Politics & Stuff

[robsblubot 3,578]

4 hours ago, Fulham Broadway said:

Isnt  that exactly how the USA was 'discovered' 'founded' ?

Yes, but I think the point here is that what worked back then may not necessarily work now.

[Fulham Broadway 16,968]

5 hours ago, YorkshireBlue said:

idn’t make it right then either, but looking at history and using that as an excuse for modern day behaviour is a non argument, we don’t stone people in the street any more, burn girls alive to test if they are witch’s etc 

 

2 hours ago, robsblubot said:

Yes, but I think the point here is that what worked back then may not necessarily work now.

Thing is the article was a comedy satire, not meant to be taken seriously. Yorkshire, you copied and pasted half a sentence just to make a point about immigrants, when the article was a piss take about him saying God has given him a right to do what he wants 🤣

[YorkshireBlue 3,140]

2 hours ago, Fulham Broadway said:

 

Thing is the article was a comedy satire, not meant to be taken seriously. Yorkshire, you copied and pasted half a sentence just to make a point about immigrants, when the article was a piss take about him saying God has given him a right to do what he wants 🤣

I knew it was a joke bud, but that particular point is constantly talked about 

[Vesper 29,192]

Trump and Infantino: Two presidents and a sporting political bromance that isn’t slowing down

https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6085431/2025/01/24/trump-infantino-fifa-world-cup/

President Donald Trump has long had a tendency to namecheck high-profile figures in concise terms of affection or derision. It is clear how much he likes allies such as UFC president Dana White and Tesla chief executive Elon Musk, and how much he dislikes others — his White House successor/predecessor Joe Biden and California’s governor Gavin Newsom included.

Add soccer’s most powerful statesman to the bromance list.

FIFA president Gianni Infantino has been singled out repeatedly by Trump as he has retaken office, with a new eagerness to celebrate the 2026 men’s World Cup coming to North America. He attended Trump’s inauguration on Monday and has this week posted nine times about the new U.S. president on Instagram, even wearing a red tie to Sunday’s pre-inauguration rally.

Infantino’s support crystallized in early 2020, when Trump, in the final year of his first term as president, was faced with the United States Senate laying its ground rules for his initial impeachment trial.

Back then, while introducing him to a dinner of CEOs in the Swiss ski resort Davos, Infantino lauded Trump as a “sportsman” and a “competitor.”

This week, Infantino was rewarded for his unstinting loyalty. Inauguration invites are largely for family members, administration officials, Supreme Court Justices, other world leaders and the inbound president’s most trusted associates.

Representing sports, Infantino was joined by staunch Trump supporters including White and Miriam Adelson, owner of the Dallas Mavericks basketball team and the incoming president’s third-largest campaign donor. In a statement, FIFA said neither “FIFA nor the FIFA President contributed to the Inauguration Committee.”

As for that 2026 World Cup, Trump has taken a cheerleading role, touting it as an example of significant events coming to the United States in the next few years. But it is potentially awkward.

As soccer’s worldwide governing body, FIFA represents 211 national associations. The U.S. will co-host the tournament with Mexico and Canada, both neighbouring countries Trump has threatened with hefty import tariffs.

During the inauguration, Infantino was filmed laughing animatedly as Trump stated that the Gulf of Mexico would be renamed the Gulf of America.

---

With Trump and Infantino, it may be a special relationship — or, as FIFA pointed out Thursday, consistent with the FIFA head regularly accepting invitations from world leaders. 

FIFA staged its men’s World Cup in Russia in 2018, despite Vladimir Putin’s first incursions into Ukraine four years earlier. Then in 2019, Putin awarded Infantino the Order of Friendship for his “enormous contribution” to that tournament.

 

Infantino receives the ‘Order of Friendship’ from Putin in May 2019 (Evgenia Novozhenina/AFP via Getty Images)

Ahead of the 2022 edition in Qatar, Infantino wrote to the 32 competing federations and implored them to “focus on the football” and avoid political and social disputes such as labour conditions for migrant workers and the rights of women and the LGBTQ+ community. He also made multiple visits to 2034 World Cup host Saudi Arabia as the Gulf country became the sole option for that edition.

But even for a sports leader reliant on political diplomacy, Infantino’s bond with Trump appears unusually close.

In some respects, Trump’s level of engagement may be a positive for FIFA. Infantino visited Washington last May but was not granted photo opportunities or meetings with Biden or Vice-President Kamala Harris. He did, however, meet the homeland security secretary to discuss visas.

FIFA had been struggling to make progress with Biden’s administration on the speed of visa processing, raising concerns that visitors from some of the 2026 World Cup’s 48 competing nations may be unable to attend.

As of Thursday evening, wait times for a visitor visa appointment at a U.S. embassy in Bogota, Colombia, were 700 days. With the World Cup 500 days away next week, some supporters would already be too late. Other concerning wait times include Casablanca (Morocco, 332 days) and Ankara (Turkey, 560 days).

As Trump pursues deportation policies, it remains to be seen how willing his administration is going to be to swing open the doors for the six weeks of the tournament, particularly if that means facilitating thousands of Central and South American visitors.

Contrasted with Russia, Qatar and Saudi Arabia, FIFA may have hoped a World Cup held across the U.S., Canada and Mexico would have fewer public relations headaches, with the added boon of $14billion (£11.3bn) in projected revenues.

 

Infantino and Trump in the White House’s Oval Office in 2018 (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

However, the shared nature of 2026 presents challenges, and Trump’s policies could test FIFA’s ability to manage relationships.

FIFA has a four-year agreement with the World Health Organisation (WHO) “to promote healthy lifestyles and equal access to health services worldwide”. Trump has this week withdrawn his country from the WHO.

In his first week back in office, Trump described Mexican cartels as foreign terror organizations and replied “could happen” when asked if he would send U.S. special-forces troops to Mexico to target them. He has also warned his administration will impose 25 per cent tariffs on Mexico and Canada, starting February 1.

Addressing the World Economic Forum on Thursday, Trump told Canada it could avoid tariffs by becoming a U.S. state.

And that’s all before we get onto the president of Panama, a contender to compete at next year’s  World Cup, being asked this week if he worries about the possibility of the U.S. invading his country, or possible tensions with Denmark over Greenland’s future.

---

The closeness between the Trump family and Infantino originated in Trump’s first term, when the so-called ‘United bid’ defeated Morocco for 2026 World Cup hosting rights. During and after that process, Infantino visited the White House three times, golfed with Trump in New Jersey and lunched with him at the 2020 World Economic Forum.

There was a need for personal involvement by Trump, most notably in providing federal guarantees essential to the hosting requirements of a showpiece global event: FIFA requires visa access for competing players, staff from federations and fans who may wish to visit.

Trump’s presidential guarantees — albeit not binding — were an important signal of intent during a presidency in which he’d signed an executive order banning foreign nationals from several predominantly Muslim countries from entering the United States for 90 days. FIFA also required assurances regarding certain tax exemptions.

The touchpoint for all of this became Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner. When Trump left office, Kushner remained a go-to contact for Infantino, organizing a lunch of New York City business and political leaders to help swing the World Cup final to MetLife Stadium in New Jersey, a few miles from Manhattan.

 

Infantino visited Trump at the White House in 2019 (Win McNamee/Getty Images)

In Davos, as Trump dismissed the 2020 charges against him (abuse of power and obstruction of Congress) as a “total hoax” — he was acquitted weeks later — he was introduced for his own speech by Infantino.

“President Trump is definitely a sportsman,” Infantino gushed. “I am lucky enough in my life to come across some of the most talented athletes in soccer. And President Trump is made of the same sort of fibre. He is a competitor. He wants to compete, he wants to win. He wants to show who is the best.”

Now, Infantino’s ongoing support appears to have put him in a prized position within Trump’s circle of trust.

It wasn’t just an inauguration ticket. Infantino had almost a week of cosying up to the incoming administration. He visited Trump at the latter’s Florida home Mar-a-Lago last Friday, revealing on Instagram that the meeting centred on the World Cup, plus this summer’s U.S.-hosted Club World Cup.

On the day Infantino donned his red tie and attended Trump’s rally, the Swiss soccer executive got publicly name-checked (although Trump initially appeared to mix him up with the president of the International Olympic Committee). After Trump’s mention, Infantino posted a video thanking him.

In a FIFA press release, Infantino said: “I would like to thank President Trump, with whom I have a great friendship, and to assure him that, together, we will make not only America great again, but also the entire world, of course, because football — or soccer — unites the world.”

 

Trump gave a recorded video address at the Club World Cup draw in December (Giorgio Viera/AFP via Getty Images)

It is just the latest episode of recent bonhomie.

At December’s draw for the group phase of the Club World Cup draw, Trump delivered a recorded video address, described Infantino as a “winner” and claimed he (Trump) was “very responsible” in bringing the World Cup to North America. Trump’s daughter Ivanka, Kushner and grandson Theodore all attended the event in Miami, with the latter even making the draw’s ceremonial first pick.

While Trump trumpets the World Cup, one obscured aspect is how, as previously revealed by The Athletic, those behind the 2026 bid actively downplayed concerns about his rhetoric.

Where once they attempted to persuade voters he did not reflect the bid, or he did not mean exactly what he said, or to reassure them it was unlikely he would be president in 2026, now he feels very much front and centre.

---

Infantino will surely hope the closeness, and Trump’s positive attention, lasts through the tournament.

As the president’s second term began, Infantino was once again mentioned by Trump at Davos.

On Thursday, he said: “Here in America, we have big events coming up. Next year we have the 250th anniversary of America’s founding. We also have the World Cup, and I understand Gianni — Gianni is in the room — Infantino. He was very instrumental in helping us get it — he’s there with you someplace, I think — and I want to thank him for that.”

And by that night, Infantino was back on Instagram, saying “Thank you, Mr. President” and, repeating once again, that #footballunitestheworld — as soccer’s political bromance continued at full speed.

Edited Friday at 17:58 by Vesper

[Vesper 29,192]

[Vesper 29,192]

Denmark “In Crisis Mode” After Terrible Trump Phone Call on Greenland

Donald Trump has fully freaked out the Danes after a phone call with the country’s prime minister.

https://newrepublic.com/post/190698/denmark-crisis-trump-phone-call-greenland-prime-minister-fredericksen

Danish Prime Minister Mette Fredericksen

Trump reportedly doubled down on his threat to seize Greenland in a phone call with Denmark’s prime minister, sending the country’s government into a panic.

Trump spoke to Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen on the phone for about 45 minutes last week. While neither leader has commented specifically on the call, officials close to the situation said it went poorly, as reported by The Financial Times. They stated that Trump was “aggressive and confrontational” on the call.

“It was horrendous,” one official said. “He was very firm,” another added. “It was a cold shower. Before, it was hard to take it seriously. But I do think it is serious, and potentially very dangerous.”

“The intent was very clear. They want it. The Danes are now in crisis mode,” another official told the publication. “The Danes are utterly freaked out by this.”

“It was a very tough conversation. He threatened specific measures against Denmark such as targeted tariffs,” said a former Danish official.

Trump has threatened to buy Greenland since his election victory, along with vows to take back the Panama Canal and make Canada the 51st state. And while many took his comments in jest, the recent phone call shows that he is seriously interested in seizing Greenland, perhaps due to its unique geopolitical position, its significant U.S. air base, or its potential real estate development.

[robsblubot 3,578]

I Prosecuted the Capitol Rioters. They Have Never Been More Dangerous.

Jan. 24, 2025

Credit...Illustration by Sam Whitney/The New York Times

By Brendan Ballou

Mr. Ballou is a former federal prosecutor.

On Jan. 6, 2021, Jalise and Mark Middleton, a married couple from Texas, trespassed onto the Capitol grounds and joined thousands of rioters gathered at the building’s West Front.

The assembled mob was assaulting a thin line of officers, and pepper spray wafted through the air. Rather than retreating in the face of violence, the couple pushed up against the makeshift barrier the police had established, hit officers and tried to drag one into the crowd. They gave up only after they were pepper-sprayed themselves, and though they did not make it into the Capitol, they were proud of what they did: Afterward, Ms. Middleton wrote on Facebook, “We fought the cops to get in the Capitol and got pepper-sprayed and beat but by gosh the patriots got in!”

I know this because I was one of the scores of lawyers who prosecuted the rioters, and was part of the team that tried the Middletons specifically. (On Thursday, I left the Justice Department, and speak only for myself.) One moment from their trial has stuck with me. Sitting in the courtroom in the awkward minutes before their verdict was announced, I noticed that Mr. Middleton was wearing “TRUMP” socks, with the president’s face stitched into the side. That small sign of fealty struck me as incredibly sad. The Middletons were ready to go to prison for a man who, quite likely, didn’t care about them at all.

The Middletons were convicted on all counts, including charges of assaulting federal officers. But on Monday, Mr. Trump pardoned them and nearly 1,600 other people who attacked the Capitol in his name. I think he did so not out of sympathy for the rioters, but because their freedom serves his interests.

 

For while some convicted rioters seem genuinely remorseful, and others appear simply ready to put politics behind them, many others are emboldened by the termination of what they see as unjust prosecutions. Freed by the president, they have never been more dangerous.

Sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter  Get expert analysis of the news and a guide to the big ideas shaping the world every weekday morning. 

Take Stewart Rhodes, whose Oath Keepers group staged firearms and ammunition near Washington on Jan. 6 in anticipation of a “bloody and desperate fight.” Or Enrique Tarrio, whose Proud Boys led rioters into the Capitol and who had declared just after the 2020 election that while he and his followers would not start a civil war, they would be sure to “finish one.”

They are now free to pursue revenge, and have already said they want it. Upon his release this week, Mr. Tarrio declaredthat “success is going to be retribution.” He added, “Now it’s our turn.”

The effect — and I believe purpose — of these pardons is to encourage vigilantes and militias loyal to the president, but unaccountable to the government. Illiberal democracies and outright dictatorships often rely on such militia groups, whose organization and seriousness can range widely, from the vigilantes who enforce Iran’s hijab dress code to the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia that have killed government opponents.

Here in America, lynch mobs and the Ku Klux Klan bolstered a racial caste system with violence that state governments, for the most part, were unwilling to commit themselves. But for decades, we had little reason to fear that vigilantes or militias would enforce the will of the state.

That may be changing. Rioters who assaulted police officers at the Capitol have called for politicians who oppose Mr. Trump to be hanged, declared that “there will be blood,” and that “I plan on making other people die first, for their country, if it gets down to that.” But it’s not just their readiness for violence. One officer, who’d worked lots of riots, explained to me how Jan. 6 felt different: Most rioters know at some level what they’re doing is wrong, he said, but these guys thought they were right. Monday’s pardons will reinforce these rioters’ beliefs in their cause, and their loyalty to the man who leads it.

Mr. Trump seems excited about this possibility. When asked Tuesday if groups like the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers had a place in the political conversation, he said, “We’ll have to see,” adding that “these were people that actually love our country.”

There is great value to him in having members of these groups released, doubly loyal to him, and eager to carry out his agenda and silence his critics through violence. Mr. Trump has shown his willingness to use his pardon power, and little stops him from doing so again.

What might happen next? Vigilantes could harass, assault or even kill perceived enemies of the state. Under the thin pretext that these vigilantes were acting in self-defense, the president could pardon them for federal crimes, or pressure pliant governors to do the same for state ones. In such a scenario, the president could put those loyal to him above the law, quite literally. This kind of violence was a part of our past; it may be a part of our future.

This is a frightening possibility, but it is not an inevitable one. Groups like the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection at Georgetown Law are already working with state officials on legislation to shut down paramilitary activity that, among other things, interferes with government proceedings or people’s constitutional rights. Local law enforcement can and should prioritize protecting the groups that unlawful private militias may target first, such as immigrants, trans people and opposition politicians.

 

These efforts are particularly urgent now, because of how many of our elected officials have changed their calculus about the attack. Elise Stefanik, a Republican in the House, once said that the rioters should “be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.” Three years later, she was calling them “hostages,” and she is now the president’s pick for ambassador to the United Nations.

Shortly after the attack, Kelly Loeffler, then a Republican senator from Georgia, said that “the violence, the lawlessness and siege of the halls of Congress are abhorrent.” Yet in the years that followed, she repeatedly called the House investigation into the attack a “sham,” and said that any indictment based on its work “should be dismissed out of hand.” She, too, is now nominated to serve in the president’s cabinet. Even Mr. Trump once called Jan. 6 a “heinous attack,” and said “to those who broke the law, you will pay.” His position, quite obviously, has changed.

Though Congress is required by law to establish a plaque honoring police officers who defended the Capitol, congressional leaders have failed to do so. It seems astounding that they would deny recognition to those people who saved their lives. But some officials’ ambitions require doing exactly that.

The president’s pardons are part of this collective attempt at forgetting. Illiberalism depends on hiding the crimes of its past, whether it is Jair Bolsonaro, when he was president of Brazil, celebrating the 1964 military coup in his country, or Vladimir Putin’s government repudiating the acquittals of the Soviet Union’s political enemies.

The past matters a great deal to the enemies of democracy, and we should not cede it. Victims of Jan. 6 should sue Congress to have their memorial installed. And academics should save the hundreds of criminal complaints on the federal docket that explain in irrefutable detail what each defendant did that day.

 

The rest of us, too, must keep the horrors of Jan. 6 from being forgotten. Memorialize the day. Read about the attack, and watch the videos. Keep it alive in your conversations. Doing so matters. For in a time when many politicians’ careers depend on forgetting, memory itself is an act of resistance.

[KEVINAA 110]

NY-PREPPER who was born in NY and who lives in NEW JERSEY. JUST PUT OUT A  VIDEO OVER 1 HOUR AGO ABOUT NEW YORK NUCLEAR TRAINING EXERCISE from 26 to 31 of January 2025.

Over 2 years ago New York released a PSA NUCLEAR ATTACK VIDEO.

EMERGENCY ALERT!! LARGE NUCLEAR INCIDENT EXERCISE IN NEW YORK!! TRUMP TO SEND TROOPS INTO MEXICO!!

 

 

Edited Saturday at 22:24 by KEVINAA

[Fulham Broadway 16,968]

Trump orders all overseas aid to cease. 

“It’s manufactured chaos,” said an official with the US Agency for International Development (USAid), speaking on condition of anonymity.

“Organizations will have to stop all activities, so all lifesaving health services, HIV/Aids, nutrition, maternal and child health, all agriculture work, all support of civil society organizations, education,” said the official.

“Freezing these international investments will lead our international partners to seek other funding partners – likely US competitors and adversaries – to fill this hole and displace the United States’ influence the longer this unlawful impoundment continues,” 

Israel will still get its $3.3bn from US taxpayers every year though. for foreign military financing

AP Press

[Fulham Broadway 16,968]

Gonna be a mad 4 years....

Brazil has reacted with outrage after 88 of its nationals arrived in their homeland handcuffed following their deportation from the United States. Brazil blasted Washington over its “degrading treatment” of the passengers and its “flagrant disregard” for their rights, demanding an explanation. Colombia, meanwhile, said it will not allow US deportation flights to land in the country.

AP Press

[Fernando 6,500]

19 hours ago, Fulham Broadway said:

Gonna be a mad 4 years....

Brazil has reacted with outrage after 88 of its nationals arrived in their homeland handcuffed following their deportation from the United States. Brazil blasted Washington over its “degrading treatment” of the passengers and its “flagrant disregard” for their rights, demanding an explanation. Colombia, meanwhile, said it will not allow US deportation flights to land in the country.

AP Press

Colombia now getting hit hard by USA with tariffs and other stuff. 

I think Petro will not last longer. 

People there don't like petro and they see USA as it's ally. Since so many people depend of the USA-Colombia connection. 

Edited Monday at 12:18 by Fernando

[Fulham Broadway 16,968]

39 minutes ago, Fernando said:

Colombia now getting hit hard by USA with tariffs and other stuff. 

I think Petro will not last longer. 

People there don't like petro and they see USA as it's ally. Since so many people depend of the USA-Colombia connection. 

Think it is only 'some people'  many still see the US as a big bully especially since they released papers from the 90s -and blame the US for it being a violent country.

According to author Robin Kirk, most Americans in 2003 remained naïve about the role of the United States in Colombia's historical development and the nation's continuing violence. 

''US military assistance may have actually worsened domestic violence in Columbia by introducing a higher level of paramilitary attacks as well as decreasing anti-narcotic operations. Also, empirical evidence suggests that US aid does not help reduce violence related to the production of drug crops such as coca.

Anyway, Trumps threats of tariffs seems to have a result -I just heard that Colombia will allow flights to land now. 

 

[Fulham Broadway 16,968]

Russia Funds Trump

Trump's businesses went bankrupt so many times in the 1990s that many legitimate banks wouldn’t lend to him anymore. He turned to Russian oligarchs -- Putin’s ruling clique -- to bankroll his projects, and launder their dirty money for them. This was, and continues to be, a huge part of his business. He’s a Russian money launderer.

"We don’t rely on American banks. We have all the funding we need out of Russia."
Donald Trump  2014

This isn’t speculation or hyperbole. There's mountains of evidence. Trump’s former election campaign Chairman, Paul Manafort, has deep ties to Russian oligarchs, and is currently in jail awaiting trial on, among other charges, money laundering!

Here are 5 more top facts everyone should know about Trump's long collusion with Russian organised criminals -- 

1

Trump’s main financial backer for the Trump Tower Toronto was a Russian-Canadian billionaire who got the money by selling a massive steel mill in Ukraine for nearly a billion dollars. $100 million of that money was paid to a Kremlin-backed fixer, likely as a bribe to VERY high Russian officials. The Chairman of the Bank who financed the deal? Vladimir Putin.

2

Trump bought his home in Palm Beach, Florida for $41 million. A few years later, with no real increase in the value -- he sold it for $95 million -- the most expensive home in America at the time! Why? A major Russian oligarch bought it -- we don’t know yet why he effectively ‘gave’ Trump $54 million. But it’s classic money laundering practice.

3

Trump's real estate deals were often fuelled by Russian money, typically passed through shady shell companies. 77% of Trump Soho apartments were bought with cash by such mysterious companies. At least 13 people with links to Russian oligarchs or mobsters lived in Trump properties, including one of Russia's top mobsters. One even ran a high-stakes illegal gambling ring in the apartment right below Trump's!

"Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets"
Donald Trump JR, 2008

4

Trump’s financial broker and “Senior Advisor” was a Russian convicted felon named Felix Sater, widely known as a mafia figure who once stabbed someone in the face with a broken margarita glass, requiring over 100 stitches. Sater helped set up shell companies, and arranged funding for Trump’s projects, including plans for Trump Tower Moscow. He’s also part of Putin’s inner circle. Here’s one email he wrote to Trump’s lawyer Michael Cohen in November, 2015:

"Michael I arranged for Ivanka to sit in Putins private chair at his desk and office in the Kremlin. I will get Putin on this program and we will get Donald elected. We both know no one else knows how to pull this off without stupidity or greed getting in the way. I know how to play it and we will get this done. Buddy our boy can become President of the USA and we can engineer it. I will get all of Putins team to buy in on this, I will."

New York Times, August 27, 2017

5

Trump’s other main business is casinos -- which are classic money laundering vehicles. One of his casinos was 100 times found in violation of federal rules protecting against money laundering, and paid the largest fine ever levied against a casino for having “willfully violated” anti-money laundering rules. Trump has a legal obligation to do “due diligence” for all his businesses to prevent laundering. His senior executive’s comment on this was “Donald doesn’t do diligence”.

 

 

Avaaz is a 47-million-person global campaign network that works to ensure that the views and values of the world's people shape global decision-making. ("Avaaz" means "voice" or "song" in many languages.) Avaaz members live in every nation of the world; our team is spread across 18 countries on 6 continents and operates in 17 languages. Learn about some of Avaaz's biggest campaigns here, or follow us on Facebook or Twitter.

 

[Vesper 29,192]

Jonathan Pie - Trump 2 .0: A New World Order

 

[Vesper 29,192]

Trump Lost. Vote Suppression Won.
Here are the numbers...

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.

https://www.gregpalast.com/trump-lost-vote-suppression-won/

 

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.

Stay with me and I’ll give you the means, methods and, most important, the key calculations.

But if you’re expecting a sexy story about Elon Musk messing with vote-counting software from outer space, sorry, you won’t get that here.

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.

There are also the uncountable effects of the explosive growth of voter intimidation tactics including the bomb threats that closed 31 polling stations in Atlanta on Election Day.

America’s Nasty Little Secret

The nasty little secret of American democracy is that we don’t count all the votes. Nor let every citizen vote.

In 2024, especially, after an avalanche of new not-going-to-let-you-vote laws passed in almost every red state, the number of citizens Jim Crow’d out of their vote soared into the millions. According to the Brennan Center for Justice, since the 2020 election, “At least 30 states enacted 78 restrictive laws” to blockade voting. The race-targeted laws ran the gamut from shuttering drop boxes in Black-majority cities to, for the first time, allowing non-government self-appointed “vote fraud vigilantes” to challenge voters by the hundreds of thousands.

Throughout election seasons, The New York Times and NPR and establishment media write stories and editorials decrying vote suppression tactics, from new ID requirements to new restrictions on mail-in voting. But, notably, the mainstream press never, ever, not once, will say that these ugly racist attacks on voters changed the outcome of an election.

Question: If these vote suppression laws — notorious example: Georgia’s SB 202 — had no effect on election outcomes, then why did GOP legislators fight so hard to pass these laws? The answer is clear on the Brennan Center’s map of states that passed restrictive laws. It’s pretty much Trump’s victory map.

America Goes Postal

Let’s look at just one vote suppression operation in action.

In 2020, during the pandemic, America went postal. More than 43% of us voted by mail.

But it wasn’t easy. Harris County, Texas, home of Houston, tried to mail out ballots during the COVID epidemic on the grounds that voters shouldn’t die waiting in lines at polling stations. But then, the state’s Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton stopped this life-saving measure.

Why wouldn’t this GOP official let Houstonians vote safely? Maybe it’s because Houston has the largest number of Black voters of any city in America. Indeed, on Steve Bannon’s podcast, Paxton proudly stated, “Had we not done that [stopped Houston from sending out ballots], Donald Trump would’ve lost the election” in Texas. Texas!

Before the 2024 election, prompted by Trump’s evidence-free attack on mail-in ballots as inherently fraudulent, 22 states, according to the Brennan Center, imposed “38 new restrictions on the ability to vote absentee that were not in place in 2020…likely to most affect or already have disproportionately affected voters of color.” You’re shocked, right?

Texas’ requirement to add ID numbers to an absentee ballot caused the rejection rate to jump from 1% to 12%.

So, here’s the question we need to ask. If restrictions on mail-in balloting swung Texas to Trump, how did all these new restrictions affect the outcome of the vote in other states?

In 2020, an NPR study found the mail-in ballot rejection rate hit 13.8% during the Democratic primaries—a loss of one in seven ballots.

Take Georgia, where the Palast Investigative Fund spent months in on-the-ground investigations.

Here are photos of a Georgia voter, career military officer and Pentagon advisor Major Gamaliel Turner (Ret), demonstrating for young voters how to fill out an absentee ballot, emphasizing that it must be mailed in promptly. He did, seven days before the deadline. But we only recently learned that Georgia officials disqualified his ballot as received too late.

Major Gamaliel Turner (now retired) about to mail in his absentee ballot. The state of Georgia rejected it. (Photo: Palast Investigative Fund, 2024.)

In 2008, even before the majority of Democrats began voting by mail, when absentee balloting was much rarer, the federal government reported 488,136 mail-in ballots were rejected, almost all on picayune grounds (i.e. middle initial on signature missing etc.). An MIT study put the number of rejected mail-in ballots at 2.9%.

That’s the low-end of MIT’s estimate of mail-in ballots tossed out. Charles Stewart, Distinguished Professor of Political Science, author of the report, notes mail-in ballots requested and never received nor returned could raise the total mail-in ballot loss rate to 21%.

For 2024, that would total 14.1 million ballots that, effectively, vanished from the count.

The “failure to return” ballot was exacerbated in this election by the steep cut in ballot drop boxes, a method favored by urban (read, “Democratic”) voters. Black voters in Atlanta used ballot drop boxes extensively because they feared, with good reason, relying on the Post Office [see Major Turner’s story above].

In response, the Republican Governor of Georgia, Brian Kemp, signed SB 202 which slashed the number of drop boxes by 75% only in Black-majority counties and locked them away at night. These moves slashed mail-in and drop box balloting, used by the majority of Democrats in 2020, by nearly 90% in the 2024 race.

Even if deemed “on time,” ballots still face rejection. Marietta, Georgia, first-time voter Andrian Consonery Jr. told me his mail-in ballot was rejected because his signature supposedly didn’t match that on his registration. (I needn’t add, Consonery is Black.) In effect, Consonery was accused of forgery — a federal crime — not by the FBI but by self-appointed amateur sleuths. This challenge to mail-in ballots, part of a right-wing campaign, has gone viral.

Georgian Adrian Consonery Jr.’s mail-in ballot was challenged because of a false claim that his signature was forged. (Photo: Zach D. Roberts for the Palast Investigative Fund, 2024.)

In 2020, the federal government reported that 157,477 ballots were rejected for supposedly “mis-matched” signatures. That’s quite a crime wave — but without criminals.

And that’s before we get to the dozens of other attacks on voting that were freshly minted for the 2024 election, attacks aimed at voters of color.

The crucial statistic is that not everyone’s ballot gets disqualified. One study done for the United States Civil Rights Commission found that a Black person, such as Maj. Turner, will be 900% more likely to have their mail-in or in-person ballot disqualified than a white voter.

Now, let’s do some arithmetic. If we take the lowest end of the MIT ballot rejection rate, and only a tenth of the “lost” ballot rate, and then apply it to the number of mail-in and drop-box ballots, we can conservatively estimate that 2,121,000 mail-in votes went into the electoral dumpster.

Whose ballots? Democrats are 51% more likely than Republicans to vote by mail; and, given the racial disparity in ballot rejections, Trump’s swing-state margins begin to look shaky.

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The KKK Plan and the New Vigilantes

In 2020, the Palast Investigative Fund uncovered a whole new way to bring Jim Crow back to life: challenges to a citizen’s right to vote by a posse of self-proclaimed vote-fraud hunters.

Four years ago, the GOP took this new suppression method out for a test ride in Georgia when 88 Republican operatives — remember, these are not government officials — challenged the rights of over 180,000 Georgians to have their ballots counted. These vigilantes based their scheme on the program originally used by the Ku Klux Klan in 1946.

One challenged voter: Major Turner, the same voter whose mail-in ballot was disqualified in a later election.

In 2020, the Major’s ballot was challenged by the county Chairman of the Republican Party in Southern Georgia, Alton Russell. (Russell likes to dress up as infamous vigilante Doc Holliday, with a loaded six-gun in a holster.) In a (polite) confrontation we filmed between the Major and Russell, the GOP honcho admitted he had no evidence that Maj. Turner, nor any of the 4,000 others he challenged, should be denied the right to have their ballots counted.

Note: The Palast Fund contacted a sample of 800 of these challenged voters and found that, overwhelmingly, they were Americans of color.

In 2020, this KKK plan, adopted by the Trump organization, proved its value. In that election, Trump almost won Georgia, falling short by just 11,779 votes — only because local elections officials rejected most of the challenges. But for 2024, the Georgia’s Republican-controlled legislature changed the law to make it very difficult for officials to deny the challenges.

That emboldened the Trump-supported organization True the Vote to roll out the challenge to every swing state. In 2024, True the Vote signed up over 40,000 volunteer vigilantes. The organization crowed proudly that, by August of 2024, they’d already challenged a mind-blowing 317,886 voters in dozens of states. By Election Day this November, True the Vote projected it would have challenged over two million voters. In addition, Trump’s lawyer, Cleta Mitchell, founded Eagle AI to challenge hundreds of thousands more including in swing state Pennsylvania.

How many voters ultimately lost their ballots? Almost all voting officials we’ve contacted have refused to answer.

Placebo Ballots

Those voters who’d been challenged but mailed in their ballot would be unlikely to know their vote had been lost. Others who showed up in person at a poll would be told they could not vote on a regular ballot. These voters were sent away or forced to vote on a “provisional” ballot.

If you’ve been challenged or find you’ve been purged off the registration rolls, you’ll be offered one of these provisional ballots, paper ballots you place in a special envelope. Typically, you’ll be promised your registration will be checked and then your ballot will be counted. Bullshit. If you’re challenged, unless you personally contact or go into your county clerk’s office with ID and proof of address, your ballot goes into the electoral dumpster.

A better name for a “provisional” ballot would be “placebo” ballot. You think you’ve voted, but chances are, you did not, that is, your ballot wasn’t counted.

Here’s an ugly number: According to the US Elections Assistance Commission (EAC), in 2016, when 2.5 million provisional ballots were cast, a breathtaking 42.3% were never counted. Think about that. Over a million Americans lost their vote — though, notably, not one was charged attempting to vote illegally. And that was in 2016, before the vigilante challenges and before millions more had been purged from the rolls leading up to the 2024 election.

And here’s the statistic that matters most. Black, Hispanic or Asian-American voters are 300% more likely than white voters to be shunted to a “placebo” provisional ballot.

The Great Purge and the Poison Postcard

The polite term in government agencies is, “List Maintenance.” It’s best known as The Purge — when voters’ registrations are wiped off the rolls. The EAC keeps track of The Purge. It’s a big business. For example, before the 2022 election, when the data was last available, swing state North Carolina wiped 392,851 voters off the rolls.

The majority of removals were based on questionable, indeed, shockingly faulty information that a voter had moved their residence. I’m not talking about the 4.9 million voters purged because they’re dead, or eight million others whose residential move could be verified, nor those serving time in prison nor those ruled too crazy to vote.

I’m talking about a trick that has been perfected by politicians of both parties to eliminate voters of the wrong persuasion: the Poison Postcard. Here’s how it works: Targeted voters are mailed postcards by state elections officials. (Let’s remember, state voting chiefs, “Secretaries of State,” are almost to a one partisan hacks.) Voters who don’t sign and return the cards, which look like junk mail, will be purged.

The Poison Postcard response rate is close to nothing. In Arizona, according to the EAC, just one in ten postcards are returned. And in Georgia, the vote-saving response is barely above 1%. And that’s the way our partisan voting officials like it.

Were the millions of Americans purged before the 2024 election all fraudsters who should lose their right to vote? Direct marketing expert Mark Swedlund told us, “This only means that most people, especially young people, the poor and voters of color, simply ignore junk mail.”

With the help of Swedlund and the same experts used by Amazon — and believe me, Amazon knows exactly where you live — we took a deep dive into two states’ purge operations for the ACLU.

The state of Georgia had purged hundreds of thousands from the voter rolls on grounds they’d moved from their voting addresses. Our experts, going name by name through Georgia’s purge list, working from special data provided us by the US Postal Service, identified 198,351 Georgians who had been purged for moving had, in fact, not moved an inch from their legal voting address. The state’s only evidence these 198,351 voters had moved? They failed to return the Poison Postcard.

In 2020, I testified in federal court for the NAACP and RainbowPUSH, presenting our expert findings to get those voters, overweighted with minorities and young Georgians, back on the rolls. Unfortunately, the Trump’d-up court system now gives huge deference to a state’s voting operations, a trend which first took off in 2013 when the US Supreme Court defenestrated the Voting Rights Act.

The results have been devastating. According to the EAC data, before the 2024 election, 4,776,706 registrants were removed nationwide simply because they failed to return the postcard.

Also in 2020, the Palast Investigative Fund produced a technical report for Black Voters Matter Fund on a proposed purge of 153,779 voters in Wisconsin, a plan pushed by Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, a group financed by right-wing billionaires. For Black Voters Matter, we brought back our team of location experts who proved, name by name, that the proposed purge was wildly riddled with errors.

Notably, we found that the purged was aimed almost exclusively at African-Americans in Milwaukee and at students in Madison. The non-partisan Elections Board agreed with us, allowing those voters to cast ballots, with the result that Biden squeaked by Trump in Wisconsin by 20,682 votes. (Note: It was not our intention to elect Biden, but to allow the voters, not some Purge’n General, to pick our President.)

Unfortunately, before the 2024 election, the Poison Postcard Purge accelerated. This time, a new Elections Board in Wisconsin (10 electoral votes) decided to use the same discredited purge list to knock off 166,433 voters which, this time, we could not stop. Kamala Harris lost that state by just 29,397 votes. In Pennsylvania (19 electoral votes), the Poison Postcards wiped out 360,132 voters, three times Trump’s victory margin.

And before the vote this year, Georgia ramped up the purge, targeting an astonishing 875,000 voters, earning it the #1 ranking for “election integrity” by the ultra-right-wing Heritage Foundation.

I saw the purge in action in Savannah, Georgia, this October, where 900 Savannah voters, most of them Black, were challenged by one single “vigilante,” according to voting expert Carry Smith. Smith, who wrote her doctoral thesis on wrongful purges in Georgia, was herself on the hit list.

And more

We haven’t even touched on other ways that voters of color, college students and urban voters have come under attack. These include the rejection of new registrations and rejection of in-person votes as “spoiled” (i.e. rejected as unreadable), costing, according to the EAC, more than a million votes — rejections which our 25 years of investigations have found are way overweighted against the Democratic demographic.

After the 2012 election, I was able to calculate, with cold certainty, that 2,383,587 new voters had their registrations rejected; 488,136 legitimate absentee ballots were disqualified, and so on. In that election, a total of 5,901,814 citizens were blocked from voting or had their ballots disqualified. These stats were based on the hard data from the EAC which gathers detailed reports from the states.

Today, with new, sophisticated, and well-financed vote suppression operations, the number of voters purged and ballots disqualified are clearly far higher than the suppression count of 2012. Unfortunately, the EAC won’t release data, if it does at all, for at least a year. We’ve put in Open Records requests to the states, but today’s officials are stonewalling and slow-walking our requests for the data. In no other democracy are the vote totals — or, to be clear, the uncounted ballot totals — a state secret.

America deserves an answer to this question: Excluding a boost from Jim Crow vote suppression games, did Donald Trump win?

From the shockingly huge numbers we’ve discussed here of provisional and mail-in ballots disqualified, the postcard purge operation, the vigilante challenges and so on, we can say, with reasonable certainty, Trump lost — that is, would have lost both the Electoral College and popular vote totals absent suppression.

By how much?

For those who can’t sleep without my best estimate, let me apply the most conservative methodology possible, as I would do in a government investigation.

I’ve updated the 2012 suppression numbers with the newest available data. Not surprisingly, the suppression number has soared, in part because the number of voters has increased by 41.3 million since 2012. But principally, the votes “lost” also zoomed upward because of the massive increase in mail-in balloting by Democrats since 2012, and crucially, the effect of new Jim Crow voting restrictions. Given a minimum two-to-one racial and partisan disparity in voters purged and ballots disqualified, the 2024 “suppression factor” is no less than 4.596% of the total vote.

Those familiar with data mining will note that there is some double-counting in the 9 million voters and their ballots disqualified that I cited at the top of the article. In addition, we must recognize that many voters caught up in the purges and challenges would have cast their ballot for Trump. Therefore, I’ve conservatively cut in half the low end of the range of the calculation of votes suppressed to 2.3% to isolate the effect on Trump’s official victory margin.

In other words, vote suppression cost Kamala Harris no less than 3,565,000 votes. Harris would have topped Trump’s official total by 1.2 million. Most important, this 2.3% suppression factor undoubtedly cost Harris the states of Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Georgia. If not for the wholesale attack on votes and voters, Harris would have won the election with 286 Electoral votes.

Tech note from a numbers guy — and Martin Luther King

Until the Elections Assistance Commission gets updated figures from the states next year (and, under Trump, I doubt we will ever get those numbers), 3,565,000 votes lost to Harris is the estimate I would present in my role as a forensic expert in a courtroom as the lowest conceivable suppression factor.

I rarely make a big deal about my own credentials but, since the election, the Web has been flooded by amateur, arithmetic-defying speculation about computer hacking and other unsupported twaddle. Best to stick to hard, verifiable data. And that’s what I do.

For two decades, I was a forensic economist for government agencies including the US Justice Department; taught statistics at Indiana University; provided expert calculations of vote suppression for the ACLU, NAACP, and RainbowPUSH and won the Global Editors Award for my data journalism on vote suppression measurements for reports done for Al Jazeera, BBC, Rolling Stone and The Guardian. The numbers you get here are exactly what I’d present to a Federal court. In other words, kids, don’t do this at home…calculating the “un-count” requires expertise.

I make this point for another reason: The theory that “Elon Musk messed with the voting machines” is, unconsciously, unintentionally racist. With few exceptions, these silly speculations come from those who simply ignore not just the millions of votes officially reported as suppressed, their theories also ignore the horrifically painful experience of Black people turned away from the polls.

Here is a photo of Jessica Lawrence in tears, moments after her 92-year-old grandmother was tossed out of an Atlanta polling station, into a storm, because she’d been wrongfully purged. Any speculation about the nefarious cause of Trump’s must not leave out Jessica’s grandma nor the millions of other citizens of color who were wrongly barred from their ballot.

Jessica Lawrence at an Atlanta polling station just after her 92-year-old grandmother was denied a ballot. (Photo: David Ambrose for the Palast Investigative Fund, 2018.) See Ms. Jordan and Maj. Turner in the film, Vigilantes Inc: America’s New Vote Suppression Hitmen, available without charge on YouTube.

Now here’s the good news

We saw that in 2020 when, despite extreme, even felonious actions by Trump supporters to block, challenge and disqualify voters and ballots, the theft by suppression was defeated.

That was the work of voting rights groups challenging these attacks. The work was done in the courts and, more important, in the precincts, re-registering the purged, challenging the challenges, “curing” disqualified ballots.

The road is long but victory is certain. After the 2016 election, the Palast team uncovered a cruel, racist purge program called, “Interstate Crosscheck” that cost nearly a million voters, overwhelmingly minorities, their rights. This motivated the Rev. Jesse Jackson to launch a campaign that successfully shut down Crosscheck. Unquestionably, Joe Biden could not have won in 2020 without the Reverend saving literally hundreds of thousands of votes. The point is, they can’t suppress all the votes all the time.

In other words, Democracy can win, despite the 2.3% suppression headwind.

And that’s our job as Americans: to end the purges, the vigilante challenges, the ballot rejections and the attitude that this is all somehow OK.

Martin Luther King gave us our marching orders in 1965, in words just as important today.

“Let us march on ballot boxes, march on ballot boxes until race-baiters disappear from the political arena. I want to say to the people of America and the nations of the world, that we are not about to turn around. We are on the move now.”

[Fulham Broadway 16,968]

8 hours ago, Vesper said:

Trump Lost. Vote Suppression Won.
Here are the numbers...

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.

https://www.gregpalast.com/trump-lost-vote-suppression-won/

 

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.

Stay with me and I’ll give you the means, methods and, most important, the key calculations.

But if you’re expecting a sexy story about Elon Musk messing with vote-counting software from outer space, sorry, you won’t get that here.

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.

There are also the uncountable effects of the explosive growth of voter intimidation tactics including the bomb threats that closed 31 polling stations in Atlanta on Election Day.

America’s Nasty Little Secret

The nasty little secret of American democracy is that we don’t count all the votes. Nor let every citizen vote.

In 2024, especially, after an avalanche of new not-going-to-let-you-vote laws passed in almost every red state, the number of citizens Jim Crow’d out of their vote soared into the millions. According to the Brennan Center for Justice, since the 2020 election, “At least 30 states enacted 78 restrictive laws” to blockade voting. The race-targeted laws ran the gamut from shuttering drop boxes in Black-majority cities to, for the first time, allowing non-government self-appointed “vote fraud vigilantes” to challenge voters by the hundreds of thousands.

Throughout election seasons, The New York Times and NPR and establishment media write stories and editorials decrying vote suppression tactics, from new ID requirements to new restrictions on mail-in voting. But, notably, the mainstream press never, ever, not once, will say that these ugly racist attacks on voters changed the outcome of an election.

Question: If these vote suppression laws — notorious example: Georgia’s SB 202 — had no effect on election outcomes, then why did GOP legislators fight so hard to pass these laws? The answer is clear on the Brennan Center’s map of states that passed restrictive laws. It’s pretty much Trump’s victory map.

America Goes Postal

Let’s look at just one vote suppression operation in action.

In 2020, during the pandemic, America went postal. More than 43% of us voted by mail.

But it wasn’t easy. Harris County, Texas, home of Houston, tried to mail out ballots during the COVID epidemic on the grounds that voters shouldn’t die waiting in lines at polling stations. But then, the state’s Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton stopped this life-saving measure.

Why wouldn’t this GOP official let Houstonians vote safely? Maybe it’s because Houston has the largest number of Black voters of any city in America. Indeed, on Steve Bannon’s podcast, Paxton proudly stated, “Had we not done that [stopped Houston from sending out ballots], Donald Trump would’ve lost the election” in Texas. Texas!

Before the 2024 election, prompted by Trump’s evidence-free attack on mail-in ballots as inherently fraudulent, 22 states, according to the Brennan Center, imposed “38 new restrictions on the ability to vote absentee that were not in place in 2020…likely to most affect or already have disproportionately affected voters of color.” You’re shocked, right?

Texas’ requirement to add ID numbers to an absentee ballot caused the rejection rate to jump from 1% to 12%.

So, here’s the question we need to ask. If restrictions on mail-in balloting swung Texas to Trump, how did all these new restrictions affect the outcome of the vote in other states?

In 2020, an NPR study found the mail-in ballot rejection rate hit 13.8% during the Democratic primaries—a loss of one in seven ballots.

Take Georgia, where the Palast Investigative Fund spent months in on-the-ground investigations.

Here are photos of a Georgia voter, career military officer and Pentagon advisor Major Gamaliel Turner (Ret), demonstrating for young voters how to fill out an absentee ballot, emphasizing that it must be mailed in promptly. He did, seven days before the deadline. But we only recently learned that Georgia officials disqualified his ballot as received too late.

Major Gamaliel Turner (now retired) about to mail in his absentee ballot. The state of Georgia rejected it. (Photo: Palast Investigative Fund, 2024.)

In 2008, even before the majority of Democrats began voting by mail, when absentee balloting was much rarer, the federal government reported 488,136 mail-in ballots were rejected, almost all on picayune grounds (i.e. middle initial on signature missing etc.). An MIT study put the number of rejected mail-in ballots at 2.9%.

That’s the low-end of MIT’s estimate of mail-in ballots tossed out. Charles Stewart, Distinguished Professor of Political Science, author of the report, notes mail-in ballots requested and never received nor returned could raise the total mail-in ballot loss rate to 21%.

For 2024, that would total 14.1 million ballots that, effectively, vanished from the count.

The “failure to return” ballot was exacerbated in this election by the steep cut in ballot drop boxes, a method favored by urban (read, “Democratic”) voters. Black voters in Atlanta used ballot drop boxes extensively because they feared, with good reason, relying on the Post Office [see Major Turner’s story above].

In response, the Republican Governor of Georgia, Brian Kemp, signed SB 202 which slashed the number of drop boxes by 75% only in Black-majority counties and locked them away at night. These moves slashed mail-in and drop box balloting, used by the majority of Democrats in 2020, by nearly 90% in the 2024 race.

Even if deemed “on time,” ballots still face rejection. Marietta, Georgia, first-time voter Andrian Consonery Jr. told me his mail-in ballot was rejected because his signature supposedly didn’t match that on his registration. (I needn’t add, Consonery is Black.) In effect, Consonery was accused of forgery — a federal crime — not by the FBI but by self-appointed amateur sleuths. This challenge to mail-in ballots, part of a right-wing campaign, has gone viral.

Georgian Adrian Consonery Jr.’s mail-in ballot was challenged because of a false claim that his signature was forged. (Photo: Zach D. Roberts for the Palast Investigative Fund, 2024.)

In 2020, the federal government reported that 157,477 ballots were rejected for supposedly “mis-matched” signatures. That’s quite a crime wave — but without criminals.

And that’s before we get to the dozens of other attacks on voting that were freshly minted for the 2024 election, attacks aimed at voters of color.

The crucial statistic is that not everyone’s ballot gets disqualified. One study done for the United States Civil Rights Commission found that a Black person, such as Maj. Turner, will be 900% more likely to have their mail-in or in-person ballot disqualified than a white voter.

Now, let’s do some arithmetic. If we take the lowest end of the MIT ballot rejection rate, and only a tenth of the “lost” ballot rate, and then apply it to the number of mail-in and drop-box ballots, we can conservatively estimate that 2,121,000 mail-in votes went into the electoral dumpster.

Whose ballots? Democrats are 51% more likely than Republicans to vote by mail; and, given the racial disparity in ballot rejections, Trump’s swing-state margins begin to look shaky.

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The KKK Plan and the New Vigilantes

In 2020, the Palast Investigative Fund uncovered a whole new way to bring Jim Crow back to life: challenges to a citizen’s right to vote by a posse of self-proclaimed vote-fraud hunters.

Four years ago, the GOP took this new suppression method out for a test ride in Georgia when 88 Republican operatives — remember, these are not government officials — challenged the rights of over 180,000 Georgians to have their ballots counted. These vigilantes based their scheme on the program originally used by the Ku Klux Klan in 1946.

One challenged voter: Major Turner, the same voter whose mail-in ballot was disqualified in a later election.

In 2020, the Major’s ballot was challenged by the county Chairman of the Republican Party in Southern Georgia, Alton Russell. (Russell likes to dress up as infamous vigilante Doc Holliday, with a loaded six-gun in a holster.) In a (polite) confrontation we filmed between the Major and Russell, the GOP honcho admitted he had no evidence that Maj. Turner, nor any of the 4,000 others he challenged, should be denied the right to have their ballots counted.

Note: The Palast Fund contacted a sample of 800 of these challenged voters and found that, overwhelmingly, they were Americans of color.

In 2020, this KKK plan, adopted by the Trump organization, proved its value. In that election, Trump almost won Georgia, falling short by just 11,779 votes — only because local elections officials rejected most of the challenges. But for 2024, the Georgia’s Republican-controlled legislature changed the law to make it very difficult for officials to deny the challenges.

That emboldened the Trump-supported organization True the Vote to roll out the challenge to every swing state. In 2024, True the Vote signed up over 40,000 volunteer vigilantes. The organization crowed proudly that, by August of 2024, they’d already challenged a mind-blowing 317,886 voters in dozens of states. By Election Day this November, True the Vote projected it would have challenged over two million voters. In addition, Trump’s lawyer, Cleta Mitchell, founded Eagle AI to challenge hundreds of thousands more including in swing state Pennsylvania.

How many voters ultimately lost their ballots? Almost all voting officials we’ve contacted have refused to answer.

Placebo Ballots

Those voters who’d been challenged but mailed in their ballot would be unlikely to know their vote had been lost. Others who showed up in person at a poll would be told they could not vote on a regular ballot. These voters were sent away or forced to vote on a “provisional” ballot.

If you’ve been challenged or find you’ve been purged off the registration rolls, you’ll be offered one of these provisional ballots, paper ballots you place in a special envelope. Typically, you’ll be promised your registration will be checked and then your ballot will be counted. Bullshit. If you’re challenged, unless you personally contact or go into your county clerk’s office with ID and proof of address, your ballot goes into the electoral dumpster.

A better name for a “provisional” ballot would be “placebo” ballot. You think you’ve voted, but chances are, you did not, that is, your ballot wasn’t counted.

Here’s an ugly number: According to the US Elections Assistance Commission (EAC), in 2016, when 2.5 million provisional ballots were cast, a breathtaking 42.3% were never counted. Think about that. Over a million Americans lost their vote — though, notably, not one was charged attempting to vote illegally. And that was in 2016, before the vigilante challenges and before millions more had been purged from the rolls leading up to the 2024 election.

And here’s the statistic that matters most. Black, Hispanic or Asian-American voters are 300% more likely than white voters to be shunted to a “placebo” provisional ballot.

The Great Purge and the Poison Postcard

The polite term in government agencies is, “List Maintenance.” It’s best known as The Purge — when voters’ registrations are wiped off the rolls. The EAC keeps track of The Purge. It’s a big business. For example, before the 2022 election, when the data was last available, swing state North Carolina wiped 392,851 voters off the rolls.

The majority of removals were based on questionable, indeed, shockingly faulty information that a voter had moved their residence. I’m not talking about the 4.9 million voters purged because they’re dead, or eight million others whose residential move could be verified, nor those serving time in prison nor those ruled too crazy to vote.

I’m talking about a trick that has been perfected by politicians of both parties to eliminate voters of the wrong persuasion: the Poison Postcard. Here’s how it works: Targeted voters are mailed postcards by state elections officials. (Let’s remember, state voting chiefs, “Secretaries of State,” are almost to a one partisan hacks.) Voters who don’t sign and return the cards, which look like junk mail, will be purged.

The Poison Postcard response rate is close to nothing. In Arizona, according to the EAC, just one in ten postcards are returned. And in Georgia, the vote-saving response is barely above 1%. And that’s the way our partisan voting officials like it.

Were the millions of Americans purged before the 2024 election all fraudsters who should lose their right to vote? Direct marketing expert Mark Swedlund told us, “This only means that most people, especially young people, the poor and voters of color, simply ignore junk mail.”

With the help of Swedlund and the same experts used by Amazon — and believe me, Amazon knows exactly where you live — we took a deep dive into two states’ purge operations for the ACLU.

The state of Georgia had purged hundreds of thousands from the voter rolls on grounds they’d moved from their voting addresses. Our experts, going name by name through Georgia’s purge list, working from special data provided us by the US Postal Service, identified 198,351 Georgians who had been purged for moving had, in fact, not moved an inch from their legal voting address. The state’s only evidence these 198,351 voters had moved? They failed to return the Poison Postcard.

In 2020, I testified in federal court for the NAACP and RainbowPUSH, presenting our expert findings to get those voters, overweighted with minorities and young Georgians, back on the rolls. Unfortunately, the Trump’d-up court system now gives huge deference to a state’s voting operations, a trend which first took off in 2013 when the US Supreme Court defenestrated the Voting Rights Act.

The results have been devastating. According to the EAC data, before the 2024 election, 4,776,706 registrants were removed nationwide simply because they failed to return the postcard.

Also in 2020, the Palast Investigative Fund produced a technical report for Black Voters Matter Fund on a proposed purge of 153,779 voters in Wisconsin, a plan pushed by Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, a group financed by right-wing billionaires. For Black Voters Matter, we brought back our team of location experts who proved, name by name, that the proposed purge was wildly riddled with errors.

Notably, we found that the purged was aimed almost exclusively at African-Americans in Milwaukee and at students in Madison. The non-partisan Elections Board agreed with us, allowing those voters to cast ballots, with the result that Biden squeaked by Trump in Wisconsin by 20,682 votes. (Note: It was not our intention to elect Biden, but to allow the voters, not some Purge’n General, to pick our President.)

Unfortunately, before the 2024 election, the Poison Postcard Purge accelerated. This time, a new Elections Board in Wisconsin (10 electoral votes) decided to use the same discredited purge list to knock off 166,433 voters which, this time, we could not stop. Kamala Harris lost that state by just 29,397 votes. In Pennsylvania (19 electoral votes), the Poison Postcards wiped out 360,132 voters, three times Trump’s victory margin.

And before the vote this year, Georgia ramped up the purge, targeting an astonishing 875,000 voters, earning it the #1 ranking for “election integrity” by the ultra-right-wing Heritage Foundation.

I saw the purge in action in Savannah, Georgia, this October, where 900 Savannah voters, most of them Black, were challenged by one single “vigilante,” according to voting expert Carry Smith. Smith, who wrote her doctoral thesis on wrongful purges in Georgia, was herself on the hit list.

And more

We haven’t even touched on other ways that voters of color, college students and urban voters have come under attack. These include the rejection of new registrations and rejection of in-person votes as “spoiled” (i.e. rejected as unreadable), costing, according to the EAC, more than a million votes — rejections which our 25 years of investigations have found are way overweighted against the Democratic demographic.

After the 2012 election, I was able to calculate, with cold certainty, that 2,383,587 new voters had their registrations rejected; 488,136 legitimate absentee ballots were disqualified, and so on. In that election, a total of 5,901,814 citizens were blocked from voting or had their ballots disqualified. These stats were based on the hard data from the EAC which gathers detailed reports from the states.

Today, with new, sophisticated, and well-financed vote suppression operations, the number of voters purged and ballots disqualified are clearly far higher than the suppression count of 2012. Unfortunately, the EAC won’t release data, if it does at all, for at least a year. We’ve put in Open Records requests to the states, but today’s officials are stonewalling and slow-walking our requests for the data. In no other democracy are the vote totals — or, to be clear, the uncounted ballot totals — a state secret.

America deserves an answer to this question: Excluding a boost from Jim Crow vote suppression games, did Donald Trump win?

From the shockingly huge numbers we’ve discussed here of provisional and mail-in ballots disqualified, the postcard purge operation, the vigilante challenges and so on, we can say, with reasonable certainty, Trump lost — that is, would have lost both the Electoral College and popular vote totals absent suppression.

By how much?

For those who can’t sleep without my best estimate, let me apply the most conservative methodology possible, as I would do in a government investigation.

I’ve updated the 2012 suppression numbers with the newest available data. Not surprisingly, the suppression number has soared, in part because the number of voters has increased by 41.3 million since 2012. But principally, the votes “lost” also zoomed upward because of the massive increase in mail-in balloting by Democrats since 2012, and crucially, the effect of new Jim Crow voting restrictions. Given a minimum two-to-one racial and partisan disparity in voters purged and ballots disqualified, the 2024 “suppression factor” is no less than 4.596% of the total vote.

Those familiar with data mining will note that there is some double-counting in the 9 million voters and their ballots disqualified that I cited at the top of the article. In addition, we must recognize that many voters caught up in the purges and challenges would have cast their ballot for Trump. Therefore, I’ve conservatively cut in half the low end of the range of the calculation of votes suppressed to 2.3% to isolate the effect on Trump’s official victory margin.

In other words, vote suppression cost Kamala Harris no less than 3,565,000 votes. Harris would have topped Trump’s official total by 1.2 million. Most important, this 2.3% suppression factor undoubtedly cost Harris the states of Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Georgia. If not for the wholesale attack on votes and voters, Harris would have won the election with 286 Electoral votes.

Tech note from a numbers guy — and Martin Luther King

Until the Elections Assistance Commission gets updated figures from the states next year (and, under Trump, I doubt we will ever get those numbers), 3,565,000 votes lost to Harris is the estimate I would present in my role as a forensic expert in a courtroom as the lowest conceivable suppression factor.

I rarely make a big deal about my own credentials but, since the election, the Web has been flooded by amateur, arithmetic-defying speculation about computer hacking and other unsupported twaddle. Best to stick to hard, verifiable data. And that’s what I do.

For two decades, I was a forensic economist for government agencies including the US Justice Department; taught statistics at Indiana University; provided expert calculations of vote suppression for the ACLU, NAACP, and RainbowPUSH and won the Global Editors Award for my data journalism on vote suppression measurements for reports done for Al Jazeera, BBC, Rolling Stone and The Guardian. The numbers you get here are exactly what I’d present to a Federal court. In other words, kids, don’t do this at home…calculating the “un-count” requires expertise.

I make this point for another reason: The theory that “Elon Musk messed with the voting machines” is, unconsciously, unintentionally racist. With few exceptions, these silly speculations come from those who simply ignore not just the millions of votes officially reported as suppressed, their theories also ignore the horrifically painful experience of Black people turned away from the polls.

Here is a photo of Jessica Lawrence in tears, moments after her 92-year-old grandmother was tossed out of an Atlanta polling station, into a storm, because she’d been wrongfully purged. Any speculation about the nefarious cause of Trump’s must not leave out Jessica’s grandma nor the millions of other citizens of color who were wrongly barred from their ballot.

Jessica Lawrence at an Atlanta polling station just after her 92-year-old grandmother was denied a ballot. (Photo: David Ambrose for the Palast Investigative Fund, 2018.) See Ms. Jordan and Maj. Turner in the film, Vigilantes Inc: America’s New Vote Suppression Hitmen, available without charge on YouTube.

Now here’s the good news

We saw that in 2020 when, despite extreme, even felonious actions by Trump supporters to block, challenge and disqualify voters and ballots, the theft by suppression was defeated.

That was the work of voting rights groups challenging these attacks. The work was done in the courts and, more important, in the precincts, re-registering the purged, challenging the challenges, “curing” disqualified ballots.

The road is long but victory is certain. After the 2016 election, the Palast team uncovered a cruel, racist purge program called, “Interstate Crosscheck” that cost nearly a million voters, overwhelmingly minorities, their rights. This motivated the Rev. Jesse Jackson to launch a campaign that successfully shut down Crosscheck. Unquestionably, Joe Biden could not have won in 2020 without the Reverend saving literally hundreds of thousands of votes. The point is, they can’t suppress all the votes all the time.

In other words, Democracy can win, despite the 2.3% suppression headwind.

And that’s our job as Americans: to end the purges, the vigilante challenges, the ballot rejections and the attitude that this is all somehow OK.

Martin Luther King gave us our marching orders in 1965, in words just as important today.

“Let us march on ballot boxes, march on ballot boxes until race-baiters disappear from the political arena. I want to say to the people of America and the nations of the world, that we are not about to turn around. We are on the move now.”

I arranged for Ivanka to sit in Putins private chair at his desk and office in the Kremlin. I will get Putin on this program and we will get Donald elected. We both know no one else knows how to pull this off without stupidity or greed getting in the way. I know how to play it and we will get this done. Buddy our boy can become President of the USA and we can engineer it. I will get all of Putins team to buy in on this, I will."

FELIX SATER

Trump’s financial broker and “Senior Advisor” was a Russian convicted felon r, widely known as a mafia figure who once stabbed someone in the face with a broken margarita glass, requiring over 100 stitches. Sater helped set up shell companies, and arranged funding for Trump’s projects, including plans for Trump Tower Moscow. He’s also part of Putin’s inner circle. 

[Fernando 6,500]

23 hours ago, Fulham Broadway said:

Think it is only 'some people'  many still see the US as a big bully especially since they released papers from the 90s -and blame the US for it being a violent country.

According to author Robin Kirk, most Americans in 2003 remained naïve about the role of the United States in Colombia's historical development and the nation's continuing violence. 

''US military assistance may have actually worsened domestic violence in Columbia by introducing a higher level of paramilitary attacks as well as decreasing anti-narcotic operations. Also, empirical evidence suggests that US aid does not help reduce violence related to the production of drug crops such as coca.

Anyway, Trumps threats of tariffs seems to have a result -I just heard that Colombia will allow flights to land now. 

 

Maybe in your side. But in Colombia a USA-Colombia relation is vital. 

The people who pick Petro are now regretting that they voted for that guy. He is one of the worst president I ever seen from Colombia, and he is such a shame to Colombia. 

What Trump did was smart, he used his power to fold Petro as Petro would not stand with that stance for a while, his people would have revolted against him. 

Edited 11 hours ago by Fernando

[Fulham Broadway 16,968]

38 minutes ago, Fernando said:

Maybe in your side. But in Colombia a USA-Colombia relation is vital. 

The people who pick Petro are now regretting that they voted for that guy. He is one of the worst president I ever seen from Colombia, and he is such a shame to Colombia. 

What Trump did was smart, he used his power to fold Petro as Petro would not stand with that stance for a while, his people would have revolted against him. 

Dont know much about Petro, Trump may be 'smart' but threatening Russia with tariffs -either White House briefings are dumb, or he is, because there is no current trade with them. 😁

Trump is quite an unsavory character...

His 'charitable foundation' is likely to be shut down for multiple examples of fraud.

Trump 'University' scammed legions of vulnerable people out of their money.

He had an affair with a pornstar and paid her to keep quiet -- she says she was also threatened with physical violence.

His ex-wife attested in court documents that he brutally raped her while tearing out her hair after he didn't like the hair replacement doctor she recommended.

He bragged, on tape, about sexually assaulting multiple women.

Hundreds of people hired by Trump say he simply decided not to pay them for their work -- including dishwashers, painters and waiters, some of whom were making minimum wage.

He has been sued, and forced to pay out settlements, over a hundred times....