“How Trump Stole 2020,” and What You Can Do to Make It Not Come True

Investigative Reporter Greg Palast

By page 3 of How Trump Stole 2020, where our 45th president is labeled as “an orange-stained, gelatinous bag of malicious mendacity, a snorting porcine pustule of bloviating bigot [sic] hinged to grasping little griplets, a bloated ball of gracelessness and cry-baby petulance,” you already know author Greg Palast is neither a great prose stylist nor a bastion of objectivity.

Make it through the next 300+ pages, however, and you’ll be just as sure that Palast is a dogged investigative journalist/activist who’s done a ton of work bringing to light voter-suppression tactics Republicans have expertly applied to win two or three presidential elections (and a helluva lot else) since the turn of the century. And if we’re not vigilant, they’re gonna get the next one, too.

How? By discarding non-White voter registration forms, discounting their ballots, and most of all by purging their names from voter rolls. It sounds like a conspiracy theory, but there’s nothing theoretical about it: this is a conspiracy.

Although sometimes the dots are not connected in the most coherent order, Palast’s outline of voter suppression is clear enough. And while goes as far back as the 2000 presidential election and the 175,000+ ballots that were disqualified in predominantly Black precincts at triple the frequency of disqualifications in predominantly White precincts, it’s 2013 when things really heat up for us now. That’s the year the Supreme Court’s Shelby County v. Holder ruling diluted the Voting Rights Act so as to give states relatively free rein in setting voter ID requirements and deciding how to purge voter rolls.

From there, it was a surprisingly short trip to Trump and the Congress that’s enabled him. Empowered by Shelby, states like Ohio, North Carolina, Arizona, and Wisconsin (I’ll take “Republican-Controlled Swing States” for $1,000, Alex) went on purge-fests. “The Democrat-controlled state of New Mexico,” Palast notes, “purged only two out of every thousand voters, or 0.2%,” while Indiana, which Barack Obama won in 2008, was “wrenched violently into the Republican Red Zone” partly by “pur[ing] a breathtaking 22.4% of its registrants ― one in five voters.”

One of the means to this end was the Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck Program, a database ostensibly designed to ferret out electoral fraud by compiling potential instances of individual voters’ presence on multiple voter rolls (so uncommon that even the partisan Heritage Foundation can point to only about 300 cases of duplicate voting or false registration nationwide over the last 30 years combined). The problem ― which Palast better details in his August 2016 Rolling Stone article, “The GOP’s Stealth War Against Voters” ― is that on the whole the data were

unreliable (a Stanford/Yale/Harvard/UPenn/Microsoft study set the error rate at 99%);
improperly or even illegally used by state legislators (partisan, always partisan) to purge their voter rolls; and
disproportionately targeted people of color, since statistically in the U.S. there is far more name repetition―the main criterion for being flagged as a potential “double-voter” on the Crosscheck list―among people of color than among White people. (Per Palast: 25% of White people share a total of 319 surnames, whereas 25% of African-/Asian-/Latinx-Americans share 43, 41, and 26 surnames, respectively.)

While Crosscheck gets the biggest slice of Palast’s attention, tactics other than “the Purge” are well covered, even if not always with the same assiduousness. As an example of disallowing or disappearing POC voter registrations, Palast reviews how nearly half of 86,000 mostly Black voter applications submitted to the State of Georgia in 2014 by the Stacey Abrams-founded New Georgia Project (although Palast doesn’t refer to the group by name) never made it onto the voter rolls. This was on Secretary of State Brian Kemp’s watch, and when you add in the 400,000 voters (yes, most of them Black) Kemp wrongly purged even by Georgia’s own rejiggered standards over the next couple of years, it’s hard not to wonder about the legitimacy of Kemp’s 50,000-vote victory margin over Abrams in the 2018 gubernatorial election.

Then there’s the old disappearing-ballot trick. For example, remember Michigan in 2016, which Trump won by fewer than 11,000 votes? Largely due to 87 faulty voting machines, roughly 75,000 ballots in Detroit (which is nearly 80% Black) registered no vote for president, as if those folks came out to cast votes for everything but that.

But Palast says this is nothing compared to issues with provisional and mail-in ballots, nearly 4 million of which went uncounted for one reason or another. Then there are the voter ID laws that prevented over 646,671 people who showed up at the polls from voting at all. “[T]he dirty little secret of American elections,” Palast writes, “is that we don’t count all the ballots ― and we sure as hell don’t allow every citizen to vote.”

While it’s not always clear where Palast gets his numbers ― unlike his Purge stats, which he successfully sued (e.g., Palast v. Kemp) to obtain and make available―his overall argument that POC are disproportionately disenfranchised at the ballot box is almost universally supported in nonpartisan (not to mention liberal/progressive) circles. And while he offers a long-term prescription for eradicating this sickness (ending purges and gerrymandering, bipartisan electoral oversight in all states, enabling online and same-day registration, requiring paper trails for all balloting, eradicating ID requirements at the polls), the most important takeaway from How Trump Stole 2020, the one that will disallow the title from being a fait accompli, is his Ballot Condom―as in: Protect your vote from a diseased screwing. The steps are simple, but they call for diligence:

Check that you’re registered ― now, no matter how sure you are.
Check the specific voting requirements of your state and county ― then check them again.
If you can, vote in person ― early ― and bring all necessary ID (or more).
If voting by mail, don’t underestimate postage. If you’re not going to the post office, put on more than you think is necessary.
Fill out all forms exactly as instructed. If it’s a bubble-in form, don’t make an X. Use only the required marking device. For punch cards, check for hanging chads. (Those pesky fuckers are partly how we got George W. Bush.)
Whether you’re voting in person or by mail, read the instructions carefully and follow them precisely, “no matter how berserk.” In Wisconsin you need to include a copy of proper ID. In Minnesota you need a witness signature. In Alabama you need that shit notarized. Stay on your toes.

“PROTECT YOUR VOTE!” Palast exhorts. “REMEMBER: They can’t steal all the ballots all the time.”

Openly polemical, inconsistently argued, and in desperate need of a good editor, How Trump Stole 2020 is not an elegant book, by the author’s own admission peppered with “lame jokes.” But for all that, it’s as factual and serious as cancer, the “metastasizing cancer on our democracy” that is “bigotry in balloting.”

But although many of its remedies cannot be enacted by this November, Trump wins 2020 only if you don’t “steal your own vote.” It’s not that Palast doesn’t understand the apathy and disaffection that might keep you from the polls. He’s Bernie guy who is no more a fan of the GOP’s “cringing enablers, the see-no-evil Democrats” than you are. But he points out that in your own way you’re rigging the system as much as the Republicans. “I read the news reports about how a University of Wisconsin study that said Trump won the state [in 2016] by 22,000 votes because more than 50,000 African-American and student voters were blocked [from voting] by the new ID law,” he writes, then turns to “an uglier side to this story”:

The professors calculated that, as big as the ID blockade on students and Black voters was, it wouldn’t have mattered but for the decision of at least another 50,000 not to vote because they didn’t like the choice of candidates. […]
A lot of my closest (ex-)friends said, “If Bernie’s not on the ballot, if they give us that harridan in a pants suitwww [i.e., Clinton], well, fageddaboutit. I’m not voting.”
I get it. They even had a Twitter handle, “#Bernie or Bust.”
So, comrades, how’s Bust working for you?

For all things Greg Palast, including his full Ballot Condom and a newsletter with updates on new shenanigans you might encounter in your state, go to GregPalast.com.

Greg Palast

For more than 8 years, Palast has been investigating vote suppression in Georgia for Rolling Stone, Black Voters Matter and, as of late, The Thom Hartmann Program.

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Victor S. Tiffany says:

August 9, 2020 at 11:12 am

#BernieOrBust was never, EVER about not voting. It was about voting for an actual progressive in 2016 and again in 2020. Voting for another neo-liberal is like giving vodka to someone suffering from alcohol poisoning.

#FakeNews