West Wing and Veep and House of Cards to get a reinforced sense of how it is. Just Is, rather than justice.
And speaking of Henry Kissinger, it’s also worth remembering his infamous statement at a 1970 meeting of national security wonks, which became known as the Kissinger Doctrine:
I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its people. The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves.
Do note that that second sentence is often left out when quoted by the MSM. You could be forgiven if you believed the ghost of Duane Clarridge has come home to roost.
In the end, Greg Palast makes it absolutely clear that Americans don’t need Russians to meddle with their elections and fuck up their democracy. They’re doing a swell job already. He says,
Did the Russians attempt to interfere? Yes, but about as effectively as a mosquito interfering with a Steph Curry three-pointer. A Russian oligarch spent a ginormous $150,000 on Facebook ads, about 1/10,000th of the $1.2 billion spent on pro-Clinton ads.
The Russians did it? Nyet.
The remedy to all of this, writes Palast, is to go after these lawless pols, by shaming them in the press, and show that their treasonous behavior is done without people knowing (it would be a revelation for citizens to understand that the vote they thought they cast was thrown away, behind their backs, by the orders of these slimesters). Don’t give up and stay home. Go out and vote — only once, of course.
Oh, and, Basta!