From: Greg Palast
Sent: Wednesday, April 20, 2016 2:11 PM
Subject: New York voting fiasco just the warm-up for the November game
GregPalast.com
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New York voting fiasco just the warm-up
for the November game
by Greg Palast
Buckle up, America. The voting demolition derby that was the New York
primary on Tuesday was merely the crash test for the coming voting wreckage
in November: a carefully planned pile up.
First, live from New York....
Francesca Rheannon, whom you may know as the host of Writers’ Voice radio,
did the civic thing by volunteering to work the polls in a town east of New
York City.
"I just got off my 17 hour shift as an election official. In my election
district, out of 166 Democratic voters, 39 were forced to file affidavit
ballots. The last [election] I worked in, exactly ONE voter needed an
affidavit ballot."
That’s nearly one of four voters. Why? Their names had gone missing from the
voter rolls.
An affidavit ballot (called a "provisional" ballot in most other states) is
a kind of placebo ballot. You get to pretend to vote--but the chance it will
actually be counted is...well, good luck. If your name is wrongly removed,
kiss your vote--affidavit or not--goodbye.
Rheannon’s experience was hardly unique. In Brooklyn alone, over 125,000
names were quietly scrubbed from the voter rolls in the five months leading
up to the primary.
To put it in prospective, the number of voters purged equals about half of
the number who got to vote. Scott Stringer, the New York City Comptroller
will now audit the Elections Board--now that the election is over. Hey
thanks, Scott.
Neal Rosenstein, the lead voting rights attorney for the New York Public
Interest Research Group, which plans legal action, notes that part of the
problem is that partisan hacks sit on the Elections board in New York--hacks
from both parties.
Brooklyn is under the control of the Kings County Democratic Party, one of
the last of the big city machines. Would they attack their opponents’ voter
registrations? I don’t have to guess: in my wasted younger days, I was in
the Brooklyn County elections office with the hacks where we were assigned
by the Party to challenge voters’ signatures en masse. (I wouldn’t and
nearly lost my state job.)
Am I saying the machine "fixed" the election for Hillary Clinton? Without
further investigation, it would be irresponsible for me to pronounce
judgment. Some of the purged may have moved, some have died. But those who
waited in line only to fill out affidavit ballots are unlikely to be
deceased.
If the Machine had been aware of the mass purge underway, would they have
stopped it? As they say in Brooklyn, Fahgeddabouddit.
But whether party hacks shoplifted New York or not, that’s small potatoes.
Scrubbing voter rolls is not a "New York value." It’s a nationwide epidemic,
a disease eating away at the heart of our democracy.
Voting officials learned a lesson from Katherine Harris the Florida
Secretary of State who purged Black voters in 2000. They learned how to
repeat the purge, expand it and carefully hide it.
I’ve been traveling the nation, from Ohio to Georgia to Arizona and
back--and finding the voter-roll purging machinery running at full speed.
Nationwide, state voting chiefs are, from my long experience, the most
violently partisan officials you’ll ever encounter.
From the data provided by the US Elections Assistance Commission, we can
calculate that no less than 491,952 voters were wrongly removed from the
rolls in 2008, the last reviewed Presidential election in addition
2,383,587 voters filled out registration forms that were simply never added
to voter rolls--and 767,023 provisional and affidavit ballots were not
counted.
