Breaking News: Trump Lost. Vote Suppression Won - The Los Angeles Harbor Area's Only Independently owned news magazine serving San Pedro, Wi
"The nasty little secret of American democracy is that we don’t count all the votes. Nor let every citizen vote."
--Greg Palast for the Thom Hartmann Report
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Here are the numbers
By Greg Palast for the Thom Hartmann Report | Chicago, Jan 27, 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.
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. [....] 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.
[See more under the cut.]
