The Election was Stolen - Here's How by Greg Palast

The Election was Stolen – Here’s How by Greg Palast Before a single vote was cast, the election was fixed by GOP and Trump operatives. Starting in 2013 – just as the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act – a coterie of Trump operatives, under the direction of Kris Kobach, Kansas Secretary of State, created a system to purge 1.1 million Americans of color from the voter rolls of GOP–controlled states. The system, called Crosscheck, is detailed in my Rolling Stone report, “The GOP’s Stealth War on Voters,” 8/24/2016. Crosscheck in action:   Trump victory margin in Michigan:                         13,107 Michigan Crosscheck purge list:                           449,922 Trump victory margin in Arizona:                           85,257 Arizona Crosscheck purge list:                            270,824 Trump victory margin in North Carolina:               177,008 North Carolina Crosscheck purge list:                   589,393   On Tuesday, we saw Crosscheck elect a Republican Senate and as President, Donald Trump.  The electoral putsch was aided by nine other methods of attacking the right to vote of Black, Latino and Asian-American voters, methods detailed in my book and film, including “Caging,” “purging,” blocking legitimate registrations, and wrongly shunting millions to “provisional” ballots that will never be counted. Trump signaled the use of “Crosscheck” when he claimed the election is “rigged” because “people are voting many, many times.”  His operative Kobach, who also advised Trump on building a wall on the southern border, devised a list of 7.2 million “potential” double voters—1.1 million of which were removed from the voter rolls by Tuesday. The list is loaded overwhelmingly with voters of color and the poor. Here's a sample of the list Those accused of criminal double voting include, for example, Donald Alexander Webster Jr. of Ohio who is accused of voting a second time in Virginia as Donald EUGENE Webster SR.   Note: Watch the four-minute video summary of Crosscheck. The investigation and explanation of these methods of fixing the vote can be found in my bookand film, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy: a Tale of Billionaires & Ballot Bandits (2016). No, not everyone on the list loses their vote.  But this was not the only racially poisonous tactic that accounted for this purloined victory by Trump and GOP candidates. For example, in the swing state of North Carolina, it was reported that 6,700 Black folk lost their registrations because their registrations had been challenged by a group called Voter Integrity Project (VIP). VIP sent letters to households in Black communities “do not forward.”  If the voter had moved within the same building, or somehow did not get their mail (e.g. if their name was not on a mail box), they were challenged as “ghost” voters.  GOP voting officials happily complied with VIP with instant cancellation of registrations. The 6,700 identified in two counties were returned to the rolls through a lawsuit.  However, there was not one mention in the press that VIP was also behind Crosscheck in North Carolina; nor that its leader, Col. Jay Delancy, whom I’ve tracked for years has previously used this vote thievery, known as “caging,” for years.  Doubtless the caging game was wider and deeper than reported.  And by the way, caging, as my Rolling Stone co-author, attorney Robert F. Kennedy Jr., tells me, is “a felony, it’s illegal, and punishable by high fines and even jail time.” There is still much investigation to do.  For example, there are millions of “provisional” ballots, “spoiled” (invalidated) ballots and ballots rejected from the approximately 30 million mailed in.  Unlike reporting in Britain, US media does not report the ballots that are rejected and tossed out—because, after all, as Joe Biden says, “Our elections are the envy of the world.”  Only in Kazakhstan, Joe. While there is a great deal of work to do, much documentation still to analyze, we’ll have to pry it from partisan voting chiefs who stamp the scrub lists, Crosscheck lists and ballot records, “confidential.” But, the evidence already in our hands makes me sadly confident in saying, Jim Crow, not the voters, elected Mr. Trump.   What about those exit polls? Exit polls are the standard by which the US State Department measures the honesty of foreign elections.  Exit polling is, historically, deadly accurate. The bane of pre-election polling is that pollsters must adjust for the likelihood of a person voting.  Exit polls solve the problem. But three times in US history, pollsters have had to publicly flagellate themselves for their “errors.”  In 2000, exit polls gave Al Gore the win in Florida; in 2004, exit polls gave Kerry the win in Ohio, and now, in swing states, exit polls gave the presidency to Hillary Clinton. So how could these multi-million-dollar Ph.d-directed statisticians with decades of experience get exit polls so wrong? Answer:  they didn’t.  The polls in Florida in 2000 were accurate.  That’s because exit pollsters can only ask, “How did you vote?”  What they don’t ask, and can’t, is, “Was your vote counted.” In 2000, in Florida, GOP Secretary of State Katherine Harris officially rejected 181,173 ballots, as “spoiled” because their chads were hung and other nonsense excuses.  Those ballots overwhelmingly were marked for Al Gore.  The exit polls included those 181,173 people who thought they had voted – but their vote didn’t count.  In other words, the exit polls accurately reflected whom the voters chose, not what Katherine Harris chose. In 2004, a similar number of votes were invalidated (including an enormous pile of “provisional” ballots) by Ohio’s GOP Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell.  Again, the polls reflected that Kerry was the choice of 51% of the voters.  But the exit polls were “wrong” because they didn’t reflect the ballots invalidated by Blackwell. Notably, two weeks after the 2004 US election, the US State Department refused the recognize the Ukraine election results because the official polls contradicted the exit polls. And here we go again. 2016: Hillary wins among those queried as they exit the polling station—yet Trump is declared winner in GOP-controlled swings states. And, once again, the expert pollsters are forced to apologize—when they should be screaming, “Fraud!  Here’s the evidence the vote was fixed!” Now there’s a new trope to explain away the exit polls that gave Clinton the win.  Supposedly, Trump voters were ashamed to say they voted for Trump.  Really?  ON WHAT PLANET?  For Democracy Now! and Rolling Stone I was out in several swing states.  In Ohio, yes, a Black voter may have been reluctant to state support for Trump. But a white voter in the exurbs of Dayton, where the Trump signs grew on lawns like weeds, and the pews of the evangelical mega churches were slathered with Trump and GOP brochures, risked getting spat on if they even whispered, “Hillary.” This country is violently divided, but in the end, there simply aren’t enough white guys to elect Trump nor a Republican Senate.  The only way they could win was to eliminate the votes of non-white guys—and they did so by tossing Black provisional ballots into the dumpster, ID laws that turn away students—the list goes on.  It’s a web of complex obstacles to voting by citizens of color topped by that lying spider, Crosscheck.

Greg Palast (Rolling Stone, Guardian, BBC) is the author of The New York Times bestsellers, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and Billionaires & Ballot Bandits, now out as major motion non-fiction movie. Support The Palast Investigative Fund and keep our work alive. Download the FREE Movie Comic Book. Rent or buy the film from Amazon or Vimeo. Or support the The Palast Investigative Fund (a project of The Sustainable Markets Foundation) by shopping with Amazon Smile. AmazonSmile will donate 0.5% of your purchases to the Palast Fund and you get a tax-deduction! More info. Follow Palast on Twitter | Like Palast on Facebook | Forward to a friend  Subscribe to Palast's Newsletter | Podcasts Share this with

The Manchurian Candidate

If you don't know what "The Manchurian Candidate" refers to, please go to Google ASAP.

Many people argue, now that Trump has been duly elected, we must work with him to help him be a successful president based upon the misguided notion that somehow he can be reasoned with and will do the right thing.  At the very least, we should relax and hope he'll do the right thing.

I think this is entirely wrong.  The comparison between Donald Trump in 2016 and Adolf Hitler in 1938 is too strong.  Trump is not Hitler and our Constitution and agencies of government should keep him in check.  But, as Hitler showed us, Constitutions and governmental agencies are no barrier to a despot dedicated to accomplishing his nefarious goals.

The people of Germany voted for Hitler just as about half of the people in this country voted for Trump.  Hitler did not hide his agenda at that time, nor has Donald hidden his agenda for this time.  Donald has told us, again and again, in a loud voice and bold print exactly how he intends to tear down this country and turn it into a third-world banana republic ruled and run by the very rich and the military.

None of this should surprise anyone.  His wife has said that he keeps Hitler's, Mein Kampf, by his bedside and reads it frequently, finding it a valuable resource.

Trump is an awful, evil person.  But the real horror is that so many citizens of this country cast their vote in his favor.  How could this happen?  Again, he did not hide the facts of the case nor did he try to hide the evil that resides within him.

If any other candidate had said just a couple of the things that Trump said, or had done just a couple of things that Trump did, that candidate would have been run out of town.

Consider:

Donald Trump is a psychopath - which means he suffers from an antisocial personality disorder.  A psychopath has no conscience, "that little voice inside that lets us know when we're doing something wrong."  Thus, Donald Trump can lie, cheat and steal, etc., with no moral qualms.  He may pretend to be sorry, but he is not.  For example, he refused to release his tax returns based upon the incredible reason that he was under audit by the IRS.  But he bragged about gaming the system so he didn't have to pay any taxes.  And that, he said, made him "smart."  No moral qualms there.

Trump is a sexual pervert by his own admission; "grabbing pussy" is his right.  If your mother, wife, sister, or niece worked for him, you would not want to give him the key to the restroom. Similarly, because of his psychopathic tendencies and his inability to control his actions, you would not want to give him the keys to our nuclear codes.

Trump's wife (who, it turns out, worked illegally in this country for some time - although both she and Trump lied about that) has referred to him as a man-child. From his words and actions, he appears to have never reached adulthood and still operates from the emotional and maturity levels of a 10-year old child.

This morning, he became frustrated by some folks protesting against him and took to Twitter to call them out, indicating first of all, he has a very thin skin; secondly, that he is vengeful; and thirdly, that he really isn't convinced our Constitution's guarantee of free speech is a good thing.

Trump is a psychopathic liar.  He lies about everything and then lies about having said what he said, even when presented with clear evidence such as tape recordings.  This was another trait that Trump shares with Hitler.  Hitler and his cohorts knew they could tell extravagant lies and then deny those lies and people would believe them.   The bigger the lie the easier it was to fool the people. Trump learned that lesson well!

He got by with lying about President Obama's birthplace.  He lied about Hillary Clinton's emails and rallied his supporters to hate her to such an extent that some of them, including at least one congressperson, indicated she should be shot!

Donald Trump is a racist, a bigot, a misogynist, and a cheater.  His record shows multiple instances of racism, that he has cheated business people with whom he has worked, that he treats women like garbage, and that he intensely dislikes certain people, especially the poor and minorities.

Currently, Trump is having to deal with a legal challenge related to his Trump University.  He is being sued for fraud.  This morning, it appears his lawyers are trying to settle and get the case closed which makes a lot of sense because it is clear that their client defrauded many people out of thousands of dollars and it just won't look good if a new president is convicted of such a deed even before he takes office.

Actually, he's involved in a number of other lawsuits, although I'm not privy to the circumstances.

Trump has another great liability:  he has no government experience.  He knows very little about the government.  Not long ago, he showed he did not know about the separation of powers or how our system works.  His ignorance shows also in his promises to "build a wall," or "get rid of Obamacare" immediately after taking office.  Because he is a fascist demagogue, however, he seems to think he can order such things to happen and voila! so they will.

Finally, back to the Manchurian Candidate.  During the campaign, Trump denied knowing Putin, avowing that he'd never met him.  Those were all lies.  Moreover, in the past, Trump has praised Putin and at one point suggested Putin involve himself in the campaign by checking out Ms. Clinton's emails.

Although Trump swore he had no business interests in Russia, it appears now that also was a lie; that his organization has secret accounts with a Russian bank, the purpose of which is yet to be determined.

Immediately following the election, Putin praised Trump and indicated he was looking forward to working with him to bring the U.S. and Russia closer together.

But the smoking gun was revealed when one of Putin's associates indicated that Russia had interfered in the election to help Trump get elected.

Remembering how Trump lies about everything and cannot be trusted to tell the truth about anything, one cannot help but be concerned over his Russian ties and Russia's intentions.  All of this certainly raises some important, even vital, questions.  A minor one that does not fall prey to conspiracy notions, is exactly what does Russia expect in return for their help in getting Trump elected?


As noted, almost one-half of the Americans that voted, voted in favor of Trump for president.  Many, if not most of this people, call themselves "conservative" or "evangelical" Christians.  How such people could vote for this monster is incomprehensible.

Unless...and this is probably the case, their "Christianity" has nothing to do with their Jesus or their God but is simply a front for their "conservative" political ideologies.  At the very least, the fact they voted for a pathological liar, sexual pervert, cheater, bigot and racist, says to all the world they are monumental hypocrites and if their Bible is true, they must expect to be cast into the fires of hell upon their death!


It is bothersome to the extreme that we've learned so little since the 1930s, that the United States, which I used to admire as having potential at least, has become one of the most morally and ethically and intellectually lax countries of the world.

For those of us who care about this a little bit, the least we can do is fight Mr. Trump in every possible way to make it impossible for him to advance his agenda and to hobble him in such a manner that his depravity fails to take hold in this country.

Now representing officially - American Fascism

This photo is in memory of what this country used to be.  It also is a recognition of what is.  Less than 1/2 of our citizens have elected (due to the Electoral College) a psychopathic fascist as our president.

The darkness descends just as it did in Germany on Kristallnacht when mobs beat and robbed Jews and torched synagogues.  The date of Kristallnacht was November 9 - 10, 1938.

In both instances, the country's leaders, demagogues both, urged the people to wreak violence against unwanted citizens.  While the same amount of violence has not yet occurred here, threats have been made by our demagogue and his followers, and it is, I believe, just a matter of time.