Voting

1.9 million ballots tossed: How Trump did – and will – disqualify your vote

Greg Palast

It’s official: 1,913,369 ballots were cast but never counted in the 2016
presidential race. That’s from the US Elections Assistance Commission.

Here’s how Michigan – and so the Presidency – was stolen four years ago.

This little chapter from /How Trump Stole 2020/ tells you how they did
it in 2016 … and can do it again in 2020:

Michigan Michigass

Here’s what you know: In 2016, Donald Trump won Michigan by 10,704
votes. Officially.

Here’s what you don’t know: 75,355 ballots were never counted. That’s
official, too. Just “spoilage,” that is, ballots that were, for some
technical reason, un-tallied.

But not just anyone’s vote “spoiled.” Most of these vanished votes were
cast in Detroit – where only one in ten city residents are white.
Motown. Not exactly Trump-ville.

Exit polls showed Clinton won Michigan. And now the pollsters were
apologizing for their “mistake.”

I didn’t buy it. If you counted those ballots in the dumpsters in
Detroit, Clinton would have won. And if this pattern held in the other
two states’ exit polls that reported she won, Wisconsin and
Pennsylvania, Clinton should have won the Electoral College.

I’m not sure what’s wrong with me. The election was over. Hillary and
hubby had moved on to lucrative book contracts, six-figure speaking
gigs, and their “charity.” Trump was triumphant and the country, too,
had moved on.

But it bothered me, the 75,355 ballots no one counted in Michigan.

The usual outlets for my investigations, like Rolling Stone, weren’t
bothered either. They had “moved on” too. So I borrowed a few more bucks
from my pension plan, begged my readers for some spare change, and
bought a ticket for Detroit.

To do this investigation, I needed a break. And I got it: a surprise
call from Jill Stein. The Green Party Presidential candidate. She
offered me a scoop. Stein was ready to raise $9 million for re-counts in
Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan to prove that Trump lost – that is,
if you counted all the votes in those states. She could literally
overturn Trump’s election.

I broke the story, she raised the $9 million in days, and the recount began.

But “recount” is the wrong word. In Michigan, the funds were meant for
counting those 75,355 ballots that were never counted in the first place.

In Michigan, you vote on paper ballots – which you shove into a scanner
to get counted. But a funny thing happened in Detroit: 87 machines broke
down, they could not read the ballots. Once in Detroit, I met with
information specialist Carlos Garcia. He told me his precinct’s scanner
was already busted when he arrived at the opening of voting at 7 a.m. It
was finally fixed at 9:30 a.m. He stayed and saw that those ballots cast
during the morning vote rush, while the machine was broken, were never
run through the scanner, never recorded.

That non-count was repeated throughout the city. It was easy to catch
… because the number of ballots in the broken machines did not match
the total of ballots these machines said it counted. But – /ready for
this?/ – the Republican Attorney General ruled that if the number of
physical ballots did not match the scanner count, these precincts could
not be re-counted. Get that? The precincts with the missing count – the
ones you’d want to review – were barred from the re-count.

Occupied Territories

One f’d-up machine in a precinct is bad luck. No big deal. But 87 broken
machines, 87 machines not counting thousands of ballots, is a very big
deal, an electoral crime wave. A stolen election.

And they knew it. Republican state officials knew before Election Day
that Detroit’s scanning machines were already busted, dysfunctional, or
likely not to survive the day. Well before November 2016, the Detroit
City Clerk Janice Winfrey pleaded to fund her budget to replace the bad
ballot scanners. But there was a problem: Detroit was bankrupt – and
every penny spent had to be approved by “managers,” overlords appointed
by the Republican Governor Rick Snyder.

In 2016, Detroit was an Occupied Territory, as was Flint, Michigan. In
Flint, the State-appointed managers cut the budget for the water system
– and poisoned Flint’s kids with lead. The stories of Detroit scanners
and the Flint water supply go together. If you’re going to poison
someone’s children, you’d better take away their right to vote against
the poisoning.

The Michigan ballot count was Jim Crow’d by bad scanners, and Trump was
triumphant. But Jill Stein was going to spoil the celebration. Her
recount would pay for an extraordinary machine that could read those
uncounted ballots: the human eyeball.

But something funny was happening at the government re-count centers.

Whistleblower

Late November in Michigan sucks. From a Hampton Inn on a truck route
north of the city, it was a long slog through dirty slush and wet snow
to meet a whistleblower at a roadhouse bar, and a couple stiff drinks to
get her to loosen up, to talk without a stutter or fear on camera. “Sue”
told me she faced retribution in her white suburb, even from in-laws who
were not happy about her blowing the whistle.

Sue is a computer programmer who thought it would be interesting, and
just a good thing to do, to volunteer for the recount operation at the
county building. She didn’t even have a strong preference in the election.

What she experienced disturbed her enormously:

We saw a lot of ballots that weren’t originally counted because
those don’t scan into the machine.

Ballot reviewers were adding previously uncounted ballots to the
Clinton column; and Trump operatives were challenging every Clinton
vote and every decision for Clinton. They are creating chaos and
slowing up the process, and making up nonsense rules to disqualify
ballots. At the same time, the Democratic Party had brought in
“observers” [who] refused to take part in the ballot count nor even
bother to get in the way of the GOP obstructers.

Despite all the obstruction, it was clear that if the count went ahead
unimpeded, Trump would lose Michigan. So Trump did the only thing he
could do: stop the count.

Get the rest of the story … in /How Trump Stole 2020/. And learn how to
steal it back.

Source: Reader Supported News 7/25/20 https://readersupportednews.org/