Will Jim Crow Strip and Flip the Alabama Senate Race? Or Will Yesterday's Major Court Victory Stop That From Happening?

By Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman, Solartopia

12 December 17

 

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UPDATE:
Voting rights victory lasted just 9 hours: Republican judges overturn ruling to prevent ballot-box stuffing
By Greg Palast, Greg Palast's Website

I hope you savored the moment. Yesterday, Monday December 11, voting rights advocate John Brakey won a court order – in Montgomery, Alabama no less – requiring every county to keep copies of their ballots after the voting Tuesday.

Now, you may think that in a democracy, in the United States of America, in the 21st Century, you wouldn’t simply throw away ballots, announce a winner, and say, “trust us, we counted the ballots fairly.”

But this is not exactly America, nor the 21st Century.  This is Alabama; Alabama after the 2013 Supreme Court ruling that gutted the Voting Rights Act.

Then, by 6pm Alabama time, the voting rights victory dance came to an end. GOP state officials, in an "ex-parte" (i.e. private) meeting with an Alabama Supreme Court judge, obtained a "stay" of the ballot protection, effectively killing it. Alabama counties may now destroy ballot images, destroy any record of the true vote.

But they’ll tell you the winner: Likely Republican Judge Roy Moore, the former chief of the court that just blocked any possible challenge to a suspect election.

Even without Judge Moore’s cronies taking away this protection of voter ballots, the GOP had nine other methods already in motion to prevent a true and fair election. If the Democrat Doug Jones loses, it won’t be to Judge Moore; rather, it will be to Jim Crow and the ten little cheats perfected by the GOP.

Ballot-box stuffing

The TRO (Temporary Restraining Order) that Brakey won, then lost, would have stopped what I call the “Baldwin Ballot Bandit” trick or, as my co-author Bobby Kennedy calls it, “good old ballot box stuffing.”

Background:  In 2002, Gov. Don Siegelman won a close re-election. But, after the Associated Press announced the result, rural Republican Baldwin County locked the courthouse doors. Beginning at midnight, GOP officials claimed to have counted thousands of ballots that they mysteriously “found”—enough to flip the election.  No one was allowed to see those ballots—if they even existed.

This is what the Brakey TRO intended to stop.

So, how will they steal it? Let me count the ways (nine of them).

The ID con.  Within hours of the Supreme Court slicing up the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Alabama passed a law requiring all voters to have a photo ID from a DMV (Department of Motor Vehicles).  And the very next day, the state shut down almost every DMW in the ten Black-Belt counties.

“Caging.”  It’s a felony crime, but that didn’t stop Judge Moore’s campaign chief, Brett Doster, from committing this vote theft crime for the George W. Bush campaign in 2004.  I know, because I have Doster’s own confidential emails.
(How I got them – well, that’s another story. You’ll just have to read the book.) Here’s a bit of one of the emails.  Bobby Kennedy Jr explains how this ‘caging’ trick steals votes (from The Best Democracy Money Can Buy):

Crosscheck.  In 2015 I got a call from Hank Sanders of Selma, Alabama.  His name was missing from the voter rolls.  That’s Senator Hank Sanders.  Despite his post, he’d been removed mysteriously.  I flew down and solved the mystery.  The perp:  Donald Trump’s operative, Kris Kobach of Kansas.

Kobach created a list of 239,801 Alabamians he tagged as “potential” duplicate voters.  I got my hands on about a third of that list – how? don’t ask – and it’s overwhelmingly names of Black, Hispanic and Asian-American voters.  Yet, Alabama has arrested not one double voter.  It’s Jim Crow all over again.

“Spoiling.”  The Alabama ballot has nothing on the ballot but the Senate race and, in some counties, a local referendum.  But it also has a box for “party-line” votes.  Vote for “Democratic Party” and also vote for the Democratic candidate, your vote can be tossed in the “spoilage” bin, not counted, because they can decide, arbitrarily, that you “over-voted” – voted twice.  It’s a technical gotcha that is used selectively…i.e. against Black voters.

I saw the “over-vote” spoilage trick eliminate 700 Al Gore votes in Gadsden County, Florida in 2000.  (That’s more than the 537 votes that supposedly elected George W. Bush.)

And I saw it again in November 2016 in Detroit, Michigan, where 70,355 ballots were not counted (in part, because of the same over-vote trick).  Throwing out those Detroit ballots gave Donald Trump a supposed 10,700 margin to win Michigan.

OK, let’s review:  There’s

1. Ballot stuffing
2. Crosschecking
3. Caging
4. Spoiling
5. Blocking (the ID con)...

...and five more tricks, including that old GOP standby, purging “ex-cons” not allowed to vote.  Except I’ve yet to find an ex-con purge list that’s anything other than a con itself.

I simply can’t describe every trick in this small space.  You’ll have to read the book or see the film.

There’s one certain way to stop these vote suppression games.  One candidate, named Barack Obama, told our team:  You can’t steal all the votes all the time.  Turn out so massively, they just can’t steal it.

Martin Luther King Jr led 35,000 marchers over the Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, to the capital Montgomery.  Along the way, four marchers were murdered by the Klan.  But by time the marchers got to the capital, the Voting Rights Act was on its way into law.

A young Hank Sanders was there.  Last year, making the film with him, the elder Senator Sanders demanded I walk over the Pettus bridge with him.  “You have to walk over the bridge every chance you get—because the right to vote is always in jeopardy.”

We will see if enough Alabama citizens will cross that bridge tomorrow to overcome the trickery and flim-flam that Alabama calls an election.

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hile the whole world watches Tuesday’s Alabama US Senate election, race-based battles behind the scenes could decide the outcome.

They focus on likely stripping of voter rolls to prevent African-Americans from casting their rightful ballots , and flipping the electronic outcome should that prove insufficient.

But election protection activists have just won a major court victory that could make electronically flipping the election more difficult.  An in-depth feature will follow on that tonight.

The national Democratic Party has poured significant resources into this race. We hope it will provide careful scrutiny on whether legitimate citizens are allowed to vote, and on how the votes are actually counted.

In particular, we urge that there be no definitive concession shy of a full recount, and of public hearings on who was allowed the right to vote and who was denied it, including access to regular rather than provisional ballots.

Three key voter access issues include:

1. The state recently passed legislation making it easier for ex-felons to vote. But critics charge there has been no significant official attempt to actually notify ex-felons of the change. A court has ruled that the state is not obligated to make such an effort ;
2. The state has imposed strict voter ID laws that could make it harder for citizens of color to vote. The state has also shut motor vehicle offices in areas where black voters are likely to apply for credentials that would allow them to cast ballots ;
3. With an intense chilling effect,  Alabama’s Republican secretary of state has threatened felony prosecution against several hundred citizens who may have switched party affiliation in the recent primaries

There is also significant concern over the nature of the ballot and the potential for a recount.

Election protection activist John Brakey has pointed out that most of the machines currently used in  Alabama can produce an electronic ballot image that is usable for recounts. But in a letter to Brakey, Alabama’s secretary of state said he may not require the use of this feature.

Brakey and others were in court today demanding that the state’s ballots be reliably counted, and that the electronic ballot images be created and preserved for a possible recount.

Brakey reported to the Free Press at 1:18pm on Monday, Dec. 11 that he won a TRO (Temporary Restraining Order) in Alabama court to force the Secretary of State to preserve the ballot images.

This is essential since the ballot design in Alabama has been called into question by election integrity activists like Mimi Kennedy. The ballot design lends itself to “overvote” problems. The ballot allows voters to vote a straight party ticket, even though in the vast majority of counties there is only the Roy Moore-Doug Jones special U.S. special election on the ballot.

But the ballot also then allows you to vote for the candidate. If you select the straight party vote and the candidate vote – the machines are likely to read this as an “overvote” and cancel out the vote. The machines can be programmed to not accept an overvote.

The only way to resolve this is to compare the ballots with the ballot images.

This campaign, of course, has been infamously unsettled by multiple allegations of sexual misconduct leveled at the Republican candidate Roy Moore. Moore has been strongly endorsed by “conservative Christians” and by Donald Trump, who is currently accused of sexual assault by some 19 women.

The stakes could hardly be higher. The 52-48 Republican margin in the US Senate would shrink to a single vote should Democrat Doug Jones win the seat. He would also become the first Democrat elected to the Senate from Alabama since Richard Shelby, who switched parties and has recently said Alabama can “do better” than his fellow Republican Roy Moore.

About a quarter of Alabama’s five million citizens are black. Should most of them vote, and have their votes actually counted, they could decide the election.

But Alabama’s long Jim Crow tradition weighs heavily against that happening.

There will likely be an “official” outcome on Tuesday. But who gets that crucial seat may actually turn on a willingness to fight for a fair turnout and to guarantee an accurate vote count.

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Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman co-wrote The Strip & Flip Disaster of America's Stolen Elections: Five Jim Crows & Electronic Election Theft (www.freepress.org).

Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.