At the risk of sounding like a voter conspiracy theorist, I forward the following facts and observations about the presidential election that we have just endured for the perusal of you, the readers.
In the spirit of full disclosure, it should be noted that I firmly believe that a few particular conspiracy theories - more than one person involved, which constitutes a "conspiracy", as opposed to "lone nut shooters" - provided to avid readers and serious historians over the past 60 years by numerous investigative authors concerning the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, Senator Robert F. Kennedy, and Reverend Martin Luther King, have proven to be true.
However, I did not at the time, and do not to this day, believe the voter conspiracy theories that were perpetrated by former President Donald J. Trump and his lawyers and advisors in the aftermath of the 2020 presidential election.
There was no proof whatsoever that any significant number of people who were not supposed to vote, did so. That was proven 60+ times in courts of law in 2020.
That, of course, did not stop Trump and his people from claiming the opposite to be true. And, as a result, according to investigative reporter Greg Palast, in the run-up to this election, Trump team-appointed "vote fraud hunters" proceeded to "purge" tens of thousands of registered voters of color from the voting roles in many of our key swing states.
This fact is supported to some extent by the fact that former president Donald J. Trump received approximately the same number of votes as he received in 2020 (74 million in 2020, 72 million in 2024), but VP Kamala Harris received 13 million less votes than President Joe Biden received in 2020 (81 million in 2020, 68 million in 2024). The question then arises, "Did 13 million less Democrats attempt to vote in 2024 than in 2020, or were many of them disenfranchised (or "purged") by Trump "ballot purgers" prior to the election?"
According to Greg Palast, author of the book, "The Best Democracy Money Can Buy", which exposed the fact that the company "Choice Point" disenfranchised many thousands of people of color in Florida prior to the election in the year 2000, says that the same thing was done by Trump's "purgers" in our swing states this year.
Think about it: in the year 2020, as well as earlier this year, President Biden had trouble filling a room of 500 people. There was no excitement to speak of at his rallies and yet he received 81 million votes in the last election.
VP Kamala Harris, on the other hand, was filling arenas with 30,000+ people for her entire 107 day campaign, with plenty of excitement - and she received 13 million less votes than Biden. To even the casual observer, it seems highly unlikely that would happen unless something unsavory was done to the voting registrations of people of color by "purgers"; and paid for by rich benefactors of Trump.
As explained by Palast, the way that the purgers work is if there is a "James Brown" registered in Detroit and another in Philadelphia, they would both be disenfranchised due to suspicion of voter fraud. "Choice Point" did the same thing twenty four years ago in Florida, helping President George W. Bush win the state and the election that year.
They purge thousands of people of color in particularly heavy-Democratic areas off the registration rolls with the lame excuse that a name such as "Williams" is too close to "Williamson" to leave them registered. In short, it is a 21st Century version of "Jim Crow" voter persecution.
In 2004, I gave a copy of the Palast book to Democratic Presidential Candidate John Kerry when he held a Town Hall in the Bethlehem, PA area in 2004, so he would be aware of the disenfranchisement trick. I had not heard of it being used since then - until now.
According to Palast's latest investigation, "just one Trump-backed group, True the Vote, signed up a posse of 40,000 of self-proclaimed vote fraud hunters who, two months ago, had already challenged the ballots of 852,381 voters, overwhelmingly citizens of color — with a goal, undoubtedly met — of challenging 2 MILLION."
Also, according to Palast, "same with mass purges: 400,000 in Georgia, 1.2 million in Texas — way over 10 million removed from the voter rolls — no other advanced nation does this, erasing voters’ rights to cast a ballot. And ... in a technical report for the ACLU in which the Palast team’s experts literally reviewed every single name on the Georgia and Wisconsin purge lists", they "found that Georgia wrongly removed a third of a million voters and Wisconsin tens of thousands."
If you believe that there is nothing to this and the Palast investigation should come to an end, what will stop them from doing the same thing in 2028 and 2032, especially when Trump is president, with full immunity and with no guardrails? The answer is nothing.
I, conversely, believe that the Justice Department should look into Palast's allegations of massive voter disenfranchisement immediately - and act accordingly.