Was Your Vote Counted?
Voters at the polling station in Wyoming Indian (Flickr,Lindsay D’Addato)
WASHINGTON, D.C.—“This is a Jim Crow election,” said Greg Palast of this year’s election. The investigative reporter was in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday to petition the Department of Justice to release 7.2 million “interstate crosscheck” names suspected of voter fraud.
After years of investigating voter suppression targeting communities of color, Palast acquired the crosscheck list this year and noticed the bias. The list wrongly accused United States citizens of voting in two states if they shared a first and last name with another voter. As Palast explained, “Maria Isabel Hernandez of Virginia is supposedly the same voter as Maria Cristina Hernandez of Louisiana.”
WATCH: Greg Palast: ‘We Need to Protect the Remnants of the Voting Rights Act’
On Monday, Palast, along with the Asian-American digital advocacy group 18 Million Rising, delivered 50,000 petitions, demanding the list of 7.2 million names on the crosscheck list. The voters on the list had their votes discounted unless the voter returned a government form confirming their legitimacy.
Palast’s findings reveal how the interstate crosscheck list targeted African-Americans, Latino Americans and Asian-Americans. One in seven voters of color was placed on the list. Once placed on the list, that vote would “spoil,” or be voided, if government forms were not returned.
“The civil rights commission found out if your vote spoils—that’s what they call it when your vote just doesn’t get counted—the chance your vote will spoil is 900 percent higher if you are black than if you are white.”
On the day following Palast’s petition delivery, he shared his findings with other voter suppression experts on a panel hosted by the Voting Rights Alliance in Washington D.C. They explained how the GOP used voter suppression tactics to its advantage in battleground states.
During the election, North Carolina struggled with vote flipping and citizen removal from voting rolls before the NAACP got involved.
The Rev. Rodney Sadler of the North Carolina NAACP discussed the voter suppression tactics targeted at people of color.
“A bill—North Carolina House Bill 589—actually went to surgical precision to disadvantage African-American people,” Sadler said. “Ending same-day registration, requiring at least 25 days prior to the election for people to be registered, reducing the number of days for early voting from 17 to 10, ending preregistration of 16 and 17 [year old] high school students, ending out-of-precinct voting and adding the voter ID requirement with 25 percent of African-Americans and 20 percent of all 18 to 29 year olds who did not possess this form of ID. Even before the election cycle began, we knew there would be trouble.”
The Rev. David Alexander Bullock of the Highland Park (Mich.) NAACP spoke to the voting violations that led to 87 broken machines.
“When counters got to Detroit and tried to recount votes, 60 percent of the precincts in the city of Detroit were not recountable—396 precincts out of 662 were not recountable. Why weren’t they recountable? Well, because there is a horrible law in Michigan that if there is a broken seal or ballot box, then the precinct counts are invalid. … The recount laws need to be revised because it provides cover for election engineering.”
Between the interstate crosscheck lists, harsher voting regulations, and defunct ballot counting systems, Palast is looking toward reform rather than recounts.
“The whole point of the recount is not really the recount, but to look at those ballots that were never counted in the first place.”
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Source: http://www.truthdig.com/eartotheground/item/was_your_vote_counted/
