[Yes, elections are stolen, but not like that. To my good
progressive colleagues who’ve been suckered into the “hacker”
fantasy, I suggest it’s time to crawl out of the Fox hole. ]
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HENS IN THE FOX HOUSE: THE VOTE MACHINE HACK MYTH  
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Greg Palast
April 19, 2023
gregpalast.com [[link removed]]

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_ Yes, elections are stolen, but not like that. To my good
progressive colleagues who’ve been suckered into the “hacker”
fantasy, I suggest it’s time to crawl out of the Fox hole.  _

,

 

Look in the mirror, comrades.  Some of my goodly-hearted progressive
colleagues were the first to traffic in this Hack-and-Flip canard. 
And now half of America, MAGA America, has fallen into this Fox hole
we helped dig.

Yesterday, Fox News Corporation agreed to pony up three-quarters of a
billion dollars to Dominion Voting Systems for broadcasting the
bonkers claim that Dominion fiddled the software on its voting
machines to cheat Trump out of his reelection.  But Fox’s
costly _mea culpa_ won’t convince the MAGAts.  And that only
provides accelerant to the wildfire of their new “election
integrity” (read: vote suppressing) crusade.

FLIPPING VOTES? THAT’S FLIPPING FALSE

For two decades, I’ve been exposing election theft skullduggery,
from George W. Bush’s specious victory in Florida in 2000 to the
electoral shafting of Stacey Abrams in Georgia in 2018.  And not
once, not ever, have I uncovered evidence of a single proven case of a
software hack, of electronic vote flipping. 

Not one solid case.  And believe me, I’ve looked.

But wait! Aren’t you the Greg Palast who revealed the theft of one
election after another for the _Guardian_, for BBC, for _Rolling
Stone_, for the ACLU, for _Democracy Now?  _ Oh, yes.  Half a
million words and half of my life.  But never, ever, has anyone shown
me hard evidence of a “hack” that flips votes._ _

So, why go after the purveyors of the “hacked” canard now?

First , because I’ve long warned that if the Left keeps crying
“hacked!” the Right will surely seize it and make it their own. 
That’s what happened.  I cringe when I hear Marjorie Taylor Greene
and Rudi the Red-Nosed Degenerate parrot the claims originated by some
of my fellow progressives.

Second, because there is a dangerous, looming apartheid in the voter
protection movement. 

VOTING RIGHTS MOVEMENT APARTHEID

As I’ve crisscrossed the Land of the Free, from one jacked election
to another, I’ve watched an unspoken but horribly disturbing split
growing between some White and Black activists.

In LA and Santa Fe, I’ll hear diatribes against Bush’s victory and
other clearly bogus election results, blaming suspect tallies on
“vote flipping,” evil software that changes your vote from Gore to
Bush, Kerry to Bush, Bernie to Hillary, and so on.  Invariably, the
speaker who insists the touch-screens and tabulators are “hacked”
is white.  And the audience applauding is, typically, 90% white.

Then I stop at an AME Church in Milwaukee, or a Black Voters Matter
strategy session in Atlanta, and the discussion is focused on
vote _suppression_:  stopping voters by outlawing
“souls-to-the-polls” early voting, by banning ballot drop boxes,
by shunting voters to provisional ballots that will never be counted,
and especially by the ugly ethnic purges of the voter rolls. 

Why this racial divide?  Let’s be blunt.  What color are the
purged voters, what color the souls who are blocked from the polls,
what color is the voter who is handed the back-of-the-bus provisional
ballot?  Vote suppression has one big aim:  to screw voters of
color.

When I asked an audience in Palm Springs if anyone had ever been
forced to a “provisional” ballot, only two people raised their
hand—the only two Black men in the audience.  Let’s not play
games about this:  white people are generally not threatened by
suppression tactics. 

But many white voters fear that hacked software could, if real,
threaten _their _votes as much as non-white voters.

Of all my good friends who claim that hidden software “flips”
votes, not one is a racist.  And many are also on the front lines
fighting all the vote suppression tricks I’ve listed and more.  I
have reported and confirmed the concerns of experts such as Law Prof.
Robert Fitrakis who have identified suspicious “vulnerabilities”
in electronic voting.  But “vulnerability” is not evidence of a
crime.  

DID HUGO CHAVEZ STEAL THE ELECTION FROM TRUMP?

The pinnacle of “hacked” crazy was the claim peddled by Lou Dobbs
and others on Fox that somehow President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela
wormed into voting machine software to steal the election from Trump.

Their main evidence: Chavez launched what is now the computer voting
systems operator Smartmatic.

But there are problems with Fox-broadcast theory that Chavez stole the
election from Trump:Chavez is dead, long dead.

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* Smartmatic did not steal Arizona nor Georgia nor Pennsylvania –
because it does not operate in those states. In fact, Smartmatic does
not run any election in the USA except in a single city, Los Angeles.
* Smartmatic computers don’t actually tabulate votes. They print
out a _paper_ ballot which is reviewed by the voter who then places
the ballot in a sealed ballot box.

But hey, _Fox_ facts are not _fact_ facts.  And now, it looks
like Fox will pay.  In April 2021, Smartmatic filed a suit against
Fox, its hosts and Giuliani.  The suit, as of today, is
re-invigorated by Fox’s admission and payout to Dominion.

(Since Chavez is gone, if you want to blame someone for Smartmatic,
blame me.  In 2002, while covering Venezuela for BBC _Newsnight_,
Chavez asked me how he might secure electoral systems.  I suggested
Venezuela–and America–would applaud a computer machine that could
simultaneously print paper ballots.  In 2004, in Venezuela,
Smartmatic conducted the world’s first election using
computer-generated paper ballots.)

PAPER BALLOTS ARE THE GOLD STANDARD OF VOTING—FOOL’S GOLD

Florida is the queen of vote suppression states – and all voting is
on paper ballots.  And let’s remember that for two centuries before
the Voting Rights Act (and too often after the Act), Black,
Asian-American, Hispanic voters were denied the ballot – the paper
ballot.  The idea that paper ballots are a panacea for America’s
democratic deficit is absurd.

And as a statistician, I assure you that the cold numbers show paper
ballots are measurably worse than Smartmatic-style computer-aided,
paper-trail voting systems.  In 2016, for example, the US Elections
Assistance Commission indicated that 1,913,000 ballots cast in person
were “residual,” that is, _disqualified and never
counted, _mostly _paper_ ballots.  In addition, the EAC and an MIT
study suggest that as many as three million mail-in
ballots, _all_ paper, were rejected or simply unaccounted for.

DON’T BLAME THE ROBOT

Think about that:  Millions of Americans cast ballots that were not
counted.  How the hell does that happen?

Let’s take the case of Michigan.  In 2016, Donald Trump won
Michigan by a dinky 10,704 votes.  Officially.  But in that
election, in Detroit, 75,355 paper ballots were cast _but not
counted_.  

In response, Green Party candidate Jill Stein paid for what was
mis-named a “re-count.”  In fact, it was mostly a count of those
ballots that had not been counted in the first place.  Ultimately,
Trump got a court order to stop the count, which if continued, would
have given the state to Hillary Clinton.

Was this the fault of machines?  Yes, but manipulations of
touch-screen had nothing to do with it.  All voting in Michigan is
done on hand-marked paper ballots.  The ballots weren’t counted
because in-precinct scanners in Detroit broke down. 

In other words, paper ballots are terrific – but only if you count
them.

And that brings us to the scary fact that….

TOUCH-SCREEN COMPUTERS AND ELECTRONIC TABULATORS STEAL ELECTIONS

What?!  But, Palast, I thought you said you didn’t find a single
proven instance of machines stealing votes.

Nope.  Pay attention.  I can’t find an election that was stolen by
secret software that flips votes or toys with vote counts. 

But machines have been used again and again to steal the vote.  The
method is ridiculously simple.  The machines break down.  And, as a
mountain of studies from the Brennan Center, Harvard Kennedy School
and others show, machines mysteriously fail or break down,
overwhelmingly, in minority and low-income areas like Detroit. 

Coincidence?  In the case of Detroit 2016, well before the November
election, City Clerk Janice Winfrey told the state government that
many of the city’s old scanners were broken or not likely to make it
through a presidential election.  But the bankrupt Black township of
Detroit could not spend the funds for scanner replacements without
approval of state-appointed financial managers appointed by Republican
Governor Rick Snyder.  The GOP-picked overlords refused the funds for
new scanners. 

And that’s how the system takes the votes of Black folk.  They
don’t need a computer whiz to hack the scanners.  Just don’t
replace the busted ones.  And that’s a lot more effective than Klan
Night Riders burning crosses.

[For more on the 2016 election heist—and heist it was—GET A FREE
DOWNLOAD OF MY AUDIOBOOK, _HOW TRUMP STOLE 2020_
[[link removed]].  I published it well
before the 2020 election – as a warning, not a prediction – based
on my investigation of 2016 and other elections.

IN THE VOTE BIZ IT’S CALLED, “SPOILAGE”

Let’s go back to George Bush’s “defeat” of Al Gore in 2000,
taking the Presidency by just 537 votes.  We all know of the infamous
“butterfly” paper ballot stealing votes in Palm Beach  That’s
because when rich white voters lose their ballot, it’s rare, and you
hear about it around the world.

But what you didn’t hear about was Gadsden, the Blackest of
Florida’s 67 counties.  In Gadsden that year, a breathtaking _one
in eight ballots were disqualified._

One method:  Gadsden’s paper ballot listed the presidential
candidates plus a line that said, “write in candidate.” Notice the
hyphen missing from “write-in.”  More than 700 voters wrote in
“Al Gore,” enough to elect him President.  And voters also
checked the box next to his name.

So, every one of these ballots was disqualified as “overvoted.” 
In the vote biz it’s called, “spoilage.”  That little trick
chose our President.

But not all votes spoil equally.  In lily-white Republican Sarasota,
the spoilage was a mere 1%.   In white-majority Tallahassee (Leon
County), if a voter accidently checked say, Bush’s name and also
wrote in “George Bush,” the in-precinct scanner would reject it,
return it instantly to the voter, and the voter received another,
replacement ballot.  But poor, Black Gadsden could not afford a
scanner in each precinct.  The tabulator at the central office could
only discard the ballot.

That’s how the system works.  Or, I should say, how it doesn’t
work—and that’s how they like it.

Not that the Bush gang took any chances.  I discovered that Florida
Gov. Jeb Bush, in connivance with his Secretary of State, purged over
90,000 voters from the rolls just before the election, tagging them as
“felons” barred from voting.  In fact, not a single one was an
illegal voter.  But most where Black.  And that purge, not the
electorate, chose our President.  No software flipped their vote. 
They never got to vote at all. 

As voting rights attorney Santiago Juarez told me, “Let’s forget
the Hollywood idea that some guy in a cave is pulling a switch and
changing your vote.  That’s not how it’s done.”

He knows how it’s done:  Racially targeted vote suppression. 

Millions of Americans are in peril. To my good progressive colleagues
who’ve been suckered into the “hacker” fantasy, I suggest it’s
time to crawl out of the Fox hole. 

***

_Greg Palast (Rolling Stone, Guardian, BBC) is the author of The New
York Times bestsellers, Billionaires & Ballot Bandits and the book and
documentary, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy
[[link removed]].
His latest film is Vigilante: Georgia's Vote Suppression Hitman
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_Palast Fund experts are continuing investigation of vote suppression,
especially the “vigilante” voter challenge system that originated
in Georgia and is spreading to Texas, Arizona and a dozen other
states.  We are also digging into the highly successful Right-wing
attack on mail-in voting and ballot drop-boxes and new purge
operations targeting voters of color._

_We need your help to complete this work before the 2024 election. 
We are steadfastly non-partisan, constitutionally non-corporate, and
penuriously non-profit.   Please make your tax-deductible donation
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thank you._

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