Greg Palast on Trump/GOP stealing the election . . .

I have no doubt Trump will add many a new wrinkle to the old GOP playbook of dirty tricks, and that he’s weaponizing his CIA/FBI and every agency he can muster . . . plus internationally.

But Palast talks more about old-school voter suppression tactics, which are battle-tested and all too successful. I posted just a section of the interview. It’s worth reading (or listening to) the whole thing.

https://www.salon.com/2020/02/28/investigative-journalist-greg-palast-how-trump-will-steal-the-2020-election/

Investigative journalist Greg Palast: How Trump will steal the 2020 election: Reporter who uncovered Georgia vote suppression says Trump will cheat again, and Dems will try to stop Bernie

Excerpt:

How does one go about rigging an election?

Not the way people most people believe. It isn’t done by some guy pressing a lever and changing the vote from blue to red. Rigging an election is usually done by blocking people from casting ballots or not counting the ballots they cast. For example, and these are hard numbers from the federal government, more than 2 million provisional ballots were cast in the United States. Most white people, unless they live in California, have never heard of a provisional ballot, but those types of ballots are handed out like candy in black and Hispanic precincts. These provisional ballots are just what they sound like, “provisional.” A person’s name is not on the voter rolls. So rather than have a person scream and holler and pound the desk and say, “Why is my name missing? I’ve voted here for 50 years!” they are told, “Don’t worry. Here’s a provisional ballot. Fill this out and we’ll count that later.” But those votes are not counted later. Over a million provisional ballots were never counted in each of the last two presidential elections.

Absentee ballots are another problem. In the United States there are about 30 million people who mail in their ballots. This year that number will be closer to 60 million. Many of those ballots will never be counted. And then machines break down. Where do the machines break? Where everything breaks down. In the barrio, in the ghetto. Underresourced schools, bad hospitals — that all equals broken voting machines.

A person’s vote in those poor areas is not being changed. The U.S. Civil Rights Commission discovered that the chance your vote will “spoil’ is 900% higher if you’re black than if you’re white. The votes don’t get counted. People are not allowed to vote. It’s not random at all. This is a violently racial system.

Demographics are against the Republican Party. Their ideas are unpopular. Their solution is to maintain a type of American apartheid. The only way for Trump and his Republicans to stay in power is to keep nonwhites and other people who oppose them from voting. What are some specific examples of the Republican Party rigging elections to achieve their goals?

The following is very important. Georgia in 2018 was the test drive for the theft of 2020 by Donald Trump and the Republican Party. All across America — in 20 states and perhaps more — there is a new system of purging the voter rolls which will change the 2020 elections. There has been a massive increase in voter purges through an initiative called “use it or lose it.” So for example, in Georgia, if you miss a couple of elections and they mailed you a postcard and you didn’t return it, you lost your vote. That is a Jim Crow tactic which is illegal under the National Voter Registration Act. They used to stop black people from voting using such tactics.

What is happening in Georgia? How come Republicans are removing people who have not voted? The answer is they’re saying that not returning the postcard is evidence that a given voter moved. “They missed two elections. They didn’t return a card. Obviously, they’ve moved.” Is that true? For my Salon piece in 2018 I went to the No. 1 experts on demography and where people actually live. Who are the experts on that subject? Amazon, eBay and American Express. I asked those experts to look at the data and then to tell me who moved In Georgia.

The experts went through the Georgia purge list and found out that exactly 340,134 voters had not ever moved from their original registration address. Over a third of a million voters were removed for leaving Georgia, or leaving their county, and had never actually moved away at all. Stacey Abrams put up a ton of money to go even deeper and found another 100,000 people who were wrongly purged. You’re talking close to half a million people who were wrongly purged for moving. Based on my research, that is why Stacey Abrams said that she had won the governorship of Georgia — she just wouldn’t be inaugurated.

Now the Republicans are trying to do the same thing in Michigan, Ohio and Wisconsin. All over the country. The Republicans and Trump are going to steal 2020 by saying that millions of people have moved, don’t qualify for voting. They won’t know until they show up to vote. Then those voters will be given a provisional ballot that won’t get counted. These people will think they voted when they have not — and they will lose their vote. If they send in an absentee ballot and they’re marked as having moved, their ballot will be thrown away.