On the eve of the midterm elections, we air a report by investigative journalist Greg Palast on how new voter ID laws risk disenfranchising millions, especially black, Hispanic and Asian-American voters. Twenty-seven states are now participating in the Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck Program. Backers say it is needed to prevent voter fraud, but critics say it is being used to stop Democratic-leaning voters from going to the polls. Tens of thousands of names have already been removed, and millions more are threatened
Greg Palast talking:
I had read that the state of Kansas and 27 other states had matched their voter files, and they found, supposedly, 6.9 million people—actually three-and-a-half million people voting twice. Now, voting twice is a go-to-jail crime. You get five years in the federal penitentiary. And here were three-and-a-half million people supposedly committing this extraordinarily difficult voting in two states in the same election. They had their names. They had their addresses. So, I said, “I need the list.” And I went through six months of hell, because all these states, like North Carolina, said, “Well, these are criminals. We can’t give you the list, because they’re suspects.” I said, “You’ve got three million suspects?” So, finally, I got—three states relented after six months, and I got two million names, supposedly one million double voters.
And this is a very, very typical list. For example, Robert Steven Jackson Jr.—or, Robert Steven Jackson is supposed to be the same person as Robert Herman Jackson Jr., and one voting in Virginia, one voting in Georgia. Now, you have to understand, that’s not unusual. If you look at my whole list—in fact, I think it was up on the screen there—there isn’t a single name where the middle name matches on that list. In fact, we went through the entire two million names. One out of four names has a mismatch of just the middle name. Junior-senior—you know, junior-senior used to be father-son. Well, they say, no, it’s the same voter, just, you know, taking a different shape and a different age. They claimed that there is no—that they used birth dates to match. There were no birth dates, none. They claimed that there was a Social Security match. This is Kris Kobach, the secretary of state of Kansas. He’s kind of the Katherine Harris of 2014. He’s always finding illegal voters. But there are no Social Security matches. And they said if there’s a mismatch of Social Security number—that’s basically everyone on the list. It actually says in the instructions, which we found, that you don’t—that they ignore the mismatch. They ignore the middle name mismatches, Social Security number mismatches, birth date mismatches. Half a million people in Georgia alone are supposedly actual double voters—not double registered, double voters.
Washington dropped out. That’s how I got the list. Washington said this list is junk. It’s just a bunch of common names. It only matches first name and last name. So they handed me the list. They said, “These aren’t criminals. It’s just a list of common American names.” And, you know, as soon as you get to common names, Amy, you’re getting to African Americans—that’s a legacy of slavery. Most Jacksons in America, according to the U.S. Census, are African-American. Most David Lees—we have a whole list. Oh, my god. We have pages and pages of Michael Lees. And most of those, about 64 percent, are Asian-American, like Michael L. Lee is supposed to be the same voter—he’s from Georgia—is supposed to be the same voter as Michael Thomas Lee of Virginia.
it’s a very underhanded method of removing people. When years ago I found the purge of black voters as so-called felons in Florida by Katherine Harris, there they marked an F next to someone’s name if they were a so-called felon. By the way, of 58,000 names, none were. None. And that changed the election of 2000. In this case, they don’t mark anyone as a duplicate voter. Instead, they send you a postcard that says, “Please verify your address and name.” Now, most people—looks like junk mail—throw it away. Renters, poor people, students who are moving a lot, the letter doesn’t even find them. So they know who they’re knocking off. If the letter doesn’t come back, in a state like North Carolina, they’re going to remove that voter. In some states, it’s a two-step process. If they don’t vote Tuesday, they’re marked inactive. If they don’t vote Tuesday, then they will lose their vote for the presidential election. And that’s where you’re going to see the biggest effect of this. It could determine the Senate on Tuesday, but it will absolutely have a huge impact on the federal presidential in 2016.
They give you one of these provisional ballots. The problem of a provisional ballot, it’s like a placebo ballot. It makes you feel good. You filled out a ballot. They say, “Oh, we’ll check your registration.” If you’re not registered, you’re not registered. And they throw it out. That’s the problem with getting the provisional ballot.
Almost every state is a Republican-controlled state, where the election board is Republican-controlled. So it’s a very select group, about half the states, but it’s the Republican states, and because they know who this is knocking off. They know who’s losing their vote.
we went down to meet, and we’re going to try again to meet, with the FBI agent that the state of North Carolina has hired, a famous G-man named Chuck Stuber. He’s now had their names. He’s had 190,000 suspects of double voting in North Carolina, for six months. He’s got their names and addresses. But he still hasn’t arrested anyone. So far, with all these millions of suspects, with their names, addresses—you know, they got all this information, they know where everyone is, and they show up to vote—they haven’t arrested anyone, because in fact there are no double voters. The fraud is not—you don’t have massive fraud by voters; you have massive fraud by the voting officials. So this G-man, this FBI agent, has arrested no one at all, not made a single referral, because he’s not going to put his name behind arresting, you know, David Larry Lee because he’s supposed to also be Michael Chang Lee. They’re not going to do it.
the biggest single problem, again, is voter fraud is a fraudulent concept. For example, I’m going to—in North Carolina, where I’m going later today, they imposed new ID requirements, as they have in Georgia, as they have in Texas. They haven’t shown me a single case yet where someone has used someone else’s identity to vote. I mean, identity theft in voting doesn’t happen. You go to jail for five years. It’s not a joke, and it’s very easy to get caught. People don’t do it. In other words, what they’re doing is they’re taking action against a crime that does not exist.
And whatever you do, don’t simply accept a provisional ballot, because they’re not going to count it.
— source democracynow.org
Greg Palast, investigative reporter with Al Jazeera America, a Puffin Foundation fellow, and author of the New York Times best-seller, Billionaires & Ballot Bandits: How to Steal an Election in 9 Easy Steps.