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Investigative reporter Greg Palast on Kris Kobach’s ‘voter fraud’ commission…

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Dennis J. Bernstein: In Berkeley I’m Dennis Bernstein. You’re listening to Flashpoints on Pacifica Radio. We’re delighted to welcome back Greg Palast, author of The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, now a film, updated and released on Amazon. So congratulations Greg, welcome back to Flashpoints.

Greg Palast: Yes, in fact it’s free if you’ve got that Amazon Prime. It’s out this week. We updated it because unfortunately America has been updated with Trump. The film originally warned you that a guy named Kris Kobach of Kansas — if you can’t remember that name just think KKK — Trump’s Vote-Thief-in-Chief, I said he was going to be the mastermind behind Trump stealing the election, and he did it. So we updated the film to show you how he did it. And now he’s back in the news, and that’s why I’m happy to speak with you.

This week, or last week I should say, Trump disbanded his so-called Vote Fraud Commission, which was headed by Kris Kobach of Kansas, and officially known as the Presidential Commission on Election Integrity. It was disbanded because Kris Kobach of Kansas was being bombarded with lawsuits by the Brennan Center, by every civil rights organization you could think of with a lawyer, and even the single Democrat who was foolish enough to join his commission and found out he was being denied access to even such things as the meeting dates of the commission. So, they were operating in secret. Kris Kobach, forgetting that the Soviet Union no longer exists and has not moved to America, thought he could operate in secret. But now he has disbanded it because there’s so much public criticism. The President has issued an Executive Order, Trump just said the commission is disbanded…

Bernstein: But Trump said that, despite substantial evidence of voter fraud, many states have refused to provide the President’s Advisory Commission on Election Integrity with basic information. That’s why they had to give it to Homeland Security, to bring the investigators in.

Palast: Yes, well, two things… Number one: the Commission was formed and Trump was just tweeting and bleating that there is massive vote fraud. As you know… they’ve claimed that three million people voted twice. That’s Kris Kobach who created something called Interstate Crosscheck, a system to reveal these three million double voters, people voting illegally twice in the same election in two different states. He couldn’t produce any actual double voters, but he did have a list of three million, which I obtained, of these illegal voters. And it was just people with names like José Rodríguez and James Brown. Believe it or not, they found two people named James Brown voting in two different states. They had different middle names, but, hey, it doesn’t matter. As far as Republicans are concerned, that was a double voter. That’s the type of fraud and fraudulent voter that they were looking for.

And so yes, a lot of states refused — or appeared to refuse. By the way, most of those states were lying. Almost every Republican state turned over their voter rolls to Donald Trump and Kris Kobach. They lied and said that they didn’t, but enough states — including the state of California — simply refused to turn over their voter rolls for those guys to go tromping through to find more people named José Rodríguez that they could claim voted in another state. So you had resistance, you had lawsuits.

So what are they doing now? They’re putting it in Homeland Security. So they’ve closed it down. That you could look at as a victory. Because they recognized they can’t operate in public and get away with their shenanigans. So they put it in Homeland Security for two purposes. Number one is secrecy. They believe that by saying this is an anti-terrorism effort, that they somehow have the cloak of secrecy afforded them by working with Homeland Security. Well, you can’t just call a hunt for black Democrats a hunt for “terrorists” and make it secret. I’ve just been on the phone with Jesse Jackson and several lawyers who said you can call it whatever you want, but if it’s a racial purge of voters they still better make those records public. So, there’s still going to be a fight, that’s number one.

Number two — and it is dangerous — they’re going to try to use the power of Homeland Security. And I’m not guessing. Kris Kobach did say this on Fox, that they will use the police powers of Homeland Security to seize the voter rolls of California and New York and other States that are refusing to turn over their voter rolls so they can tromp through and find “double voters”. And Homeland Security is going to be saying that it’s looking for illegal alien voters — that’s the other big claim that they’ve made, that there are literally one to three million aliens, who swam the Rio Grande just so they could vote in our school board elections. It may be laughable, except it’s no joke when they start purging people whose crime is having a Hispanic last name.

Bernstein: You know Greg, we spent most of the show today talking about the Administration’s decision to abruptly end temporary protected status for some 200,000 Salvadorans [listen to the complete show here]. He did this for Haitians just a little bit ago. It seems it’s sort of part of a piece, in a way. It’s an attack on black and brown people, and it’s an attempt to cleanse black and brown people from the voter rolls — and some from the country.

Palast: Well, in fact, don’t discount this. Kris Kobach of Kansas — Mr. KKK as I mention in my film and my work for Rolling Stone — he not only is Secretary of the State of Kansas (and he’s running for governor of Kansas, by the way), he not only is heading Trump’s Commission, or I don’t know what his position now will be in Homeland Security, but he remains the lawyer for a group called FAIR. And FAIR’s founder says its entire purpose is to maintain a European America. And I have a suspicion he doesn’t mean a European-Haitian America, okay? This guy is a white supremacist… and I don’t throw that term around easily.

He is a declared white supremacist, Kris Kobach. And he is in charge of the politics behind these Trumpian racist deportation moves. And it’s of a piece with cleansing the voter rolls. Because, understand, when they talk about deporting people, if they find someone again named José Rodríguez, which there are hundreds of people named José Rodríguez on those voter rolls that they were attempting to purge — and did purge, by the way, in the last election. When they create these lists of illegal aliens and they start deporting aliens, they’re also going to be attacking the voting rights of anyone with a similar name.

So you can’t disconnect the attack on voter rolls from the attack on legitimate alien Americans who want to become citizens. They’re going after the ones who’ve become citizens already, or who’ve been citizens for generations. Let’s not forget that in New Mexico and California for a lot of Hispanics the border crossed them, it’s not that they crossed the border.

Bernstein: Talk a little bit about what you’re preparing for. We’re seeing this unfold now, we’re seeing this Commission being moved into Homeland Security. We’ve got the 2018 elections coming up. These are going to be highly contested. How are you making preparations? What are you going to do, Greg, to stop them from stealing these elections?

Palast: Well, number one, I’d better keep reporting the story because we’re not getting it on the mainstream media. They laugh at Kris Kobach and the claims of voter fraud. But what they’re not doing is investigating… It’s not a joke. They’re using this absurdity that millions of illegal alien voters, double voters, and others [as an excuse to purge legal voters.] And the double voters almost in all cases that they’ve identified are voters of color. So the first thing is exposure, which is very difficult to do in an America which believes that, as Hilary Clinton put it, we have the most wonderful electoral system in the world, which means she’s only been to Kazakhstan.

By the way, I just came back from Switzerland… where they do read my reports and my work is popular there. And they’re stunned. It’s so hard for them to get [their heads] around the idea that we don’t count all the votes or let everyone vote. This is in a nation, Switzerland, where everyone is required by law to vote. Like, they don’t even understand this idea that someone wouldn’t vote or wouldn’t get their vote counted. Or that you can get away with taking away someone’s vote by saying they don’t have the right ID or something like that. They’re absolutely stunned that this is still happening. And that’s true in other nations in Europe who are just stunned at the US system. So number one: it’s exposure.

Number two: political action. And we’ve seen Jesse Jackson and Rainbow PUSH are doing a national campaign which is starting with Interstate Crosscheck, Kris Kobach’s game saying that millions of people voted twice, just as a way to remove every guy named James Brown from the list; and every guy named Jesse Jackson, by the way, from the voter rolls as well.

And then there’s legal action. The great class action lawyer Jeanne Mirer in fact was just calling a moment to go to my office because she’s about to file open records requests on the states that are working with Kobach on his scheme to remove so-called double voters, demanding that they release their hit lists, release their racist purge lists. Because if they release the lists, and we go through them, our experts already know what are on those lists because we have about a third of the names. And, like I say, this is an attack on voters of color.

So there’s a political attack, a legal attack, a journalistic attack, meaning journalism’s job is exposure. Hard to do. It’s hard to get editors and producers in America to do any story about anything but America being a wonderful democracy. You’re the guy who is passing gas at the debutante ball of American democracy. It’s not done. So it’s a very difficult thing to accomplish.

So those are the three things; exposure, political action, and legal action. And obviously it would be nice to see legislative action as well, but that would require the Democrats.

Bernstein: Well the Democrats, yeah, I was going to say the Democrats. But they’ve been deadbeats on all this stuff, haven’t they? I mean, they have not been willing from Gore in 2000… They’re just cowards to take this on.

Palast: Well some of it is cowardice. In my investigations of what is politely called vote suppression, unfortunately, Democrats have taken part in this too. Not on the kind of industrial, computerized scale that Republicans have done. But you’d have a very different Democratic Party if every voter of color was allowed to vote and have their votes counted. A very different Democratic Party.

And I saw this particularly in New Mexico, where I saw brutal vote suppression where machines simply did not work in the pueblos. Machines simply did not work, and therefore recorded no votes — zero votes for President in certain precincts that were heavily Hispanic Democrat. And who is in charge or running the vote? Hispanic Democrats under the direction of Bill Richardson. You had kind of elite Hispanic Democrats fearful of the votes in primaries of poor Mexicanos.

Remember, vote theft is kind of class war by other means. So, therefore, you would expect it from Republicans, but you still have the problem of Democrats being involved and they don’t want to give up those tools either.

Bernstein: Well that’s a problem for all of us. You can learn a lot more if you have an opportunity to connect with some of the work of Greg Palast. You can go to gregpalast.com, find out all about his film, about the latest release. Find out all about a lot more in terms of how to defend your vote.

But this, it really isn’t taken seriously. And I’m not sure how to read the killing of the Kobach Commission. [It] may be a good thing, may be a bad thing, or it may be irrelevant because these folks are going to do this at the grassroots [level]. They’re going to steal the vote and it’s going to be continuing to target people of color because they don’t have the resources to fight back.

Palast: Well I think it does matter. Number one: it is a political victory. That is the Kobach Commission was roundly dismissed as a joke. It shouldn’t be a joke because these guys ain’t foolin’ around. You know, it’s not a circus act, these guys are serious. It is dangerous because there’s been so much crowing by the liberals and the MSDNC reporting, you would think that they’ve just saved the nation by driving Kris Kobach underground. But driving Kris Kobach into Homeland Security and his operation… into basically the Secret Service of the United States, now to use police powers and conducting operations in the dark, that’s extremely dangerous.

But, again, most of this activity happens at the state level. And, you know, most of the Flashpoints listeners are in California. There’s a lot of cleanup there and that’s in a one party, Democratic state. If you remember Alex Padilla oversaw a primary in June of 2016 in which nearly one million ballots were never counted, disqualified through cockamamie manipulation of the vote, forcing people to use provisional ballots or having their ballots disqualified because they used the wrong ballot.

It’s games that I saw in Alabama, games that I saw in Mississippi, and here we’re having this kind of José Crow operation in California. So it’s up to activists, it’s up to an informed public; Don’t depend on the parties to save your vote.

Bernstein: All right… I’m looking forward, Greg, as it comes a little bit closer to the elections that we strike up our Election Crimes Bulletin, because we know we’re going to need it. We’re going to need the great work that you’ve been doing for so many years, Greg. And we appreciate this ongoing collaboration. Again, people can check you out at gregpalast.com, the film is available, a great deal of information is available. And we thank you, Greg, for always making yourself available to our listeners and to the Flashpoints show.

Palast: Terrific. Thank you, Dennis.

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The Republican sabotage of the vote recounts in Michigan and Wisconsin…

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Michigan officials declared in late November that Trump won the state’s count by 10,704 votes. But hold on — a record 75,355 ballots were not counted.

The uncounted ballots came mostly from Detroit and Flint, majority-Black cities that vote Democratic.

According to the machines that read their ballots, these voters waited in line, sometimes for hours, yet did not choose a president. Really?

This week, I drove through a snowstorm to Lansing to hear the official explanation from Ruth Johnson, the Republican secretary of state. I was directed to official flack-catcher Fred Woodhams who told me, “You know, I think when you look at the unfavorability ratings that were reported for both major-party candidates, it’s probably not that surprising.”

Sleuthing about in Detroit, I found another explanation: bubbles.

Bubbles?

Michigan votes on paper ballots. If you don’t fill the bubble completely, the machine records that you didn’t vote for president.

Susan, a systems analyst who took part in the hand recount initiated by Jill Stein, told me, “I saw a lot of red ink. I saw a lot of checkmarks. We saw a lot of ballots that weren’t originally counted, because those don’t scan into the machine.” (I can only use her first name because she’s terrified of retribution from Trump followers in the white suburb where she lives.)

Other ballots were not counted because the machines thought the voter chose two presidential candidates.

How come more ballots were uncounted in Detroit and Flint than in the white ‘burbs and rural counties? Are the machines themselves racist?

No, but they are old, and in some cases, busted. An astonishing 87 machines broke down in Detroit, responsible for counting tens of thousands of ballots. Many more were simply faulty and uncalibrated.

I met with Carlos Garcia, University of Michigan multimedia specialist, who, on Election Day, joined a crowd waiting over two hours for the busted machine to be fixed.

Some voters left; others filled out ballots that were chucked, uncounted, into the bottom of machine. When the machine was fixed, Carlos explained, “Any new scanned ballots were falling in on top of the old ones.” It would not be possible to recount those dumped ballots.

This is not an unheard of phenomenon: I know two voters who lost their vote in another state (California) because they didn’t fill in the bubble — my parents! Meet mom and dad in my film, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy.

How did Detroit end up with the crap machines?

Detroit is bankrupt, so every expenditure must be approved by “emergency” overlords appointed by the Republican governor. The GOP operatives refused the city’s pre-election pleas to fix and replace the busted machines.

“We had the rollout [of new machines] in our budget,” Detroit City Clerk Janice Winfrey said. “No money was appropriated by the state.”

Same in Flint. GOP state officials cut the budget for water service there, resulting in the contamination of the city’s water supply with lead. The budget cuts also poisoned the presidential race.

The Human Eye Count

There is, however, an extraordinary machine that can read the ballots, whether the bubbles are filled or checked, whether in black ink or red, to determine the voters’ intent: the human eye.

That’s why Dr. Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate, paid millions of dollars for a human eyeball count of the uncounted votes. While labeled a “recount,” its real purpose is to count the 75,355 votes never counted in the first place.

Count those ballots, mostly in Detroit and Flint, and Trump’s victory could vanish.

Adding to the pile of uncounted ballots are the large numbers of invalidated straight-ticket votes in Detroit. In Michigan, you can choose to make one mark that casts your vote for every Democrat (or Republican) for every office. Voters know that they can vote the Democratic ballot but write in a protest name — popular were “Bernie Sanders” and “Mickey Mouse” — but their ballot, they knew, would count for Clinton.

However, the Detroit machines simply invalidated the ballots with protest write-ins because the old Opti-Scans wrongly tallied these as “over-votes” (i.e., voting for two candidates). The human eye would catch this mistake.

But Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette stymied Stein’s human eye count. The Republican pol issued an order saying that no one could look at the ballots cast in precincts where the number of votes and voters did not match — exactly the places where you’d want to look for the missing votes. He also ordered a ban on counting ballots from precincts where the seals on the machines had been broken — in other words, where there is evidence of tampering. Again, those are the machines that most need investigating. The result: The recount crews were denied access to more than half of all Detroit precincts (59 percent).

I met with Stein, who told me she was stunned by this overt sabotage of the recount. “It’s shocking to think that the discounting of these votes may be making the critical difference in the outcome of the election,” she said.

This story was repeated in Wisconsin, which uses the same Opti-Scan system as Michigan. There, the uncounted votes, sometimes called “spoiled” or “invalidated” ballots, were concentrated in Black-majority Milwaukee. Stein put up over $3 million of donated funds for the human eye review in Wisconsin, but GOP state officials authorized Milwaukee County to recount simply by running the ballots through the same blind machines. Not surprisingly, this instant replay produced the same questionable result.

Adding Un-Votes to the Uncounted

Stein was also disturbed by the number of voters who never got to cast ballots. “Whether it’s because of the chaos [because] some polling centers are closed, and then some are moved, and there’s all kinds of mix-ups,” she said. “So, a lot of people are filling out provisional ballots, or they were being tossed off the voter rolls by Interstate Crosscheck.”

Interstate Crosscheck is a list that was created by Donald Trump supporter and Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach to hunt down and imprison voters who illegally voted or registered in two states in one election.

An eye-popping 499,092 Michiganders are on the Crosscheck suspect list. The list, which my team uncovered in an investigation for Rolling Stone, cost approximately 50,000 of the state’s voters their registrations. Disproportionately, the purged voters were Blacks, Latinos and that other solid Democratic demographic, Muslim Americans. (Dearborn, Michigan, has the highest concentration of Arab Americans in the US.)

The Michigan Secretary of State’s spokesman Woodhams told me the purpose of the mass purge was, “to clean our voter lists and ensure that there’s no vulnerability for fraud. We’ve been very aggressive in closing vulnerabilities and loopholes to fraud.”

While Woodhams did not know of a single conviction for double-voting in Michigan, the “aggression” in purging the lists was clear. I showed him part of the Michigan purge list that he thought was confidential. The “double voters” are found by simply matching first and last names. Michael Bernard Brown is supposed to be the same voter as Michael Anthony Brown. Michael Timothy Brown is supposed to be the same voter as Michael Johnnie Brown.

Woodhams assured me the GOP used the Trump-Kobach list with care, more or less. He said, “I’m sure that there are some false positives. But we go through it thoroughly, and we’re not just canceling people.”

As to the racial profiling inherent in the list? Did he agree with our experts that by tagging thousands of voters named Jose Garcia and Michael Brown there would be a bias in his purge list?

The GOP spokesman replied, “I’ve known a lot of white Browns.”

Jill Stein didn’t buy it. Responding to both Michigan’s and Trump’s claim that voter rolls are loaded with fraudulent double voters, Stein said, “It’s the opposite of what he is saying: not people who are voting fraudulently and illegally, but actually legitimate voters who have had their right to vote taken away from them by Kris Kobach and by Donald Trump.”

Crosscheck likely cost tens of thousands their vote in Pennsylvania as well.

“It is a Jim Crow system, and it all needs to be fixed,” Stein concluded. “It’s not rocket science. This is just plain, basic democracy.”

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The election was stolen – Here’s how…

Crosscheck in action…

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.

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.

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‘Colonel’ behind voter-purge operation on black voters exposed…

Meet ‘Colonel’ Jay DeLancy…

While the rest of the press is shocked that white North Carolina vigilantes are using racially-poisonous trickery to knock more than 6,700 Black citizens off the voter rolls, we already have the ringleader of the scheme on camera boasting of his election-snatching tactics.

The NAACP has identified the Voter Integrity Project of Raleigh, North Carolina, as the organization directing the mass mailings to voters in minority communities. When the letters marked “Do Not Forward” were returned to vigilante citizens guided by VIP, the group’s frontmen then challenged the Black citizens’ right to vote. Republican officials then quickly removed these voters from the rolls despite the lack of any evidence that any are fraudulent voters.

“Colonel” DeLancy’s caging operation

VIP is headed by “Colonel” Jay DeLancy. DeLancy admitted to this reporter, on camera, that he’s previously used the mailing trap, called “caging,” in attempts to remove the rights of voters he considers “aliens” or “dead” or otherwise illegally registered.

While DeLancy has not found a single illegal voter, not one zombie from Mexico, he did create enough media hysteria about chimerical “fraudulent” voters to successfully push North Carolina to adopt draconian voting laws.

RFK Jr: Caging is a felony

DeLancy told me of his efforts to eliminate voters’ rights, despite lacking convincing evidence of fraud, had caused a storm of protest regarding its racial effect. DeLancy grinned from ear to ear when he said, “And you would think that Jim Crow rose from the dead,” then chuckled.

Indeed, that was the conclusion of a federal court that in July struck down some of these VIP-promoted laws which, the court concluded, “target African-Americans with almost surgical precision.”

Law professor and voting rights attorney Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who joined me in the investigation for Rolling Stone and BBC Television Newsnight, has said that this kind of mailing is known as “caging” to experts. If it targets voters of color, “caging is a felony crime punishable by high fines and even prison time under several laws including the Voting Rights Act of 1965.”

The biggest purge yet: “Interstate Crosscheck”

DeLancy, often seen on Fox TV declaring that thousands vote fraudulently in his state, was the chief lobbyist who pushed for the state to adopt a vote purging scheme which has targeted more than 35,750 voters that DeLancy and GOP state officials accused of the felony crime of voting twice.

Rolling Stone’s extensive investigation of this DeLancy/GOP purge program, called, “Interstate Crosscheck,” revealed that, in fact, Carolina did not convict a single voter of committing the crime of voting twice—yet has removed tens of thousands of voters through the program.

Rolling Stone’s experts calculated that one in seven minority voters in the state were targeted by the Crosscheck program promoted by DeLancy. North Carolina Board of Elections chief Kim Strach testified to her legislature that 35,750 voters are “registered in North Carolina and another state and voted in both in the 2012 general election,” a fact promoted by DeLancy but quickly debunked by law enforcement.

The Crosscheck purge of up to one million voters in several swing states could, “flip the outcome of the US Senate races” in North Carolina, Ohio, Arizona and other states according to Voting Rights attorney Robert Fitrakis of Columbus, Ohio. Fitrakis has represented both the the Republican and Democratic parties in litigation.

The mass purge by Crosscheck was unknown and therefore unchallenged by the NAACP in the lawsuit which successfully challenged other so-called voter-fraud-prevention procedures.

Ion Sancho, respected voting expert with the non-partisan Verified Voting Foundation states that the “Colonel’s” Voter Integrity Project, “is a North Carolina offshoot of True the Vote, a national movement that purports to combat election fraud by challenging voter registration of those they believe should not be on the voter rolls” – though they found no evidence to convict the voters whom they victimize.

True the Vote, in turn, is affiliated with the Heritage Foundation’s Hans von Spakovsky who is funded by the right wing think tank backed by conservative billionaires included the Mellon and Koch families.

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GOP’s stealth war on voters (Video)

For Rolling Stone, gonzo investigative reporter Greg Palast uncovers the GOP plan to steal the votes of a million voters. From the investigations for the feature documentary, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, a tale of billionaires & ballot bandits, out in September. For info on the film, and the book and comic book, go to GregPalast.com.