Mail-in, Early and Absentee Ballots go Absent
If you've gone postal in this election, good luck! According to EAC data, at least half a million absentee ballots go absent, that is, just don't get counted. The cause: everything from postage due to "suspect signature." Fitrakis told me that in his home state of Ohio, you need to put your driver's license number on the envelope, "and if you don't have a driver's license and leave the line blank--instead of writing 'no driver's license'--they toss your ballot.
From Palast's book The Best Democracy Money Can Buy: A Tale of Billionaires & Ballot Bandits by Ted Rall
It's a "gotcha!" system meant to knock out
the ballots the officials don't want to count. (Remember, your mail-in
ballot is anything but secret.) Team Green will try to fight for each
absentee ballot rejected for cockamamie reasons.
If the recount doesn't change the outcome, can we feel assured the election was honest?
Students and others were discouraged from voting because they lacked the proper ID (300,000 by the estimate of the experts with the ACLU--that's thirty times Trump's plurality). But if you didn't cast any ballot, provisional or otherwise, no one can fight for it.
And final decisions may come down to the vote of the Wisconsin Elections Commission, God forbid. As Norman Stockwell, the editor of Madison-based The Progressive explained to me, formerly, elections law adjudications were made by a panel of non-partisan judges. These were replaced by this new commission of partisan shills appointed by GOP Governor Scott Walker.
Trump says millions voted illegally. Is he crazy?
Crazy like a fox. There's a method in his madness that affects the recount.
While the media dismisses Trump's claim that there are "millions of people that voted illegally," they have not paid attention to the details of his claim. Trump explains that millions of people are "voting many, many times," that is, voting in two states in the same election.
Trump's claim is based on a list of "potential duplicate voters" created by his operative, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach. Kobach (a top dog in Trump's transition team) directs a program for hunting down fraudulent voters using a computer system called, "Crosscheck."
It's quite a computer: Crosscheck identified a breathtaking 449,922 Michiganders who are suspected of voting or registering in a second state, a felony crime, as are 371,923 in Pennsylvania.
I spent two years investigating the Trump/Kobach claim for Rolling Stone. We obtained the "confidential" suspect list of several million citizens accused of voting twice. In fact, it was no more than a list of common names--Maria Hernandez, James Brown, David Lee--that is, common to voters of color. Read: Democrats. A true and typical example: Michael James Brown of Michigan is supposed to be the same voter as Michael Kendrick Brown of Georgia.
Page from The Best Democracy Money Can Buy (FREE) Comic book penned by Keith Tucker
About 54,000 voters in Michigan,
five times Trump's plurality, lost their right to vote based on this
nutty double-voter accusation. In Pennsylvania, about 45,000 were
purged.
The problem for Fitrakis: While he eventually plans to file suit
against Crosscheck purges, in the meantime, it's not clear he can
challenge someone whose lost their vote because of a false accusation of
double voting. And those who found their names missing and didn't
demand a provisional ballot--there's no hope at all of recovering their
vote.
Is Jill Stein going to get rich?
Fitrakis laughs at this one. "The FEC
[Federal Elections Commission] has very strict rules on recounts. The
donations for the recount are sequestered in a specially designated
account and all spending is restricted to the recount."
The big problem is that the cost is somewhat out of Stein's control.
Each state will bill the campaign for the "pro-rated salaries and
benefits" of its county and state officials working on the recount.
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