Voter Suppression is Class War by Other Means

 “How Trump Stole 2020,”by Greg Palast, cartoons by Ted Rall, 2020

Yeah, it’s a pretty nervy title for a book published a few months ago.  The book is full of humor.  But it’s not about a long-shot legalistic Trump coup backed by fascists and the U.S. military.  It is about a more routine practice.

Palast is a Fedora-wearing investigative reporter that goes where the mainstream U.S. media won’t go.  In fact he’s been banned by them, but not by the BBC, Guardian and Rolling Stone.  This little book is based on factual and deep reporting into voter suppression in a number of U.S. states, especially during the 2016 election, but also back to 2000.  It shows that voter suppression is overwhelmingly directed against young people and students, working-class European-Americans and especially African, Asian, Arab and Latino-American voters, who are nearly all proletarian.  Most of these groups vote Democratic. 

DEMS and SUPREMES

What is ‘strange’ is that the Democratic Party hierarchy, except for Stacey Abrams in Georgia, has not built on Palast’s research.  In practice the Democrats have done their best to ignore the issue, even using some of these practices themselves.  Their basic alliance with the Republicans as one of the U.S.’s two ruling parties prevents them from digging too deep in how rotten their ‘democracy’ is.  For instance Obama’s justice department endorsed the Republican-Kobach voter removal plan CrossCheck.  The liberal Pew Charitable Trust also got in on the voter purge game.  Clinton and Gore ignored vote theft in their elections.  Trump’s present claims of ‘vote fraud’ could be turned on their head by the Dems – but they don’t.  As Palast says about this “Silence of the Democratic Lambs” - they “concede at light speed.”

The legal background is that the Supreme Court has allowed voter purges and racist voter suppression since 2000’s “Bush v. Gore” halted a recount.  Citizen’s United, the overturning of the Voting Rights Act (Shelby v Holder) and in this book, Husted v APRI, which overruled a key aspect of the National Voter Registration Act, all play a role.  The latter decision allowed fabricated mass voter purges aimed at mostly Democratic voters, giving the new Jim Crow a boost.  This reminds us that the liberal ‘Warren Court’ was a blip in U.S. legal history. 

Long Voter Lines in some parts of Georgia

HOW IS IT DONE?

The book is full of shocking discoveries and numbers that cannot be ignored.  Palast starts in Georgia with Abrams, covering the pre-2016 voter purges by Secretary of State and also gubernatorial candidate Brian Kemp.  Palast brings with him a professional crew of statisticians, techies and investigators, access to 240 databases and “an advanced address hygiene list expert.”  Palast’s group, through phone calls and other methods, discovers that, among other actions, Kemp’s unjust purge of 340,134 voters helped him defeat Abrams and supported Trump’s win in Georgia in 2016.  

The deeper story is that Gore, Kerry and Clinton probably won their elections absent these various open thefts.  While Democrats ignore the 33-50% of the population who don’t vote (wonder why…) – it is pretty clear that many CAN’T vote.  Palast debunks the ludicrous Clinton/media line in 2016 that ‘the Russians did it.’  Hell, the Dems even ignored Cambridge Analytica, which harvested 89 million U.S. citizen's psychological FaceBook profiles to propagandize for Trump.  Sadly, their ‘democratic’ system did it, but it’s always easier to find a familiar scapegoat.

The methods that Palast discovers in various states:

 1.     Purge through Interstate CrossCheck.  It matches similar names in different states, even with different middle initials, then bars them from voting.  I.E. Damion Jones in Kentucky is Damion Jones in Tennessee.  The list was based on common minority names like Jackson, Rodriquez, Mohamed, Patel and Kim.  A method created by Kansas’ Kris Kobach – or ‘KKK’ for short.

2.     Purge through not voting for 2 elections - the main method used by Kemp.  Kemp assumed people moved out of state if they hadn’t voted!

3.     Subsequent junk mail notices about ‘address changes’ designed not to be returned.  As Palast calls it, ‘theft by postcard.’  Others call this 'caging.'

4.     Massive throwing out of ‘spoiled’ mail-in ballots on trivial technicalities, but especially through bogus signature verification.

5.     ID laws – Driver’s license, passport or certified birth certificate – that many people do not have.  In Texas, they accept gun permits as proof, but not student I.D.s.  

6.     Conveniently ‘broken’ machines, few/one/no polling stations, early voting centers or ballot drop-off boxes.

7.     Barring felons from voting, even after they’ve served their sentences, then barring voting until all court fees are paid.

8.     Plain old not counting the votes. 

9.      Provisional ballots that don’t get counted, but you get a sticker!  Or refusal to give even a provisional ballot - they just send voters home.

10.    Providing mail-in ballots at polling stations instead of regular voting, as mail-ins are much more easily discarded.

11.    Unprocessed registrations.

12.    Undelivered mail ballots – both sent and received.  See USPS/De Joy and various Republican Secretaries of State.

13.   Throwing out ‘spoiled’ regular ballots.  (See Florida ‘chads’ etc.)

14.   Software protection against hacking or software for imaging each ballot is not working.  I.e. no paper trail.

15.    Very tricky electoral rules, especially in ‘open’ primaries in California.

16.   Gerrymandering, an art perfected by Republicans and sometimes copied by Democrats.  Part of rat-fucking elections in 50 states. 

THE NUMBERS

In 2019 the U.S. ranked #25 in the world in electoral functioning, with social democratic countries like Norway leading the list.  Part of this is that elections are run by ‘states’ not the federal government.  The Republican excuse is their methods are to prevent ‘voter fraud.’ The Republican Party is the fraud, as there is almost zero evidence of double-voting.  Only 3 people have been convicted for voter fraud in years. Of 800M votes in 2000-2014, there have been 35 documented double-votes for various reasons.  The stenographers of the mainstream bourgeois press reported the Republican allegations but not the paltry results.  Exit polls, which are used by the U.S. government to certify foreign elections, have been abandoned in the U.S. except by one company, which then changes their results to match the ‘vote!’  Everybody walks off the cliff like a good soldier.  

 So… here are some numbers on suppressed votes:

A.     2020.  California sent 3.721 million ‘independent’ ballots to mostly Sanders’ voters without a presidential choice on them.  This was part of a convoluted ‘open primary’ system managed by a pro-Clinton Secretary of State.  These were also given out at polling stations.

B.     2000.  Florida removed 94,000 ex-felons from voter rolls. 

C.     Florida targeted 180,000 Latinx people to prove they were citizens.

D.     2019.  Texas attempted to remove 95,000 people unless they immediately provided a birth certificate and passport.

E.      2016.  Georgia removed 340,134 voters who they claimed had moved to another state who had not.  Kemp was the Secretary of State that did it.

F.      2019.  Ohio purged 267,000 voter names, mostly Democrats, for not voting.

G.     Wisconsin.  The Republican Secretary of State purged 165,000 voters who they claimed had moved, who had not.

H.     Kansas.  Secretary of State Kobach sent the Crosscheck list of 7.2M ‘criminal’ double voters in the U.S., leading to the purging of 1.1M voters with no evidence.

I.          Indiana.  80,000 African Americans don’t have the required I.D.

J.       3M is the number of ballots not recorded during a typical national election.

K.     2016.  1M provisional ballots were thrown in the dumpster.

L.      2016.  Georgia refused to register 40,000 minority registrations and shut-down Korean voter registration volunteers.

M.    2016.  Michigan blocked the counting of 75,355 ballots in Detroit.  Jill Stein and the Green Party challenged this.  The Democrats sat on their hands and wouldn't join the lawsuit, so it lost due to Stein's 'lack of standing.'

N.     2016. Wisconsin blocked 182,000 college students from voting due to voter I.D. laws.

O.     2016.  500,000 mail-in ballots nationally were rejected and not counted.

P.      2008.  At least 5.9M votes were suppressed or discarded in total.

Q.     2020.  Ohio – 432,000 purged.

R.     2020.  North Carolina – 576,534 purged.

S.      2020.  Arizona – 258,000 purged.

T.      2020.  Wisconsin – 99,000 purged.

U.     Other numbers too many to mention.

You can’t always steal all the time, as proved in the 2020 Arizona and Wisconsin  ‘swing’ states - but it probably worked in two others, Ohio and North Carolina.

The WIZARDS BEHIND the CURTAIN

Organizations paying for Kemp’s voter suppression are companies like Southern Company, Georgia-Pacific, Koch Industries and Georgia Power.  I.E. coal, timber, pet-coke and a failing nuclear plant.  Also global warming, as Southern Co. is the worst U.S. carbon emitter.  Kemp’s millionairess Senate appointee Kelly Loeffler is on the Georgia Power board of directors, which is no surprise.  These politicians are merely front-people for a wing of extractive and carbon capital.  Palast notes that voter suppression is international – in Mexico, in India, in Turkey, in England and no doubt many other places.  It is actually an essential part of ‘parliamentary democracy.’

Palast:  “Voter suppression is class war by other means.”  Marx and Engels would agree.  The 1848 program of the German Communist Party stated: “Every German, having reached the age of 21, shall have the right to vote and be elected.”  A statement which, by the way, was ahead of ANYTHING in the U.S. in 1848, as women, native Americans and African-Americans could not vote, and even some Catholic European-Americans.

Other prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left:  Marxists on Elections; Is the U.S. an Actual Democracy; A Statute of Limitations; European Working Classes Having an Effect in Electoral Arena; Are the Democrats a Real Opposition; Notes on the Election; Mr. Hollande’s Holiday; Field Notes on Democracy (Roy); The Only Political Question that Matters?; The People’s Convention; The New Jim Crow (Alexander). 

P.S. - The Georgia Republican Sec of State recently said that Lindsay Graham urged him to throw out legal ballots. Jail Graham! 

And I bought it at May Day Books!  - We’re still open.  Knock if needed.

Red Frog

November 13, 2020