Election expert Greg Palast: Thanks to GOP crackdown, "Democrats may have lost"

Some elements of Georgia's current ruling race could fundamentally undermine confidence in democracy. If Republican candidate Brian Kemp, the current secretary of state, wins the elections, his victory may seem illegitimate. Impartial observers will never be able to tell if he would have won if all eligible voters in the state had been able to vote. If he loses, there is no doubt that the victory of Democratic candidate Stacey Abrams will be seen as an existential threat to the same forces who tried to rig things against her.

Salon was maintained by email with Greg Palast, the journalist who had previously informed him of the widespread denial of voters in Georgia earlier this month. Palast has created a website that can help you find out if you are purged of roles.

In your opinion, how many Georgians have been deprived of their rights and what is your proof?

Brian Kemp, State Secretary of Georgia, has removed 550,702 Georgians from the electoral rolls in 2016 and 2017, that is to say, canceled their registrations. I do not guess. After much resistance, Kemp revealed the names and addresses of each of those electors who were purged in response to a threat of prosecution by the federal government (which I filed in federal court in Atlanta and whom I had served at Kemp on Friday).

Of these, we are certain that 340,134 were falsely deleted without notice. I would like to thank Salon for your viral report which allowed Georgians to know that my foundation had listed all the names of people served on GregPalast.com. Unfortunately, there were only a few days left to re-register, but it seems like thousands did it.

This leaves hundreds of thousands of people without their rights. If they show up to vote on November 6 – although they will not receive notice of polling stations or postal ballots, they will only be able to receive "ballot papers". provisional ", with little or no chance of counting them.

How did Kemp manage this mass purge? He moved voters from the so-called "inactive" list of his state to "canceled", on the basis of his assertion they had all left the state or their county.

But they had not moved. According to a team of experts led by John Lenzer, CEO of CohereOne, 340,134 had never moved at all. Lenzer led a group of top-level professionals from the country's "advanced address hygiene specialists," who use dozens of databases (including detailed post office files) to find out exactly where each of them lives. American. Our experts advise companies like American Express to charge you your bill (or find you if you do not pay).

As Lenzer told me about the 340,134 Georgians, "They did not move and they should not have been removed from the voters list".

How could Kemp say that these voters had moved? Everyone was "guilty" of missing the 2014 and 2016 elections and did not return a postcard. The postcard looks like junk mail; most people throw it away. Kemp rightly argues that the Supreme Court said states could use this procedure – but only to the extent that the state had a good faith base to believe that voters had moved.

Kemp sent the "inactive to canceled" list to counties for accuracy, knowing that counties do not have the experts or the resources to do so.

So I do it now for them. I have the name and address of each voter who has not moved. I want to emphasize that this does not include the tens of thousands of electors who have moved to their riding and who, under federal law, should not be removed.

What methods has Brian Kemp's office used to deprive these voters of their rights?

In addition to what I call the "postcard trick" to eliminate a third of a million voters, Kemp has a devil 's toolbox, which is to deceive the votes.

For example, Kemp has sent consultants to ask counties to close polling stations, which are found especially in black neighborhoods. I saw this in the 6th Georgian congressional district, which partly explains the defeat of Democrat Jon Ossoff in the 2017 special elections. My daughter, a Georgian voter, could explain to you how Kemp (and other GOP officials) dismissed university campus polls.

Kemp requires that the "exact matches" of the voter ID, letter by letter, number by number, correspond to state and federal records that are filled with typos. If your name is García-Márquez, forget to register. The lines and accents – and you know which voters have them – are unlikely to pass this crazy test. This is the heart of the problem of the 53,000 pending registrations – some five years – which have not been put on the rollers.

Then there are the threats and intimidation against the voter registration groups. GOP officials sent the Georgia Investigation Office to take care of the 10,000 Korean polls, threatening criminal charges against volunteers registering their voters for bizarre and absurd reasons. After two years of "investigation", the charges were dropped, but the registration was discontinued.

I could go on.

Tell me more about the lawsuit you filed.

As you can see, Kemp is a real job. I have been investigating him for five years, starting with Al Jazeera in 2014 and Rolling Stone in 2016. He has totally criticized our requests for public documents, including the names, addresses and motives for the purge of Georgian voters. With Helen Butler of the Georgia Coalition for the People 's Agenda (Reverend Joseph Lowery), our law firm sent her a 90 – day notice to file a federal complaint unless she opened her case. This forced him to give us the names and addresses we investigated – but he still keeps records that we believe will prove he uses the famous "Interstate Crosscheck" lists created for Kemp by Kris Kobach of Kansas . [That state’s secretary of state, and also the Republican gubernatorial nominee this year.] Kobach is known as Trump's "fraudulent voter hunter".

Kemp admits he sent Kobach the entire state voter file and recovered a "blacklist" of Kobach – but Kemp says he never used it and "can not find" cross checklists. Sorry, Brian, but your deputy admitted to using this list and even gave this list to a journalist you thought would be a Republican who would make a stellar advertisement. However, the reporter actually worked for me – for the Rolling Stone investigation. I've had it!

And now, Mr. Kemp, you will have the opportunity to explain these contradictory statements to a federal judge.

I would note that as a journalist, my costume requires only information. However, the NAACP Atlanta, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the Rainbow / PUSH Coalition will use the information we seek from Kemp to stop this purge operation of New Jim Crow.

How does this fit into a larger model at the national level of disenfranchisement?

I have already filed a 90-day notice of intent to file a federal lawsuit against 26 other state secretaries and election councils. Kemp has not invented anything – he and his friend Kris Kobach of Kansas are just the vanguards of a new wave of officials, most (but not all) Republicans, who use suspicious and poisoned ploys racially, such as Interstate Crosscheck, to serve their electoral lists.

Most officials came out with their hands up and their files open. In addition to Georgia, I have already posted on GregPalast.com lists of ridiculous purges from Indiana, Nevada, Nebraska, Illinois and Colorado.

In the case of Indiana, for example, our experts found that the excessive number of voters on Kobach's cross checklist (46%), sent to Indiana GOP officials, had been purged. When asked about this, the Indiana Elections Council attorney admitted that it appeared that Indiana had served the electors in violation of a federal court order. . Violation or not, at least 20,000 voters labeled by Kobach were wrongly removed from the voters list in a state where the race in the US Senate was tight.

And I'm sorry to say that I discovered many ugly games with counting and voting counts in Democratic polls, but not nationally.

Could this refusal to vote make the difference between victory and defeat for Democrats in Georgia or elsewhere?

Absolutely. We are considering dead heat races in Nevada, Indiana and Arizona, where you should not be surprised to see a "red turn", that is, Republican victories in races where exit polls show a Democratic victory. This is because the provisional and mail-in ballots were rejected (because of registration, ID or other problems): people can tell pollsters how they voted, but not if their vote was counted.

The fact that millions of voters have lost their registrations without notice that they have been served means that the Democrats may have lost all chance of winning key elections before only one vote is cast.