Who Needs Democracy? Inside America's Billionaires' Brazen Attempt at Fascism - Part 2

Because we don’t have a right to vote, America’s billionaires and the GOP are preventing Democrats from voting…

Over four thousand Pennsylvania residents who live overseas just had their right to vote challenged by a group using data from a billionaire-funded outfit. As Sam Levine wrote for The Guardian:

“So far officials in Bucks, Lancaster, Lehigh, York, Cumberland, Dauphin, Beaver, Centre, and Lycoming county have all received challenges, said Andy Hoover, an ACLU spokesman.”

Many of America’s rightwing/neofascist billionaires don’t want you to vote. And they’ve funded extraordinary efforts across multiple states to put that desire into law.

Reporter Greg Palast has been busy this year documenting efforts by Georgia Republicans to hang onto control of their state by preventing Democrats from voting. Most recently, they’ve passed a law that allows any individual in Georgia to challenge the right of a virtually unlimited number of people to vote.

As a result, as Palast documents in his new movie (produced by Martin Sheen and George DiCaprio, and narrated by Rosario Dawson) Vigilantes, Inc. America’s New Vote Suppression Hitmen, thousands of Georgia citizens trying to vote today will discovered they’re no longer registered.

Most will think it’s just them, not realizing it’s part of a massive, national effort by Republicans and the billionaires who fund them to prevent Democrats from voting.

“Carry Smith wrote her PhD thesis on the Voting Rights Act and challenges to the right to vote in Georgia,” writes Palast.

“Now dig this: Smith, the expert on challenges to voting rights, lost her vote because a Republican vigilante challenged her registration—along with 900 other Savannah voters—until she was forced to make an appearance proving her right to vote at a meeting of the Chatham County (Savannah) elections board.

“Half of the others challenged still lost their vote in this do-or-die battleground.

“Adrian Consonery Jr. was also challenged, in this case, by officials in Cobb County, Georgia. The elections officers claimed that the signature on his drivers license ‘didn’t match’ the signature on his ballot. Were these local pols forgery specialists?  No, they were Republicans. No problem, they told Consonery, a student in the middle of his finals; all he had to do was drive to their offices, eight hours away, and re-sign his ballot.

“Why were Smith and Consonery targeted? At this point in the Ugliest Election in Memory, you won’t be shocked to learn that Consonery is Black and Smith is of Cherokee heritage. (I’ve reported that America’s Tribal members are the number one target of vote suppression tactics.)

“But who knows the motivation of the Savannah vigilante Helen Strahl—who used a Georgia ‘challenge’ statute last deployed in 1946 by the Ku Klux Klan. I tried to speak to Strahl, the self-appointed vote-fraud hunter who attacked Smith and 900 others in this majority African-American city. Was it racism? Or was it a purely a partisan attack on voters expected to vote for Kamala Harris.”

In a few small ways I helped Greg put this movie together but, even after writing an entire book about Republican efforts to block Democrats from voting (The Hidden History of the War on Voting), I was shocked by what he discovered.

The last time there was a concerted effort like this to challenge individual Americans’ right to vote was in 1946. It was done by the Ku Klux Klan in Georgia, running through a front group they started called Vigilantes, Inc. Now they’re back with a vengeance, although they’ve traded in the sheets and hoods for law degrees and billionaire funding.

Just between 2017 and 2019, Brian Kemp and friends removed at least 538,485 people from the voting rolls in Georgia, ensuring that he could beat Stacey Abrams in the race for governor by around 50,000 votes.

And now, under this new revival of an old Klan law, the people profiled in Palast’s new movie have challenged tens of thousands more. All in the name of stopping a “voter fraud epidemic” that isn’t happening now, never has happened, and never will happen.

Three years ago, Ari Berman and Nick Sergey detailed for Mother Jones magazine how the billionaire-funded Heritage Action for America helped draft voter suppression legislation that’s now law in dozens of states, with a particular target on the swing states.

Heritage spent a small fortune of its billionaire’s money in “Arizona, Michigan, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Nevada, Texas, and Wisconsin” to pass and defend legislation making it harder for students, low-income people, Blacks, Hispanics, and seniors to vote while making it easier for partisans to challenge the right of people to vote or have their vote counted. As Berman and Sergey note:

“Every Tuesday, the group leads a call with right-wing advocacy groups like the Susan B. Anthony List, Tea Party Patriots, and FreedomWorks to coordinate these efforts at the highest levels of the conservative movement. ‘We literally give marching orders for the week ahead,’ [Heritage Action Executive Director Jessica] Anderson said. ‘All so we’re singing from the same song sheet of the goals for that week and where the state [voter suppression] bills are across the country.’”

Kemp, with billionaire backing, won his election against Stacey Abrams by 54,723 votes, a fraction of the number of Black people he’d just purged from the rolls.

In the two years leading up to 2020, Kemp’s Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger (pronounced Raff-ens-Purger), purged another massive 309,000 voters from the rolls, so Palast hired the same company Amazon uses to confirm addresses to check the list: 198,351 were wrongly purged.

Palast, along with the Georgia ACLU, Black Voters Matter Fund, and the Georgia NAACP, were successful in getting about half of them put back on the rolls, which is why Joe Biden won that state by a mere, as Trump said, “11,780 votes.”

These purges have since spread out of Georgia and are now — with major billionaire funding — accelerating across the country. Keep in mind that, as NPR’s Domenico Montanaro explained:

“Just 44,000 votes in Georgia, Arizona and Wisconsin separated Biden and Trump from a tie in the Electoral College."

Palast did a similar analysis in 2020 in then-GOP-controlled Wisconsin where 135,000 voters were about to be removed before the election.

Using that Amazon contractor’s name-by-name analysis, he found that about a third of the list, “almost entirely Black people in Milwaukee and students in Madison,” were on the purge list incorrectly.  Luckily, the Palast Investigative Fund and Black Voters Matter filed that information with a bipartisan elections commission and stopped the billionaire’s purge so Biden was able to win that state by about 10,000 votes.

“Now,” Palast told me, “we have at least 20 states using this same purge system.”

Most recently, Republican billionaires rolled out a new strategy to get around legal challenges to Red states purging millions of voters: voter vigilantes.

While most states allow whistleblower citizens to challenge the vote of an individual they know and believe is voting illegally, Georgia’s SB202 (written with help from the billionaires who fund Heritage) was the first law in the country since the 1940s to allow “unlimited” challenges to voters by people who aren’t government officials.

The benefit of this system is that states are banned by law from purging people via “list maintenance” within 90 days of an election, but the Supreme Court just ruled that a citizen vigilante can submit voter purge lists right up to and on election day, when it’s far too late for purged voters to re-register and vote.  

“In 2022, 149,000 voters were challenged in Georgia,” Palast told me, “not by the government, but by vigilante vote fraud hunters using specious data. There have been two federal court rulings thus far that have allowed this to continue, so it’s now spreading to other states.”

Palast told me about one Georgian, Marjorie Taylor Greene ally Pam Reardon, who challenged 32,000 voters, heavily focused on Black people and college students, using a list from the group True The Vote, who produced the discredited movie 2000 Mules (premiered at Mar-a-Lago by Trump himself) that falsely claimed millions of votes were “stuffed” into drop boxes by mostly Black people across the nation.

Another voter vigilante Palast identified, Chairman of the Ft. Benning area GOP Alton Russell, challenged over 4,000 voters, “capturing a substantial number of Black soldiers.” Russell sees himself as a vigilante, wearing Georgia native Doc Holliday style clothes with a loaded six-shooter on his hip.

The Palast Investigative Fund, Black Voters Matter, Georgia NAACP, and Georgia ACLU found that not one single voter challenged by Reardon, Russell, or any of the other vigilantes who challenged hundreds to thousands of Georgia voters, was a fraudulent voter. They were able to stop the Reardon purge, but Russell’s challenge was sustained and all 4,000-plus were removed from the rolls.

This, Palast told me, “is what election attorney Mark Elias calls the ‘Big new unseen threat.’” And there’s virtually no coverage of this in any of our nation’s mainstream media.

Palast notes:

“Georgia and Texas are not red states: if people were allowed to vote they’d be Blue states.

“Their brand of voter vigilantism has now legally spread to Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. They’re now mass challenging literally hundreds of thousands of voters, and True The Vote has put out the call to get 100,000 volunteers to submit these challenges. They’re probably the most effective vote suppression organization since the Ku Klux Klan.”

Raising the stakes, courts approved the Georgia legislature’s plan to require new voters to prove their citizenship when registering to vote, an effort that Mike Johnson tried unsuccessfully to take national earlier this year.

That billionaire-funded effort will hit married women particularly hard, as the National Organization for Women (NOW) details in a report:

“According to the Brennan Center for Justice, one third of all women have citizenship documents that do not identically match their current names primarily because of name changes at marriage. Roughly 90 percent of women who marry adopt their husband’s last name. 

“That means that roughly 90 percent of married female voters have a different name on their ID than the one on their birth certificate. An estimated 34 percent of women could be turned away from the polls unless they have precisely the right documents.”

This hits Black women even harder than white women, and, because Black women have been the key to both the Obama and Biden presidencies, this is a reality not lost on Republicans. Particularly in a country and era where most elections are decided by one or two or three points. 

None of these games Republicans are playing would be legal if we had an absolute right to vote or if the NVRA were enforced. Unfortunately, billionaire-supported Republicans on the Supreme Court have repeatedly ignored it, even when referenced in voting rights lawsuits.

— Because we don’t have a right to vote, Red State governors can radically cut back on the number of polling places and voting machines so that working class people are forced to stand in line for five, six, in some cases in 2022 11 hours to vote.

— Because we don’t have a right to vote, legislators in Georgia made it a crime to give a bottle of water or a slice of pizza to somebody they have forced to stand in line for 11 hours to vote.

— Because we don’t have a right to vote, about 40 million registered voters nationwide have been removed from the voting rolls since 2014, so when they show up to vote they are given “provisional ballots” that, in Red States, are often never counted unless there is a lawsuit.

— Because we don’t have a right to vote, back in the 1960s William Rehnquist helped organize “Operation Eagle Eye” in Arizona to pull together a volunteer army of large and often uniformed white men to challenge Black, Hispanic, and Native American voters at the polls. It was so successful it kicked off Rehnquist’s political career, taking him all the way to Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court. Republican armed vigilantes have returned, surrounding Arizona ballot drop boxes challenging Hispanic voters.

— Because we don’t have a right to vote, Florida’s Republican Governor Ron DeSantis was able to prevent almost a million mostly Black Florida citizens from voting if they owed fines or fees to the government.

— Because we don’t have a right to vote, Louis DeJoy could slow down the mail just in time for the election and not face any legal consequences.

— Because we don’t have a right to vote, in 2000 then-Florida Governor Jeb Bush threw over 90,000 African Americans off the voting rolls, supposedly felons barred from voting, just before the election that Jeb’s brother George “won” in Florida by 537 votes. Yet, not a single one of those Black voters was, Palast and the BBC found, a convicted felon. 

—Because we don’t have a right to vote, the Supreme Court told the Republican governor of Ohio  —  and now all governors  —  that he could remove millions of big city registered voters from the rolls because they hadn’t voted in the previous election and/or didn’t mail back a postcard.

— Because we don’t have a right to vote, Red State legislators have been able to force through laws requiring citizens to jump through extraordinary hoops like getting IDs they normally wouldn’t need or use, just to vote.

— Because we don’t have a right to vote, Republicans in multiple states are making it extremely difficult to vote by mail or drop off your ballot at a convenient dropbox.

The press says the “Big Lie” is that the election of 2020 was stolen from Trump, but the real Big Lie — that was amplified by billionaire Trump and toady Johnson at their press conference earlier this year at Mar-a-Lago — is that non-citizens vote illegally and therefore all these voter purges and other challenges are necessary.

While it requires lawful due process — your day in court — to take away your gun, Red state governors and secretaries of state can now take away your vote without even telling you.

If Democrats can hold the Senate and White House and take back the House, the first order of business next January — along with blocking billionaire and corporate money from our elections — must be to pass legislation explicitly granting a legal right for average people to vote.

Today’s the last day to beat back this neofascist billionaires’ scheme: Vote!

The song that was inspired by this article is here.
My reading this article as an audio podcast is here.
My newest book, The Hidden History of the American Dream, is now available.