Here’s what we do now, a personal note

By Greg Palast
palastreport@gregpalast.com
Being right never felt so horrid. Before the election, I wrote, “How Trump Won.”
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. Did the voters or the vote challengers pick our next president?
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 Within the next six months, we may see the Voting Rights Act repealed — and civil rights set back 50 years; the entirety of our environmental protection laws burnt in a coal pit; police cruelty will be made our urban policy; the Education Department closed to give billionaires a tax holiday; and howling anti-Semites will be appointed White House counselors.

But the horror we face is countered by this one hard question the US media will ignore, but I can’t: Did Donald Trump actually win this election? If so, was it really a landslide?
Here’s something you won’t read elsewhere: In the last Presidential, according to the official count of the federal Elections Assistance Commission, 2.7 million provisional ballots were rejected.

Whose ballots? If you’re Black, Hispanic or Asian-American, the chance you were shunted to one of these provisional ballots is 300% higher than if you’re white.
How many Black ballots were thrown in the electoral dumpster?
As a former professor of statistics, I know there’s still a lot of sleuthing in the numbers I have to do, but I can tell you this: The number of rejected provisional ballots, the number of voters wrongly purged from the rolls, the number of ballots “spoiled” and not counted, has unquestionably skyrocketed.

The result: This is the most “Jim Crow,” racially bent election I’ve covered in 25 years of reporting.
Did that make the difference? Don’t ask our “see-no-evil” media. While, before the election, The New York Times (never forget to capitalize the “The”) and MSNBC will run some stories on vote suppression trickery, from crazy ID requirements to rejecting student registrations to suspect purges of voters. However, the establishment outlets will NEVER, EVER say that these ugly, racist electoral swindles changed the outcome of the election.
They will wave the flag and tell us that American democracy prevailed again. That’s just horseshit. Excuse my French, but when are we going to face the fact that Jim Crow has returned — this time as Dr. James Crow, systems analyst.

In my film Vigilantes Inc.: America’s New Vote Suppression Hitmen, I note that just one Trump-backed group, True the Vote, signed up a posse of 40,000 of self-proclaimed vote fraud hunters who, two months ago, had already challenged the ballots of 852,381 voters, overwhelmingly citizens of color — with a goal, undoubtedly met — of challenging 2 MILLION by this week.

Could disqualifying literally millions of ballots affect an election’s outcome? What do you think, Sherlock?
Vigilante challenges are a whole new racist weapon, new to 2024. It worked, so they’ll do it again in 2028 and 2032. They are already planning it. So, what are we going to do about it?
Same with mass purges: 400,000 in Georgia, 1.2 million in Texas — way over 10 million removed from the voter rolls — no other advanced nation does this, erasing voters’ rights to cast a ballot. And may I remind you, that in a technical report for the ACLU in which the Palast team’s experts literally reviewed every single name on the Georgia and Wisconsin purge lists, we found that Georgia wrongly removed a third of a million voters and Wisconsin tens of thousands.

Could this bend an election? Well, Sherlock, is the rancid evidence wafting up your nose yet?
Maybe what you smell are those rotting, “spoiled” ballots. The nasty little secret of US elections is that we don’t count all the votes. “Spoilage” is the fancy term in the vote-counting biz for votes that are rejected for all kinds of reasons, from paper ballots that scanners could not read to ballots cast in the wrong precinct.

Now, if voters’ spoiled ballots rejected were just a random thing, hey, it wouldn’t matter. But as I pointed out in The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, a Black voter is 700% more likely than a white voter to have their ballot thrown in the reject dumpster. We are talking about, by official count, one to three MILLION ballots in our last presidential elections. Do the math, Sherlock. If we counted all the votes, who really won?

What can we do now?
Cut the tears, crybabies. We have work to do.
In 2016, in Rolling Stone, I laid out, in cold numbers, how Trump “won” election through a racially poisonous voter roll purge system called, “Interstate Crosscheck,” which purported to identify and remove criminal double voters from the rolls. If a “James Brown” voted in Michigan and “James Brown” voted in North Carolina, they’d remove this criminal double voter from the rolls. Roughly 1.1 million voters were knocked off the rolls. Combined with the purges, spoilage, provisional ballots rejected and other scummy scams — easily accounted for Trump’s official victory.

But here is the good news to remember: A national campaign led by Rev. Jesse Jackson and boosted by the ACLU in court deploying our investigative findings, our films, and our reports completely eliminated the Crosscheck purge system. If we did not continue the battle for voter protection after the 2016 race, Biden could not have won in 2020.

And let me make this clear: Our purpose in taking on Crosscheck was not to elect Biden — I’m strictly non-partisan. Our purpose was and remains to let the voters decide.
Some weeks ago, Rev. Jackson told President Biden and VP Kamala Harris to watch our film Vigilantes Inc., and then take action. But still, the Justice Department hit the snooze button. What that tells us is that no government agency, no political party, is going to save our democracy. That’s completely on us. And that’s my commitment.

Greg Palast is known for his investigative reports for The Guardian, BBC Television, Rolling Stone and his string of New York Times bestsellers including The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and Billionaires & Ballot Bandits.
His latest film, “Vigilantes INC.: America’s New Vote Suppression Hitmen” is narrated by Rosario Dawson and produced by Martin Sheen and George DiCaprio.