How Do Republicans Get Away With Voter Suppression?

Sunday, January 01, 2017
By Mark Karlin, Truthout | Interview

Who are the billionaire bandits responsible for turning democracy in the United States into a joke? In this new documentary, dogged sleuth Greg Palast investigates the GOP's vote-purging and other dirty tricks that helped put Donald Trump in the White House. Click here to order The Best Democracy Money Can Buy on DVD by making a donation to Truthout today!

From busted voting machines intentionally placed in precincts where people of color vote to fraudulent interstate purging of likely non-Republican voters through a process called "caging," Greg Palast has been sleuthing down the details of GOP voter suppression for more than 15 years. He's an investigative reporter who is not easily deterred, because it's often a lonely beat -- given that the mainstream corporate media is more interested in the final vote count, not who was intentionally not allowed to vote due to discrimination. Truthout recently interviewed Palast about this expanding scam that often has more impact on electoral outcomes than the actual vote tabulation margin of victory.

Mark Karlin: I've known you professionally since the theft of the election in 2000. You were the only journalist who nailed Katherine Harris (Jeb Bush's secretary of state in 2000, who oversaw voting in the state) when she used a voter-suppression "purge" list through a firm then called Choicepoint to prohibit people with names sounding like felons -- who happened to primarily be people of color -- from registering to vote. It was in the tens of thousands -- far, far more than enough people that if they hypothetically were to have voted would have made Al Gore the president. I asked you then, and I'll ask you now. Why were your findings -- and you have superb statistical proof -- not picked up by the mainstream corporate media?

Greg Palast: In 2000, while working in London for The Guardian and BBC Television, I discovered that GOP voting chief Katherine Harris and Governor Bush purged from the voter rolls 94,000 citizens whom they tagged as felons not allowed to vote. Every single one was innocent; their only crime: Voting While Black. Harris's and Bush's real crime stole the election for Jeb's brother Dubya. It's in my new film ... as an animated cartoon drawn by Keith Tucker (the guy who drew Who Framed Roger Rabbit).

I did get this story into the mainstream media -- the world's two most prestigious news outlets -- BBC and The Guardian. You ask me, Why the silence of the American media lambs? Where were my US colleagues?  Many Black journalists ran the report (including Bob Herbert in his column in The New York Times). Whatever you think of mainstream corporate media reporters, their producers and editors are...

1. Racist.
2. Lazy Bastards.
3. Cheap.
4. Toadies to the powerful.
Or all four or more.

Read more
http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/38936-how-do-republicans-get-away-with-voter-suppression