by Pierce Butler
Voter turnout in last year’s election dropped by 19 million from the totals of 2020, as I wrote in our Jan-Feb issue, and I may have left some readers blaming slackers and airheads who failed to remember the harms caused by Donald Trump’s first term.
I have to apologize for that, at least in part, because Kamala Harris was defeated by dirty tricks on state and local levels by Republican officials and operatives, at least according to many reports on the pre-election dirty tricks of 2024. Data reporter Greg Palast leads the pack in uncovering who did what when and where, and he concludes:
4,776,706 voters were wrongly purged from voter rolls according to US Elections Assistance Commission data.
By August of 2024, for the first time since 1946, self-proclaimed “vigilante” voter-fraud hunters challenged the rights of 317,886 voters. The NAACP of Georgia estimates that by Election Day, the challenges exceeded 200,000 in Georgia alone.
No less than 2,121,000 mail-in ballots were disqualified for minor clerical errors (e.g. postage due).
At least 585,000 ballots cast in-precinct were also disqualified.
1,216,000 “provisional” ballots were rejected, not counted.
3.24 million new registrations were rejected or not entered on the rolls in time to vote.
Citing respected sources such as the US Elections Assistance Commission, the Brennan Center for Justice, the US Civil Rights Commission, and more, Palast brings the numbers to spotlight both the scale and the biases of last year’s voter suppression:
Rejection of Black in-person votes, according to a US Civil Rights Commission study in Florida, ran 14.3% or one in seven ballots cast.
… if not for the mass purge of voters of color, if not for the mass disqualification of provisional and mail-in ballots, if not for the new mass “vigilante” challenges in swing states, Harris would have gained at least another 3,565,000 votes, topping Trump’s official popular vote tally by 1.2 million.
In short (Palast’s emphasis):
That is, if all legal voters were allowed to vote, if all legal ballots were counted, Trump would have lost the states of Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Georgia. Vice-President Kamala Harris would have won the presidency with 286 electoral votes.
Meanwhile, Florida continues to expand its voter suppression tactics:
Gov. DeSantis’ Office of Election Crimes and Security still works to find and arrest those with, say, invalid voter ID cards;
The state still bars anyone from voting who has not paid in full all fines from prior convictions – and still provides no way for would-be voters to see what they might still owe;
A 2021 law, per Tom McLaughlin of the Pensacola News Journal, “limits the availability and accessibility of mail ballot drop boxes and requires voters to put their state ID number or Social Security number on their mail ballot applications, but does not provide an alternative for voters who don’t have that type of information.”
U.S. District Court Judge Mark Walker wrote, “… the state of Florida has, with surgical precision, repeatedly changed Florida’s election code to target whatever modality of voting Florida’s Black voters were using at the time. That is not this court’s opinion, it is a fact.”—but he was overruled by the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta;
Voter registration groups now face such harsh penalties for minor errors that most, maybe all, have ceased work in Florida, and mail-in voting has even more restrictions.
Republican politicians surely have more barriers to democracy in mind, as we will see when the state legislature gavels itself into action this month.
Nationally, the GOP also offers the “Safeguard American Voter Eligibility” (SAVE) Act, requiring everyone registering or updating their registration to show, in person (not online, not by mail or through public voter-registration drives), a birth certificate or passport—military or tribal ID won’t cut it either.
Groups including FloridaRising.org, the League of Women Voters (lwvfl.org), BlackVotersMatterFund.org, NAACP.org, and more are pushing back, but as the Trump-Musk-Vance juggernaut has demonstrated daily since Jan. 20, our new (and old) oligarchs don’t want mere citizens to get in their way. (Go ahead and tell Senators Scott and Moody, and Rep. Cammack, to protect American democracy anyway: phone 202-224-2131.)
Palast’s full report, more digestible summaries, and a video (“Vigilantes Inc.: America’s New Vote Suppression Hitmen”)— all with an eye to the Jim Crow history as well as last year’s dirty tricks—wait for you at gregpalast.com. Take a look—and don’t slack off or space out if/when we get another chance to speak out as a nation next year!