- by Greg Palast, for the Hartmann Report
You can ignore Trump slyly hinting to the Lord's chosen that he just might call off the next election.
But don't ignore this: Trump won't be calling off the election because he doesn't have to. The Fix for 26 is already in.
"Four more years, you know what? It'll be fixed, it'll be fine, you won't have to vote any more, my beautiful Christians." Donald Trump speaking at the Turning Point USA Student Action Summit in West Palm Beach, FL on July 26, 2024.
How To Votes Spoil? The Ballots in the Electoral .Dumpster. Think your vote counted? The nasty little secret of US elections, is that we don't count all the votes. Clip from Greg Palast's ...
(Image by YouTube, Channel: Greg Palast) Details DMCA
The Republican plan is to win next year's election this year. Yes, the voting will be bent, jacked and hammered this year, 2025, one year before the official voting. Because this is the year of The Great Purge.
And if The Great Purge doesn't do the trick, Republicans are ramping up other vote suppression tactics they rolled out to win 2024, including a private army of MAGA-nauts who challenged over a million voters' ballots in 2024 and plan on way more by the 2026 midterm.
As I detailed in my analysis for The Hartmann Report, vote suppression cost Kamala Harris at least 3,565,000 votes. And now that Trump and his attack Doge have their sticky fingers in the electoral process, we could look back at the 2024 vote suppression spree as the good old days of democracy.
I'm a committed non-partisan data journalist who has gone after both parties. But for this past election and the one coming, it is the GOP which is cranking up these racially-poisonous purges and challenges to new pain levels. Here's what to expect"
The Great Purge of 2025
What is a "purge"? In 2000, George W. Bush won the presidency by just 537 votes in Florida-- after the state's Republican Secretary of State Katherine Harris "purged," i.e. removed from voter rolls, tens of thousands of African-Americans because they were, supposedly, ex-cons ineligible to vote. In fact, not one, our investigators at BBC Newsnight found, was an illegal voter.
What the Republican Party learned from the successful mass purge operation is that simply crossing voters off the rolls, especially Black voters, is a dandy way to win elections. And so, in 2002, President Bush signed the Orwellian-named Help America Vote Act which requires states to purge their voter rolls in the year before each federal election.
In its 2023 report, the United States Election Assistance Commission reported that over 19 million voters were purged from the rolls before the latest presidential election. True, most purged were dead or had moved, but 4.47 million citizens were blocked from voting by what the EAC euphemistically calls "Failure to return confirmation notice," or what voting rights lawyers call, "Caging." For the ACLU of Georgia, my team of experts analyzed every single voter purged by caging in one swing state, Georgia. We found the "error" rate was 63.3%-and shockingly racist. In federal court, the NAACP presented the names and addresses of the 198,000 voters we found that were wrongly removed-- but it was too late to save them all.
In 2023, in the lead-up to presidential race, the Georgia Secretary of State more than doubled the number of voters "caged" compared to 2020. He proudly announced he'd targeted over 875,000 voters. For 2026, get ready for a similar rise in the number of voters purged in GOP-controlled states. This is more than likely as the voter protection police, the Justice Department Civil Rights Division, under Trump, has been turned into the Civil Wrongs Division.
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