Chapter 8: The Heist of Democracy

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Chapter 8: The Heist of Democracy

How America’s Voting Rights Were Stolen in 2024

The corporate media keeps telling us that Donald Trump won the 2024 election fair and square. They’re almost certainly wrong: Joe Biden was, in my opinion, the last fairly elected American president.

Democracy lost big-time on November 5, 2024. This wasn’t because of fancy software hacks or the fever dreams of some convoluted China/Venezuela voting machine conspiracy, but through an old-fashioned, systematic campaign of voter suppression similar to the ones that characterized the fifty years or so following the collapse of Reconstruction. What we witnessed in the election of 2024—and the media still has yet to acknowledge—was Jim Crow 2.0, and it worked exactly as well as it did in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

How They Stole It: The Numbers Don’t Lie

The story is actually fairly straightforward: if all legal voters had been allowed to vote and if all the legal ballots had been counted, Kamala Harris would have won Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Georgia. Instead of a second Trump administration, Harris would have become our president with 286 electoral votes.

The US Elections Assistance Commission (an official government agency) data tell us the damning story: a staggering 4.7 million voters were purged from the voter rolls before the election, all on the false claim of “voter fraud,” something so rare that you’re more likely to be hit by lightning than to ever encounter it.1

By August 2024, self-proclaimed “vigilante” vote “fraud hunters” had challenged the eligibility of 317,886 voters across multiple states.2 When Election Day arrived, millions more were disenfranchised; the Georgia NAACP, for example, estimates challenges exceeded 200,000 people whose right to vote was stripped from them months before the election in Georgia alone.3

This was a coordinated national strategy, organized and executed by the GOP and several mostly billionaire-funded groups aligned with it:

— Over 2.1 million mail-in ballots were disqualified for minor clerical errors.4
— 585,000 in-person ballots were thrown out.5
— 1.2 million “provisional” (what I call “placebo”) ballots were rejected without being counted.6
— 3.2 million new voter registrations were rejected or not processed in time.7

And here’s the true obscenity, the kicker that the mainstream media refuses to even discuss (for a variety of reasons): these rejections weren’t random. A state audit in Washington, for example, found Black voters were four times more likely than white voters to have their mail-in ballots rejected.8 And that pattern repeated nationwide. In Florida, North Carolina, and Georgia, analyses showed that officials flagged Black voters’ mail ballots at more than twice the rate of white voters’ ballots.9

The KKK Playbook, Updated for the Digital Age

Georgia was the biggest test kitchen for the new Jim Crow cooking, with Governor Brian Kemp as head chef, a role he’d played in previous elections by purging voters when he was secretary of state and running for the governorship.

First, they used what my old friend reporter Greg Palast calls “Poison Postcards”: official-looking mail sent to targeted voters. When Georgians (especially young, poor, and Black or Hispanic voters) didn’t return these postcards (which were designed to look like junk mail), they were removed from voter rolls, a purging process that five Republicans on the Supreme Court legalized in 2018 with the Husted decision. In Georgia, for example, the response rate to these cards was barely above 1 percent.10

Then came the so-called “vigilante” challenges. In 2020, Palast uncovered a scheme where Republican operatives challenged the voting eligibility of 180,000 Georgians. Deeper investigation revealed this tactic was based on a program first deployed by the Ku Klux Klan in 1946.11 For 2024, the Georgia legislature changed state law to make it nearly impossible for election officials to deny these challenges, and the program went nationwide.

By August 2024, True the Vote and similar organizations had signed up 40,000 volunteer “vigilantes” who challenged nearly a million voters.12 A documentary film shows one Republican official, Pam Reardon, who personally challenged over 32,000 voters. When asked if she had verified any of the challenges, she admitted on camera, “I can’t go through 32,000 people. I was handed the list by True the Vote.”13

The Mail-In Ballot Attack

Republicans spent four years demonizing mail-in voting after the 2020 election, and it paid off. In Georgia, SB 202 slashed the number of ballot drop boxes by 75 percent—but only in Black-majority counties—and locked them away at night.14 These moves reduced mail-in and drop-box balloting (used by the majority of Democrats in 2020) by nearly 90 percent.

The attacks on mail ballots were particularly devastating because research consistently shows racial disparities in rejection rates. In North Carolina, multiple analyses found Black voters’ mail ballots were rejected at more than twice the rate of white voters’ ballots.15 In Texas, after new ID requirements were enacted, the rejection rate jumped from 1.7 percent to 12 percent during the March 2022 primary, with minority voters bearing the brunt.16

Provisional Ballots: The Ultimate Scam

Perhaps the cruelest trick was the “provisional” ballot. If you showed up to vote and found you’d been challenged or purged, you were offered one of these ballots and told your registration would be checked. What they didn’t tell you is that unless you personally went to your county clerk’s office with ID and proof of address afterward, your ballot was likely trashed.

According to the US Elections Assistance Commission, in 2016, when 2.5 million provisional ballots were cast nationwide, a breathtaking 42.3 percent were never counted.17 And Black, Hispanic, and Asian-American voters were 300 percent more likely than white voters to be shunted to these “placebo” ballots.18

The Deadly Math

When we apply the most conservative calculation to these numbers, the suppression factor in 2024 was at least 2.3 percent of the vote. That translates to approximately 3,565,000 votes that, largely, should have gone to Kamala Harris. With those ballots properly counted, she would have topped Trump’s official total by 1.2 million and won the Electoral College with 286 votes.19

This isn’t speculative: it’s the cold, hard math based on documented evidence from our own federal government. And it’s exactly what Republican officials designed their laws to do. As Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton proudly stated on Steve Bannon’s podcast after blocking Houston from sending mail ballots during COVID, “Had we not done that, Donald Trump would’ve lost the election [in Texas].”20

America’s Nasty Little Secret

The nasty little secret of American democracy is that we don’t count all the votes. Nor do we let every citizen vote. Because America is the only advanced democracy in the world where voting is a privilege rather than a right of citizenship.

Since 2020, according to the Brennan Center for Justice, “At least 30 states enacted 78 restrictive laws” to make voting harder.21 Why would legislators fight so hard to pass these laws if they didn’t affect election outcomes? The answer is clear when you look at the map of states with the most restrictive voting laws: it mirrors Trump’s 2024 victory map almost perfectly.

America deserves an answer to this question: Excluding the boost from Jim Crow vote suppression games, did Donald Trump win? The evidence clearly shows he did not.

What Happens Now?

Martin Luther King Jr. gave us our marching orders back in 1965, and they’re just as important today: “Let us march on ballot boxes, march on ballot boxes until race-baiters disappear from the political arena. I want to say to the people of America and the nations of the world, that we are not about to turn around. We are on the move now.”22

Democracy can win, despite the GOP’s 2.3 percent suppression headwind. After the 2016 election, Palast and others exposed a cruel, racist purge program called “Interstate Crosscheck” that cost nearly a million voters their rights. The Reverend Jesse Jackson launched a campaign that successfully shut down Crosscheck. Joe Biden couldn’t have won in 2020 without that victory saving hundreds of thousands of votes.

We need to organize now to end the purges, the vigilante challenges, the ballot rejections, and the attitude that this is somehow acceptable in a true democracy.

That fight starts with naming what happened clearly and honestly: Trump didn’t win. Vote suppression did.