In 2004 the Ohio GOP stripped more than 300,000 inner city voters in an election decided by 118,775 officially, though more than 90,000 votes still remain uncounted.
Palast shows that in 2016, the Democratic constituency will be electronically stripped of millions of voters in at least two dozen key states, easily enough to make the difference in a close election.
But if that isn't enough to put Trump in the White House, the final count can be flipped with computerized "adjustments" made in the dark hours of election night.
In both Florida 2000 and Ohio 2004, electronic manipulation put and kept George W. Bush in the White House.
In 2016, well over half the votes will be cast on electronic voting machines. Most of these are 10 years old or more. All can be easily manipulated by their owners, which are private corporations, primarily Warren Buffett's ES&S.
The courts have ruled that the software on these machines is proprietary. So there is no effective public monitoring or accountability of the tallying process. At the end of election day, if they are in agreement with each other, the governor and secretary of state can make the vote count pretty much whatever they want.
In a close election, the six key swing states electronically available to the GOP are likely to comprise more than enough votes to swing the Electoral College. The question is: will their governors give those electoral votes to Trump?
Florida's governor is the far-right Rick Scott. After 2000, Florida reformed the secretary of state position used by Katherine Harris to help Jeb Bush put George W. Bush in the White House. But the governor's power over the vote count remains potentially decisive. Florida also has a key Senate race involving Marco Rubio, which gives the GOP an added incentive
North Carolina has also made adjustments to its vote count system, and has a Democratic secretary of state. But its disenfranchisement measures are legendary and could be decisive.
Michigan, Iowa and Arizona could all be strip-and-flip locks for the GOP.
So as always, Ohio may be the key. Governor John Kasich has made very clear his disdain for Donald Trump. But the US Senate race pits his good friend Rob Portman against the former Democratic governor Ted Strickland. Kasich may be willing to throw Trump under the bus. But he and his secretary of state, Jon Husted, will be strongly committed to sending Portman back to the Senate.
Thus they won't want the unlikely discrepancy of a GOP Senate victory alongside a GOP presidential loss.
Whatever the case, no matter how many hundreds of millions are spent on this campaign, no matter how many thousands of hours the bloviators blab about this issue or that, when push comes to shove, this election will be decided on election night by the swing state governors and secretaries of state who have their hands on the electronic vote count.
Thus the smart money would be on Donald Trump entering the White House in January 2017.
*Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman's Strip & Flip Selection of 2016: Five Jim Crows & Electronic Election Theft is at www.freepress.org, along with The Fitrakis Files. Harvey Wasserman's America at the Brink of Rebirth: The Organic Spiral of US History is at www.solartopia.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.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
