1,913,369 Ballots Thrown Away, How Trump Did - and Will - Disqualify Your Vote

By Greg Palast, adapted from his new book, How Trump Stole 2020

25 July 20

 

The Article below is excerpted for Greg Palast’s explosive new book How Trump Stole 2020 . - MA/RSN

t’s official: 1,913,369 ballots were cast but never counted in the 2016 presidential race. That’s from the US Elections Assistance Commission.

And not just anyone’s ballot gets tossed into the electoral dumpster. The US Civil Rights Commission took a look at Florida’s throw-away pile and calculated that your chance of having your vote simply go uncounted, “spoiled,” is 900% higher if you’re Black than if you’re white.

Trump’s call for an army of 50,000 vigilantes is laughable: some schmuck in a Hawaiian shirt and MAGA cap won’t scare off voters of color. But 50,000 challengers, challenging every single ballot for Biden – that could succeed. It did for Trump in Michigan in 2016.

Here’s how Michigan – and so the Presidency – was stolen four years ago.

This little chapter from How Trump Stole 2020 tells you how they did it in 2016 … and can do it again in 2020:

Michigan Michigass

Here’s what you know: In 2016, Donald Trump won Michigan by 10,704 votes. Officially.

Here’s what you don’t know: 75,355 ballots were never counted. That’s official, too. Just “spoilage,” that is, ballots that were, for some technical reason, un-tallied.

But not just anyone’s vote “spoiled.” Most of these vanished votes were cast in Detroit – where only one in ten city residents are white. Motown. Not exactly Trump-ville.

Exit polls showed Clinton won Michigan. And now the pollsters were apologizing for their “mistake.”

I didn’t buy it. If you counted those ballots in the dumpsters in Detroit, Clinton would have won. And if this pattern held in the other two states’ exit polls that reported she won, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, Clinton should have won the Electoral College.

I’m not sure what’s wrong with me. The election was over. Hillary and hubby had moved on to lucrative book contracts, six-figure speaking gigs, and their “charity.” Trump was triumphant and the country, too, had moved on.

But it bothered me, the 75,355 ballots no one counted in Michigan.

The usual outlets for my investigations, like Rolling Stone, weren’t bothered either. They had “moved on” too. So I borrowed a few more bucks from my pension plan, begged my readers for some spare change, and bought a ticket for Detroit.

To do this investigation, I needed a break. And I got it: a surprise call from Jill Stein. The Green Party Presidential candidate. She offered me a scoop. Stein was ready to raise $9 million for re-counts in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan to prove that Trump lost – that is, if you counted all the votes in those states. She could literally overturn Trump’s election.

I broke the story, she raised the $9 million in days, and the recount began.

But “recount” is the wrong word. In Michigan, the funds were meant for counting those 75,355 ballots that were never counted in the first place.

In Michigan, you vote on paper ballots – which you shove into a scanner to get counted. But a funny thing happened in Detroit: 87 machines broke down, they could not read the ballots. Once in Detroit, I met with information specialist Carlos Garcia. He told me his precinct’s scanner was already busted when he arrived at the opening of voting at 7 a.m. It was finally fixed at 9:30 a.m. He stayed and saw that those ballots cast during the morning vote rush, while the machine was broken, were never run through the scanner, never recorded.

That non-count was repeated throughout the city. It was easy to catch ... because the number of ballots in the broken machines did not match the total of ballots these machines said it counted. But – ready for this? – the Republican Attorney General ruled that if the number of physical ballots did not match the scanner count, these precincts could not be re-counted. Get that? The precincts with the missing count – the ones you’d want to review – were barred from the re-count.

Occupied Territories

One f’d-up machine in a precinct is bad luck. No big deal. But 87 broken machines, 87 machines not counting thousands of ballots, is a very big deal, an electoral crime wave. A stolen election.

And they knew it. Republican state officials knew before Election Day that Detroit’s scanning machines were already busted, dysfunctional, or likely not to survive the day. Well before November 2016, the Detroit City Clerk Janice Winfrey pleaded to fund her budget to replace the bad ballot scanners. But there was a problem: Detroit was bankrupt – and every penny spent had to be approved by “managers,” overlords appointed by the Republican Governor Rick Snyder.

In 2016, Detroit was an Occupied Territory, as was Flint, Michigan. In Flint, the State-appointed managers cut the budget for the water system – and poisoned Flint’s kids with lead. The stories of Detroit scanners and the Flint water supply go together. If you’re going to poison someone’s children, you’d better take away their right to vote against the poisoning.

The Michigan ballot count was Jim Crow’d by bad scanners, and Trump was triumphant. But Jill Stein was going to spoil the celebration. Her recount would pay for an extraordinary machine that could read those uncounted ballots: the human eyeball.

But something funny was happening at the government re-count centers.

Whistleblower

Late November in Michigan sucks. From a Hampton Inn on a truck route north of the city, it was a long slog through dirty slush and wet snow to meet a whistleblower at a roadhouse bar, and a couple stiff drinks to get her to loosen up, to talk without a stutter or fear on camera. “Sue” told me she faced retribution in her white suburb, even from in-laws who were not happy about her blowing the whistle.

Sue is a computer programmer who thought it would be interesting, and just a good thing to do, to volunteer for the recount operation at the county building. She didn’t even have a strong preference in the election.

What she experienced disturbed her enormously:

We saw a lot of ballots that weren’t originally counted because those don’t scan into the machine.

Ballot reviewers were adding previously uncounted ballots to the Clinton column; and Trump operatives were challenging every Clinton vote and every decision for Clinton. They are creating chaos and slowing up the process, and making up nonsense rules to disqualify ballots. At the same time, the Democratic Party had brought in “observers” [who] refused to take part in the ballot count nor even bother to get in the way of the GOP obstructers.

Despite all the obstruction, it was clear that if the count went ahead unimpeded, Trump would lose Michigan. So Trump did the only thing he could do: stop the count.

Get the rest of the story … in How Trump Stole 2020. And learn how to steal it back.

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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.

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This Is What Happens When the War on Terror Is Turned Inward, on America

By Hamilton Nolan, Guardian UK

25 July 20

Trump has realized that our vast post-9/11 security state can be used to police internal bogeymen like antifa

strange and necessary ingredient of America’s descent towards fascism is that it will have little impact on the majority of people. As militarized federal agents are deployed into major cities to snatch protesters and charge them with harsh federal crimes for daring to deface the ruling party’s monuments, most Americans will continue living their normal lives with no discernible changes, at least for the time being. People wake up and eat breakfast and spend their days doing mundane tasks in fascist countries, too.

If there was ever a tipping point, we are past it. Trying to stare hard at the daily news to determine the exact point at which we slip into fascism is like staring at a baby to see when it turns into an adult. By the time you perceive it, it’s already happened. It is important to understand that the crackdown phase that we are now in – the unaccountable government forces, the riot police, the teargas, the targeted political prosecutions that will come next – are not something new, but something old. This isn’t about Donald Trump. This is about America, baby. This is what we do.

Trump, a fool ruled by impulse rather than strategy, did not build the fearsome machine of government oppression that is now being aimed at his political opponents. This machine was systematically assembled and lovingly tended to by generations of presidents before him – Democratic, Republican, Whig. Trump is only broadening its aperture. All of these tools have been sharpened on the bones of Native Americans and Black people and immigrants and Muslims overseas. America has always needed someone to oppress. Mostly so that we could steal their stuff, but also so that the rest of us didn’t turn against one another. This country has managed to avoid a class war by giving poor white people an array of minorities to abuse, a trick that has benefited rich white people for centuries. We have used injustice not just as a way to get ahead, but as a release valve. Our leaders have long calculated that it is safer to subjugate and mistreat a minority of the population than to risk dissatisfaction in the majority. In doing so, the government has become very adept at creating enemies and wielding power against them in flagrant shows of force.

These are trivial observations, basic facts that will only be disputed by those who are destined to land on the side of fascism anyhow. The question is what they mean for our present moment, which is distinguished not by the existence of government oppression but by its direction. We are finding out what happens when the war on terror is turned inward on ourselves. In addition to the federal agents already in Portland, more are coming to Chicago, Albuquerque, and Kansas City; that may well be just the beginning of a national rollout. “Protecting federal property” and “maintaining law and order” are twin fig leaves wafting in a cloud of teargas. The Department of Homeland Security has effectively become a White House-controlled paramilitary and domestic surveillance service unaccountable to anyone except Trump and his loyalists. (If we’re being honest, this moment has been inevitable since DHS was panic-created in the days after the September 11 attacks. If there is any more fascist word than “homeland”, I haven’t heard it.)

The basic logic behind gun control is that if there are a bunch of guns lying around, sooner or later someone will get shot. The same holds true for the security state. If you build it, it will eventually come for you. Cloaked in the banality of federal bureaucracy, we have tolerated the creation of a terrifying set of powers that now rest in the small hands of a man who has been waiting his entire life to take revenge on each and every enemy who has slighted him. Barack Obama sat in the White House for eight years and did nothing to dismantle this bureaucracy of soldier-cops. He was too busy using it in foreign drone wars. It’s too seductive to have that power, when you are the one who controls it. Now a worse president has it, and it will be turned, at last, against a bigger chunk of us than ever before.

Every new outrage is a test of what we will tolerate. If the government can roll out troops to a large swath of major cities and shoot the eyes out of protesters with rubber bullets all under the guise of stopping some kids from spray-painting some courthouse, it is a fairly good indicator that the spirit of the broader American public will not rouse itself to stand in the way of fascism’s tightening grip. In a nation this big, you can make 100 million people official Enemies of the State and still leave a comfortable majority blissfully unaffected. The trick now is convincing that tranquil, all-American majority that their interests are actually more aligned with the protesters wielding spray-paint outside the courthouse than with the militarized cops in fatigues.

That shouldn’t be an impossible task. When there is actual justice being done inside the courthouses, the protesters and the storm troopers will both disappear.