Half a million Georgia voters were purged with no notice — and their provisional ballots likely won’t be counted. Brian Kemp, who until this week was Georgia’s secretary of state, is stealing the gubernatorial election from Stacey Abrams. It begins with ...more
[Atlanta] “I was blocked from voting for Stacey Abrams.” Yasmin Bakhtiari is upset, horrified and determined. Her family had fled Iran for American democracy. But New York born Yasmin found democracy disappeared now that she’s located down in Brian Kemp’s Dixie.
Kemp, until Thursday, was Georgia’s Secretary of State in charge of voting – and in charge of “maintaining” the voter rolls to make them more accurate. But he used that power to ...more
There are elements of about the current Georgia governor's race that may fundamentally ...more
It’s not close, the Democrats won, if you counted all the votes...
Thom Hartmann and Palast discuss Ohio 12th District Race and Kansas GOP Gubernatorial Primary between Colyer and Kobach ...more
GOP Congressional candidate Karen Handel will do anything to duck questions about her role in purging Black and Asian voters in the Georgia run-off race against Jon Ossoff. Stay tuned for the full story of the Stealing of the Sixth CD — reports this week by Greg Palast for Thom Hartmann and Democracy Now!
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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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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: 449,922Trump victory margin in Arizona: 85,257
Arizona Crosscheck purge list: 270,824Trump 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 …more
by Greg Palast
Investigative reporter Palast wrote Rolling Stone’s recent exposé,
“The GOP’s Stealth War Against Voters.”
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 …more
by Greg Palast with Dennis J Bernstein
If you believe the Republican hysteria machine, there’s an unprecedented election crime wave sweeping America involving a staggering 7.2 million suspected double voters. Thousands of these supposed criminals — who, if found guilty, have committed a felony punishable by 5-years in the slammer — have already lost their right to vote, with 41,000 people in Virginia alone being struck off voter roles. Statistical analysis of the evidence uncovered by investigative reporter Greg Palast shows that one million Americans may lose their vote by November. It also shows that a high proportion of these black, white, and brown voters have one thing in common: they tend to vote blue. In this week’s Best Democracy Money Can Buy: Election Crimes Bulletin, Palast gives Flashpoints’ Dennis J. Bernstein the skinny on this election crime wave, which in reality is little more than a GOP-generated racist sham designed to filter the blue out of the votes at the polls.
Dennis J. Bernstein: Greg Palast has got an article that just went up on Rolling Stone. Will an anti-voter fraud program designed by one of Trump’s advisors deny tens of thousands their right to vote in November?
Greg Palast: This week Rolling Stone has a tremendous investigative report, “The GOP’s Secret War Against Voters.” I know about it because I wrote it. This is an investigation I’ve now been on — I say one year in the article, but it’s really been two and a half years — uncovering a system by which the GOP has already removed tens of thousands, probably hundreds of thousands of voters from the voter rolls — and it’s probably going to hit a million by November.
DB: The 21st century version of Jim Crow, the electronic Jim Crow. Talk a little bit about it…
Palast: Here’s the deal: 29 Republican Secretaries of State have given their voter rolls over to …more
Donald Trump is right—the election IS rigged. And it’s his buddies who are rigging it. Rolling Stone has unearthed a confidential list of MILLIONS of voters who are marked to be purged, up to a million at risk by November. Who? Mostly, voters of color, i.e. Democrats.
On Friday, Rolling Stone will release on newsstands, “The GOP’s Secret War on Voters,” a year’s-long investigation by Greg Palast and a team of experts exposing a scheme by 29 Republican state voting officials to remove voters, a program directed by ultra-right Trump operative Kris Kobach Secretary of State of Kansas.
Taking off from Trump’s unsubstantiated claim that “people are voting many, many times,” GOP officials are targeting voters who are allegedly voting or registered in two states and can therefore vote a second time in November. While voting twice is a felony crime, and less than 6 voters have been convicted of this crime, the GOP purge operation is removing tens of thousands of innocent voters as you read this.
Palast obtained the lists—kept …more
HuffPo reports that former Republican Presidential nominee Mitt Romney will endorse Senator Marco Rubio. Why? The answer is: the financier known as The Vulture, Paul Singer—donor Number One to the GOP—and top sugar daddy to the Rubio campaign.
Back in 2012, we broke The Nation cover story exposing how Singer, Mitt Romney’s finance chair, secretly stuffed the “blind trust” of Ann Romney with up to $115 million. For $115 million, a politician will wash your car — with his tongue. So, of course, Mrs. Romney’s husband will endorse the Vulture’s choice. Blind trust=blind endorsement.
Download Vultures and Vote Rustlers, the film of Romney’s folly and other Palast team investigations, our best for BBC and Democracy Now! (Or get a signed copy of the DVD!)
More to come on Singer candidate shopping spree in our upcoming movie: The Best Democracy Money Can Buy.
You can read more about the Vultures here:
BBC America: Palast Hunts the Vultures
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In 2016 Greg Palast will be releasing his new feature film The Best Democracy Money Can Buy—A Tale of Billionaires and Ballot Bandits, which includes his award-winning investigation Jim Crow Returns.
Greg Palast is the author of several New York Times bestsellers including The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and Billionaires & Ballot Bandits, Armed Madhouse and the highly acclaimed Vultures’ Picnic.
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Sam Wyly is one of the planet’s “Ten Greenest Billionaires,” according to Forbes. And, the magazine should have added, the one that deserves the most prison time.
Yesterday, the Securities and Exchange Commission charged billionaire Sam and his billionaire brother Charles with a stock market fraud which sucked over a half billion dollars out of their victims’ pockets. That’s nothing. The SEC has only uncovered the rattling tale of the Wyly snake.
This billionaire boys club is best known for backing the smear campaign against John McCain credited with giving George W. Bush the GOP nomination for President in 2000. In 2004 they backed the Swift Boat smear on John Kerry.
Updated from the original report for AlterNet
In today’s Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the Court ruled that corporations should be treated the same as “natural persons”, i.e. humans. Well, in that case, expect the Supreme Court to next rule that Wal-Mart can run for President.
The ruling, which junks federal laws that now bar corporations from stuffing campaign coffers, will not, as progressives fear, cause an avalanche of corporate cash into politics. Sadly, that’s already happened: we have been snowed under by tens of millions of dollars given through corporate PACs and “bundling” of individual contributions from corporate pay-rollers.
The Court’s decision is far, far more dangerous to U.S. democracy. Think: Manchurian candidates.
Republicans are right. President Barack Obama treated them like dirt, didn’t give a damn what they thought about his stimulus package, loaded it with a bunch of programs that will last for years and will never leave the budget, is giving away money disguised as “tax refunds,” and is sneaking in huge changes in policy, from schools to health care, using the pretext of an economic emergency.
Way to go, Mr. O! Mr. Down-and-Dirty Chicago pol. Street-fightin’ man. Covering over his break-you-face power play with a “we’re all post-partisan friends” BS.
And it’s about time.
Frankly, I was worried about this guy. Obama’s appointing Clinton-droids to the Cabinet, bloated incompetents like Larry Summers as “Economics Czar,” made me fear for my country, that we’d gotten another Democrat who wished he were a Republican.
Then came Obama’s money bomb. The House bill included $125 billion for schools (TRIPLING federal spending on education – yes!), expanding insurance coverage to the unemployed, making the most progressive change in the tax code in four decades by creating a $500 credit against social security payroll deductions, and so on. …more
The Pits: Georgia’s GOP Swipes the Peach State
for SuicideGirls.com – November 5, 2008
The evil little &*%$’s are doing it again.
Even as they drown in the anger of platoons of pissed-off voters, Republican operatives are swiping ballots with both hands.
Ground zero is Georgia. It’s here where the sick little vulture named Saxby Chambliss won the US Senate seat six years ago by calling his Democratic opponent, a guy who’d lost three limbs in Vietnam, a friend of Osama bin Laden.
There’s no way in hell that Chambliss can slime his way back into the Senate in the face of over half a million newly registered voters (Black and young – 69% for Obama) without jacking them out of their votes. That’s what the Republicans are up to. Right now. As we speak.
Over 50,000 the new voters in Georgia have been blocked from voting by using a nasty little new law, the Help America Vote Act signed by George Bush. (Bush is helping us vote – look out!)
I just got this from Christina Rush in the Peach Pit state:
“They really have stolen my vote and I don’t know what to do about it at this late stage. I just found out 2 days ago that I do not exist on the voters rolls in Georgia. I have disappeared. After calling 866-OUR VOTE and the Secretary of State (for GA), it has been determined that the last vote I was accounted for was the 1996 General Election. That’s awfully strange to me, considering that I voted in the recent Primaries and that last two General Elections (2000 and 2004).”
“Everyone is ‘very sorry’ this is happening, but no one can tell what I can do to make my vote count for THIS election. The only advice I’ve been given is to fill out a new voters registration form and I’ll be eligible for any future elections, just not THIS one.”
“So, what can I do except tell anyone and everyone who will listen?”
And no one is going to listen to you or the other 50,000 dumped voters in Georgia.
But here’s the good news: it won’t save them. The GOP is toast. Paint the White House black and blue and Congress the same hue.
But the steal in Senate races may allow the GOP to savage, obstruct, …more
From Greg Palast’s and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s investigative comic Steal Back Your Vote!
Copy it, print it out, spread it everywhere – and download the complete 24-page comic for free at www.StealBackYourVote.org. Hope isn’t enough. Rove-proof your ballot.
And get a stack of print copies before we run out. Hand’m out on the voting line – non-partisan, so it’s OK. We’ll send them out via priority mail in time for the election. (Donate $100 and get a free copy of The Election Files DVD)
For those of you who mailed in your ballot, please tell me, what happened to it? You don’t know, do you? I can tell you that officially, three-fourths of a million absentee ballots were never counted last time, on the 
weakest of technical excuses. And you won’t even know it. Furthermore, tens of thousands of ballots are not mailed out to voters in time to return them – in which case you’re out of luck. Most states won’t let you vote in-precinct once you’ve applied to vote absentee. Every time I hear of a voter going “absentee” to avoid computer screens, I want to “go postal” myself.
But for gosh sakes—don’t throw out your ballot if you have a mail-in. Either mail it in, making sure to include ID if required (you first-time voters) or, better, WALK it into your county clerk’s office. …more
Fired US Prosecutor levels new charges against GOP operatives.
Greg Palast and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for Huffington Post
Virtually the entire mainstream electronic media drank ACORN Kool-Aid this month brewed up by the Republican National Committee. Almost no one seriously challenged John McCain’s comical assertions that ACORN, a grassroots voter registration group, “is now on the verge of maybe perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history in this country, maybe destroying the fabric of democracy.”
While the Republicans had the distracted media searching for links between Obama and ACORN, RNC operatives were busily completing one of the most massive voter suppression and purging efforts in American history, stealing hundreds of thousands of Democratic votes across the embattled swing states and striving to arrange chaos and endless lines at the voting booths next week.
First the facts about ACORN. Months ago, we obtained, as part of our investigation for Rolling Stone magazine, the Republican’s list the GOP alleged were the very worst cases of vote and registration fraud by ACORN and similar groups. We went through the names the GOP asserted were “obviously, undeniably and clearly fraudulent” voter registrations.
First, there was Melissa Tais, a dubious ACORN registrant. Her two voter registration forms show, admittedly, suspiciously different signatures. Republicans suggested Melissa was part of a massive fraud to allow Democrats to vote twice.
They were wrong. Ms. Tais, a Cerrillos, New Mexico, waitress, told us she had signed one form on a table and one form holding the paper in her hand. Hence, a second, wobbly signature.
Then there was Patricia White, who Republicans claimed was a fictitious voter. When we filmed her at home in Albuquerque, she seemed real enough.
And so on, through the entire GOP list — not one fraud. And these were their best cases out of the five million “illegal voters” who Republican leaders claim have infiltrated America’s voting rolls.
The overblown histrionics about ACORN do not surprise those of us who have been watching the RNC’s election manipulation antics. For eight years White House operatives have been trying to gin up press stories about voter fraud. David Iglesias of New Mexico was one of seven U.S. Attorneys fired by the White House for their refusal to bring voter fraud prosecutions. “We took over 100 complaints,” from the GOP, he told us, “We investigated for almost 2 years, I didn’t find one prosecutable voter fraud case in the entire state of New Mexico.”
Iglesias, a McCain supporter, has, for the first time, leveled a new and serious charge: Despite finding none of the 200 voters guilty, he says the White House nevertheless ordered him to illegally prosecute baseless cases against innocent citizens, just to gin up voter fraud publicity. His refusal, he says, cost him his job. “They were looking for politicized — for improperly politicized US attorneys to file bogus voter fraud cases.”
Greg Palast and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. are authors of an investigation of vote suppression in the current Rolling Stone, and a comic book voter guide, “Steal Back Your Vote,” both available for download at StealBackYourVote.org. …more
Rolling Stone Magazine has agreed to make the full article available for download.
You can also download
the comic book voting guide:
Steal Back Your Vote
“The new registrations thrown out, the existing registrations scrubbed, the spoiled ballots, the provisional ballots that were never counted — and what you have is millions of voters, more than enough to swing the presidential election, quietly being detached from the electorate by subterfuge.
“Jim Crow was laid to rest, but his cousins were not,” says Donna Brazile. “We got rid of poll taxes and literacy tests but now have a second generation of schemes to deny our citizens their franchise.” Come November, the most crucial demographic may prove to be Americans who have been denied the right to vote. If Democrats are to win the 2008 election, they must not simply beat John McCain at the polls — they must beat him by a margin that exceeds the level of GOP vote tampering.
These days, the old west rail hub of Las Vegas, New Mexico, is little more than a dusty economic dead zone amid a boneyard of bare mesas. In national elections, the town overwhelmingly votes Democratic: More than 80 percent of all residents are Hispanic, and one in four lives below the poverty line. On February 5th, the day of the Super Tuesday caucus, a school-bus driver named Paul Maez arrived at his local polling station to cast his ballot. To his surprise, Maez found that his name had vanished from the list of registered voters, thanks to a statewide effort to deter fraudulent voting. For Maez, the shock was especially acute: He is the supervisor of elections in Las Vegas.
Maez was not alone in being denied his right to vote. On Super Tuesday, one in nine Democrats who tried to cast ballots in New Mexico found their names missing from the registration lists. The numbers were even higher in precincts like Las Vegas, where nearly 20 percent of the county’s voters were absent from the rolls. With their status in limbo, the voters were forced to cast “provisional” ballots, …more
Don’t worry about Mickey Mouse or ACORN stealing the election. According to an investigative report out today in Rolling Stone magazine, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Greg Palast, after a year-long investigation, reveal a systematic program of “GOP vote tampering” on a massive scale.
– Republican Secretaries of State of swing-state Colorado have quietly purged one in six names from their voter rolls.
Over several months, the GOP politicos in Colorado stonewalled every attempt by Rolling Stone to get an answer to the massive purge – ten times the average state’s rate of removal.
– While Obama dreams of riding to the White House on a wave of new voters, more then 2.7 million …more
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