Brian "Chainsaw" Kemp ("Chainsaw" is Palast's nickname for him), surrounding himself with redneck insignia** though in reality an establishment "suit," sprung from the landed gentry, resorted to the same registration rolls that Harris did, the most vulnerable and hacked-to-pieces component of the electoral process, and succeeded. It's an old trick that still works.
Kemp's hacking was no big deal in the Peach Tree State. Nor are the relevant local-level offices open at times when We the People of Color can easily access them to register. Nor are they located in voter-friendly placesin predominately African American counties anyway. And often they lack adequate identification and transportation. The roadblocks are legion.
The purge spread to twelve more key states, warns Palast, "stealthily bleach[ing] the voter rolls whiter than white."
Kemp's antics, blatantly removing "deplorables" from the registration rolls, won him the governorshipprefiguring Trump's 2020 victory, writes Palast, UNLESS WE DO SOMETHING TO STOP IT.
In Wisconsin in 2016, 182,000 university students were prevented from voting in 2016. A student photo ID wasn't accepted but gun permits were. "Carry a weapon, good. Carry a book, forget it." Remember, dumbing down the country guarantees wall-to-wall Trumpism. Forever. Trump took the Badger State by 22,000 votes. Gerrymandering has handed most of the congressional seats to the Republicans even though the majority of registered voters are Democratic46 percent of the vote was theirs but 64 percent of the state assembly in 2018. Milwaukee's county elections supervisor was one of those eliminated from the rolls. This largest Democratic/minority stronghold in the state was expectedly the hardest hit.
Paper ballots are tossed because the bubbles are filled in with checkmarks. Voter intent clear, no? Shades of Florida 2000. Fully 1.9 million "spoiled" ballots were discarded in 2016, according to the Election Assistance Commission, a sometimes-meticulous record keeper (surprisingly since it's so closely federal government-monitored, as s creation of the Help America Vote Act in 2002). According to the Caltech-MIT Voting Project, fully 3.3 million mail-in ballots went uncounted in 2016. Routinely, Palast has found, 20 percent of mail-in ballots, whether absentee or simply no-excuse, are lost through myriad chain-of-custody foul-ups. Ballots may arrive in the mail already damaged, or harvested by the disingenuous opposition, or stolen from mailboxes and filled in according to the thief's predilections, or stolen from drop boxes, or lost en route to the post office " and the list goes on.
Mail-in ballots must be notarized before submitted in Alabama, among other states; further complications include requirement of a witness signature. The barriers are uncountable at this point, in every category.
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