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.
Palast's analysis of this voter suppression may not tell us anything we didn't already know, but seeing the numbers is still stunning. And hearing so many Canadians ridicule Americans for electing this maniac, I feel compelled to share this as widely as I can.
Certainly this was not the first US election to be manipulated by the right wing, but it is certainly the most consequential.
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.
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.
Go here to see the numbers and read the rest of the story.
Palast concludes:
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.
3 comments:
When Biden first got elected, my conviction was that the only thing he had to do to be a success was to pass anti voter suppression laws. When he failed to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, I gave up on the guy.
Then came the genocide...
The fact that Biden was even nominated speaks volumes about the DNC.
The corporate media will report on voter suppression bills when they are introduced by state legislators.
The corporate media will report on voter suppression bills that are passed and signed into law in a particular state.
The corporate media will NEVER report on what actual effect all of those voter suppression laws had on any election.
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