We’re all wound up pretty tight right now. I know this sounds like CT, but I just watched Amy Goodman interviewing Greg Palast on Democracy Now! Palast has investigated, and has a huge spreadsheet of minority voters stricken off the rolls to back up his story. I think this will be on front pages and nightly news soon.
I got that from YouTube; these quotes are from the Democracy Now! website:
In an on-the-ground report from the battleground state of Ohio, investigative reporter Greg Palast has uncovered the latest in vote suppression tactics led by Republicans that could threaten the integrity of the vote in Ohio and North Carolina. On some polling machines, audit protection functions have been shut off, and African Americans and Hispanics are being scrubbed from the voter rolls through a system called Crosscheck. "It’s a brand-new Jim Crow," Palast says. "Today, on Election Day, they’re not going to use white sheets to keep way black voters. Today, they’re using spreadsheets." . . .
[Greg Palast explains how, after questions about vote-rigging in Ohio in 2004, they got brand new state of the art voting machines, which take pictures and timestamps of every virtual ballot cast. But the Republicans have turned off all the machines’ security features — and a Republican judge just ruled that it would be too hard for the election workers to point and click to turn them back on again.
Then Palast covers the Republican war against early voting, and the effects on GOTV efforts in minority communities in Ohio.
But the biggest fraud in the story is the spreadsheet being shared across 30 Republican run state governments, listing 1/6 of the minority voters in the US, and claiming that 1 million of them are trying to vote twice in different districts. The Republicans did something like this in Florida in 2000 — they found people who had names similar to felons, then struck them from the voter rolls without telling them. State governments appear to have done the same to these million (mostly) minority voters today, for having names similar to voters in other states. Looking at the spreadsheets, you can see that Republicans were hunting for names that sound African American or Hispanic.]
GREG PALAST: Reflecting Trump’s claim of multiple-voting Democrats, GOP-controlled states have purged nearly 1 million voters accused of voting or registering in two states. Ohio’s Republican secretary of state has a secret list of a whopping 497,000 double-voting suspects. We got our hands on this confidential list, including such would-be criminal voters as Donald Alexander Webster Jr., who supposedly voted a second time in Virginia as Donald Eugene Webster Sr.
[Palast then interviews Donald Alexander Webster Jr.]
GREG PALAST: In fact, nearly 2 million voters on the list, called Crosscheck, have middle names that don’t match—like this one: Maria Isabel Hernandez is supposed to be the same voter as Maria Cristina Hernandez. Who’s on the list? Names like Hernandez, Wong, Garcia, Jackson.
Our experts have calculated that fully one in six voters of color are on the Republican blacklist.
We’ve asked voting rights attorney Fitrakis why Ohio’s Republicans would use this Crosscheck scheme.
ROBERT FITRAKIS: He knows what he’s doing is illegal. What he’s doing is counting on bigotry to get away with it. He’s picking first and last names only, because he doesn’t want to actually match people by using the middle name. He wants to purge blacks and Hispanics. And he’s trying to make Ohio winnable in the only way he knows how: by stealing American citizens’ votes. . . .
AMY GOODMAN: And Greg Palast joins us now from Columbus, Ohio. Greg, thanks so much for that report, Rolling Stone investigative reporter. Explain further this Crosscheck list and what happens when people come up against it. Do they know they’re coming up against it?
GREG PALAST: No, they don’t. It’s really devious. And remember, the lists are secret. You know, you could tell from my hat that I’m an investigative reporter, so I got a hold of their secret list, Amy. There are 7 million names on it, 7.2 million Americans suspected of voting twice. And about 1 million—from the information we received from Virginia, about 1 million will find their names missing today when they go to vote. They’ll be given provisional ballots, which, if they’re missing from the voter rolls, fair or not, they lose their vote. So about one in seven of the 7 million are going to be without a vote today. And 30 Republican states concentrated in Ohio and in North Carolina. This could flip the Senate. Very good chance that this alone could flip the Senate. [ed. If Comey hasn’t already]
AMY GOODMAN: Explain again Donald Webster’s story. And did this happen this year?
GREG PALAST: Oh, yeah. No, this is—we just filmed him for—actually, for my movie. And his name is Donald Alexander Webster Jr. And according to the GOP blacklist, he is supposedly registered a second time to vote as Donald Eugene Webster Sr. Now, it’s not just—at least 2 million of the names are, on their face, mismatched. And they say they use Social Security numbers to match people and say, "Oh, these are double voters." But those Social Security numbers are absolutely not used and absolutely missing. And it’s because we got the list that we found out that they are removing literally a million people without any evidence and without even—you have to understand, they’re not notifying people: "You are accused of voting twice." They’re just going, poof, you’re gone. Your problem. This is—this is one of the biggest—this is the biggest purge game I’ve seen since Florida knocked off the fake felons, which I discovered back in 2000, accusing black men of being criminals and who can’t vote, but in fact their only crime was voting while black. At least they put an F next to their names so they knew that they were falsely accused of being felons. You don’t know why you’re removed. You’re marked inactive, or you simply vanish.
If you haven’t already, go watch the video at the top of this diary. And read Democracy Now!, on their website, or watch clips on YouTube: Amy Goodman and Rachel Maddow are the best TV anchors in the US.