Will We Have Free and Fair Elections in the Midterms?
There’s a troubling sense of normalcy bias among some Democratic leaders who believe they’ll regain their footing in the 2026 midterms, riding another anti-Trump wave. But here’s the critical question: will the United States even have free and fair elections? To answer that, we need to look back and ask: was the 2024 U.S. election free and fair? Elon Musk and Donald Trump, and those around them, break the law so brazenly, how can we trust they came to power without breaking the law?
According to investigative journalist Greg Palast, this week’s guest and director of the must-see film Vigilantes Inc., which you can watch for free, the answer is a resounding no. Palast’s analysis reveals the shocking normalization of Republican voter suppression: over 3.5 million votes were effectively canceled in 2024. This means 3.5 million Americans were denied their fundamental right to vote. And according to Palast, a significant number of suppressed voters are nonwhite. This isn’t just voter suppression; it’s a modern-day resurrection of Jim Crow, fueled by the Republican Party’s relentless assault on democracy. In this week’s bonus episode, out Friday, Elie Mystal, the Justice Correspondent for The Nation, and author of the new book Bad Law: Ten Popular Laws That Are Ruining America, explains how the GOP’s reaction to the first Black president was to gut the Voting Rights Act, paving the way for Trump.
In this week’s bonus episode, we also continue our conversation with Palast, diving into the power of film as a powerful force for confronting America’s darkest history. Plus, we’ll also hear from Mystal on why European nations must take a stand by imposing a travel ban on Ivanka Trump and others complicit in the destruction of our democracy—a move that could help hold the Musk-Trump regime accountable for its action, along with divestment strategies that brought down Apartheid. Don’t miss this eye-opening episode, out Friday!
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Show Notes
Watch Vigilantes, Inc. by Greg Palast for free: https://www.watchvigilantesinc.com/
Bad Law Ten Popular Laws That Are Ruining America https://thenewpress.com/books/bad-law
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Andrea Chalupa (00:14):
This is one of the most important interviews that Gaslit Nation has ever done because we are going to get to the heart of whether the 2024 election was stolen by Trump and Musk, and therefore, is this an illegitimate administration? And if that is the case, what are we all going to do about it? With us to sort through this constitutional crisis is Greg Palast is known for his investigative reports for the Guardian and bestsellers, including the best democracy money can buy Greg Pal's new film about the latest attacks on the right to vote. That bent this past election is called Vigilantes Inc. America's New Vote Suppression Hitman narrated by Rosario Dawson and produced by Martin Sheen. Leonardo DiCaprio has released the film for free streaming@gregpales.com, which we'll link to in the show notes. So Greg was the 2024 US election, a free and fair election,
Greg Palast (01:14):
Not even close. This was a Jim Crow election. Now, as you heard, I've been on the vote suppression beat for 25 years for the Guardian BBC Rolling Stone. For decades, I was an investigator what's called a forensic economist, a detective who specializes in numbers for the United States Justice Departments and dozens of attorneys general of the United States. This is what I do, these numbers, these investigative numbers. And so here's, can I give you the numbers, the bottom line numbers, okay? Now, you don't have to write these down or pull out your calculator. You can go to greg palace.com and it's all summarized there in one article. Trump lost vote suppression won. Here are the numbers and here's the numbers. If it were not for what we politely call vote suppression tactics. And by the way, vote suppression is a fancy polite word for shafting black people and Latinos and Asian Americans and young people out of their votes. Shafting people out of their votes.
(02:20):
That's what vote suppression is. If it were not for vote suppression tactics, which I will break down detail, Kamala Harris would've had 3,565,000 additional votes, which would've given her a popular victory over Trump by about one and a quarter million, and she would've won four more states, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Georgia. I ain't guessing. I'll give you some numbers here. I just said three and a half million votes. Now, this is not the first Jim Crow election. We have Jim Crow baked into our electoral system. It was there in 2020, 2018, and all the way back, but this year was special in its ugliest attack ever that I've seen in my career on the rights of voting people to vote since the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Here's a couple of other numbers you must know. The first number is the number of people purged. They're literally taking off the voter rules.
(03:29):
By the way, I've covered elections for BBC all over the world, from England, Germany, Venezuela, Argentina, Liberia, and I haven't seen any nation that simply takes the voter rolls and crosses off literally millions of people. 4,776,706 people were crossed off the voter rolls without any evidence. I want to repeat that without any evidence. They were removing the voter rolls as illegal voters. People who are not voting from their legal voting address are there really 5 million felonious illegal voters in the United States that had to be removed. These are removed by the states. Well, guess what? You know how many they arrested for illegally registering? It's a felony crime out of 5 million people that they accused of and removed their right to vote exactly zero, Andrew, no one. It doesn't happen. And by the way, where did Greg Powell get 4,776,000? That number -- it comes from a government agency, the federal agency called the US Elections Assistance Commission.
(04:41):
Believe it or not, we have a government agency which not only tracks the number of votes and how we vote, et cetera, but it also tracks something else. The votes, we don't count that America, the people removed from the voter roll in America. That's our nasty little secret in America is that we don't count all the votes and let all our citizens vote. We are unique among recognized democracies. I mean, I'm not talking Saudi Arabia or Russia here. I'm talking about United States. We are the only nation in the OECD that pulls off this stunt of stopping people from voting. Again, these are not my numbers. These are from the US government. Now, you mailed in your ballot, good luck, Jackson. Most Democrats do. You're 51% more likely to vote by mail if you're a Democrat. Ready, 2,120,000 mail-in ballots were disqualified. It's really easy to disqualify your ballot.
(05:32):
You registered in some states like you take Georgia and many other states. You registered with a middle initial. You signed on the return address, use the return address sticker or something like that, or you signed it or stamp. Guess what? If you didn't include that middle initial that you registered with, you've just disqualified your ballot. My sister, a lawyer lost her mail-in ballot because she put an X instead of filling in a bubble on her choices and she was knocked out and disqualified. She's a lawyer, but usually but whose vote? Look, if it's random, if it's just lawyers like my sister or if it's just random people, it wouldn't matter. But here's the ugly part. The state of Washington just did an analysis and found out that if you are black, the chance your mail-in ballot will be disqualified is 400% higher than if you're white.
(06:27):
They look out for those black ballots and they disqualify those votes. It's really easy to do. You folded it wrong. Use the wrong envelope. 300,000 people tend to get knocked out for postage due because many ballots require two stamps, but again, it's four to one, black to white. Now that ain't all. That ain't all. We have something called spoiled ballots. You walk in, you vote, you think, oh, you voted. Well, guess what? If the scanner didn't like your machine, I'm not talking about, by the way, I'm not talking about Elon Musk changing the votes from outer space. Take off your tinfoil hat. This is really simple direct. We can measure it, we can look at it. We can see it vote suppression, but 585,000 ballots, over half a million ballots were knocked out as somehow disqualified illegal. But you know what? Again, if it's random, hey, it wouldn't change the election.
(07:22):
But here's the ugly number again. United States government, US Civil Rights Commission measured this and they said, if you are black, the chance your ballot will be rejected on a technical ground is 900% higher than if you are white, 900% higher. And again, this is not a small number. We're just beginning provisional ballots. Now, if you're white, you may not even know what a provisional ballot is. Provisional ballots are handed out like candy to people of color provisional ballots when they say, oh, you've been purged. Your name is missing, blah, blah, blah. Some reason they don't like your id, something they don't like the way you signed your name. Well, they give you a provisional ballot and the nice lady behind the desk says, Hey, you fill out this provisional ballot and they'll check your registration and then they'll count your vote. No, they won't. No, they won't. They don't count your vote because what happens is if whatever knocked you out and forced you to provisional ballot keeps you off the ballot, unless in most states you have to physically go into your county clerk's office after the balloting, show them ID proof of citizenship, et cetera, and then they might count your vote. Otherwise, forget it. That's 1.2 million provisional ballots were junk in the last election. Now, who cast these ballots? Well, let me go back.
(08:52):
According to the US government figures and the Brennan Center for Justice, they're the experts on this. If you're black, the chance you'll be shunted to a provisional ballot or Hispanic or Latino is 300% higher than if you're white. 300%. Now, again, and by the way, how many provisional ballots, what's the chance your ballot will be counted if it's provisional? The answer according again to the United States Elections Assistance Commission, not Greg Palast, their number is at 42.3%, nearly half of all provisional ballots cast are rejected, never counted, and again, three to one, if you're voter of color, it's going to go in the garbage can and the rejection rate, not just the give out rate, but the rejection rate, like I said, is nine to one. It's obscene. And finally, the most obscene, the most obscene method of vote suppression is brand new to 2024. And this is what put Trump over.
(09:55):
Absolutely put him over in Georgia and maybe other states too. But I can tell you right now in Georgia, this is called the Vigilante Voter Challenge, and that's why my film's called, by the way, Vigilante Zinc. This is new or at least nuisance 46 as I'll explain. By August of election year, three months before the election, a Trump front group called True the Vote out of Texas was handing out lists to Trump volunteers, almost all of them, white GOP officials. And I'm not being prejudiced and I'm not being partisan. I'm just telling you the facts, ma'am, they, I know 40,000 voter vigilantes where individuals can challenge the right of another voter to vote. And I say, what do you mean? Greg Palace can say that Andrea shouldn't be allowed to vote. She doesn't live where she says she lives. Who am I to say that?
(10:53):
The answer is I'm a vigilante and under the laws of at least two dozen states left over from the Jim Crow era, from reconstruction, from after reconstruction, you're talking about 317,000 people were challenged by August. Their goal was 2 million. The NAACP, the president of the NAACP Georgia, tells me that they were looking at over 200,000 challenges by election day in one state, 200,000 challenges in one state. Now, who are these people to challenge one, there's self-appointed vigilante voters. Now, if you watch the film Vigilante Zinc, you'll see me confront one GOP official works for Marjorie Taylor Green, a nice lady in a red dress in a Gone with the Wind mansion. She personally already, she personally challenged 32,000 of her neighbors in Cobb County, Georgia, 32,000. She simply sent in a spreadsheet that she got from this Trump front group. 32,000 voters challenged. I showed her photos.
(12:03):
I went to your house. I showed her photos of some of the black neighbors that she challenged, and I said, do you know these people? No. I said, but you challenged their right to vote. And she said, well, I can't call 32,000 people. No, you can't. But you seem to be able to challenge their right to vote. Another challenge you'll see on camera, you get to meet him. If you watch the film, vigilantes Zinc, again, that's free@gregpalace.com. Thank you, Leo and Major Gamal Turner, US Career Military Officer, Pentagon consultant assigned to from Fort Bennington out of Georgia, was assigned to a military base in California. They challenged this officer's right to vote. He asked, he said, where's my ballot? Two days before the election, they said, well, Mr. Turner calls his county clerk's office. Very few people do that. He did. Where's my ballot? And he said, Mr. Turner, you've been challenged.
(13:01):
He says, what do you mean? I've been challenged? What does that mean? He says, well, someone, it turns out that someone who challenged him was is vice chairman of the state party's also chairman of the party in Columbus, Georgia or the Republican Party. So this is a Republican party official, not a government official who stopped Major Turner from getting his ballot. They said, no problem. All you have to do is come in, prove you're a citizen, et cetera. He says, wait a minute. You're telling me US military officer, you're telling me 2,700 miles away that all I have to do is come in and prove that I am an American citizen.
(13:45):
I didn't have to do that, Andrea. You didn't have to do that. But black men had to do that who were in the US military assigned to other bases. They were told they had to fly back to Georgia at their expense, and if they could get the time off to get their ballot counted, by the way, the major did go 5,000 miles trip, a round trip. Eventually, he needed a federal court order to get his ballot counted. But 4,000 others challenged by this guy, Alton Russell, a vicious, vicious attack on these men's right to vote. None of them got their ballot back except for the major who had to go to federal court. Now in the film, you'll actually see us see the major confront this vigilante. By the way, Alton Russell, you'll love this in the film, he actually dresses like vigilante. Doc Hollis, his shtick.
(14:34):
He likes to dress up like an actual vigilante. The unfortunate thing is that he had a loaded six gun on him and a holster. Thank God he was no wire Earp when we confronted him. But this plan of individual challenges has not been used in the United States since 1946. When the K clue Klux Klan launched the scheme to challenge every black voter in Georgia, they pretty much did that and elected a Klansman as governor. That was 1946. But the governor, Eugene Tallman was about to be arrested by Harry Truman's, FBI, but he happened to drink himself to death just before the FBI cuffed him. Now, it was illegal in 46. How did it become suddenly legal now and in 46, they're filling out these little forms. Don't let Joe Black vote. Now they use computers. They've taken Jim Crow into cyberspace. This is the most dangerous, dangerous new Jim Crow attack, yet is this vigilante vote challenging, which is, by the way, why the film's called Vigilantes Inc. Because vigilantes Inc is how the Ku Klux Klan incorporated itself as Vigilantes incorporated. That's the Ku Klux clan, and they did that to try to hide their criminal attack on black voters from the feds. But they don't do it. They don't hide anymore. They're out in the open because who's going to bust them?
(16:03):
Trump's Attorney General, who's going to bust them? Brian Kemp, the white racist governor of Georgia, don't believe that he's a good guy because he wouldn't go to jail for Trump. This is what's happening now. So I can tell you now, by the way, if you add up all my numbers, there are many millions, many more than the three and a half million vote lost by comma because there's some double countings. Not everyone, not everyone purged was going to vote for her. So we have to take out all that. So the net line is 3,565,000, three and a half million votes is a lot of votes. And again, it's aimed at voters of color because they're the most vulnerable politically, and that's the story. And how did this happen? The final number I'll give you is the Brennan Center for Justice said the reason for this type of massive vote suppression, how it got worse is that 30 states passed laws between the 2020 election and the 2024 election. 30 states read states past laws making it harder for people of color to vote. We are running backwards as fast as we can from the Voting Rights Act of 65. That's the bottom line. Okay, I've given you enough numbers. Class, there won't be a test. Don't worry.
Andrea Chalupa (17:25):
Shocking numbers. So 3.5, 3.6 million Americans voted in the 2024 election but did not have their vote counted. That's a massive amount of people. Why aren't we seeing those people rise up? Talk to the press, talk to local representatives, flood, social media. Where are those human beings in all this?
Greg Palast (17:48):
Oh, they're on camera. If you go to Vigilantes Zinc, and if you go to the naacp, they've been screaming. I did a technical report. Well, I do my films that are, they're movies, they're fun to watch. Bring Your Popcorn. It's no charge. It is a movie. It's a documentary movie, but it's an eyeopener, but it's also entertaining. But I do technical reports for the A CLU Black Voters Matter Fund, NAACP Rainbow Push, where we go into federal court and I act as an expert witness because of my credentials with numbers and my degrees in economics and statistics now. So we do bring these things, but it's murderously difficult to get the US media to look at what they consider a race issue. Once in a while they'll bring up these things, but it is hard. I mean, when we sued the state of Georgia, we, black Voters Matter sued the state of Georgia based on my A CLU investigation, and we went to federal court. So the New York Times covered that. Did they cover the effects of it? No, we found, okay, we actually went through just to show you that we know what we're talking about when we say these things are phony.
(19:09):
I hired the experts that work with Amazon and the United States Postal Service who are the experts on where you live. Amazon knows exactly where you live, like right this minute. In fact, they know where you are this second, they know where you are. So does the US Postal Service. We went through every single name by computer, of course, and we found out that the state of Georgia before the election knocked out 198,000 voters illegally wrongly, 190, and we weren't guessing. We have the names and addresses of every legal voter that was removed, and we called 800, which statisticians out there know that's a big sample. We called 800 and overwhelmingly they were African-Americans and no one that we called had any idea. They'd been purged. And then they looked it up and found out, oh my God, I can't vote. So in fact, and I want to put a face to the names, when we did this analysis, I was at the polling station with our camera crews in Atlanta, and I was there.
(20:16):
One black person after another is being thrown out, and then 92-year-old woman in a walker dressed to the nines because she takes voting seriously. A black woman, 92 years old, and they threw her out. It was her 50th year voting at the same polling station. They said, you can't vote here. You're off the voter rolls. Looked it up. They thought that she was accused of not living where she lives, so she was purged that she didn't live in Atlanta anymore. Well, I went down the street to her Atlanta home, and there on the wall was a picture of her having dinner there 50 years earlier with her cousin, Martin Luther King. This is Martin Luther King's cousin. She was knocked off the voter rolls because of that 92 years old. Heartbreaking story. We didn't get her on the regular news, but we got her on the Daily Show. So the comics were picking it up. Why do we have to get our news from a comedy show? It's a tragedy. They gave a reward for the worst case of vote suppression in America. I hate to say it. There's a lot worse out there, and this is what's going on. So we're trying, trying.
Andrea Chalupa (21:31):
What response have you had to your findings by people in positions of power?
Greg Palast (21:40):
Well, there are some people out there. I mean, Jesse Jackson and I had a meeting with Bernie Sanders who's a member, by the way of the Black Caucus. There's no racial requirement, and Bernie was working with the Black Caucus. I mean, we've got the Black Caucus, very, very concerned, deeply knowledgeable. My problem is that we can't get the White Congressional Caucus to get excited about these matters. Well, I would say that she Brown, who we just lost as a senator from Ohio, there are some people out there, and you just saw the terrific Jasmine Crockett. But again, this is an African-American congresswoman who's fighting this fight and taking my film to the Black caucus. We are trying, and there are some progressive good people. There are even some state officials, and I have to say that there are some Republican local officials who refuse to accept these challenges. They fought and they were crushed by their own party.
(22:42):
So we do get some notice in the press, but here's what happens. The press scammers away and disappears after an election. So for example, NPR did a study. Remember I said all these mail-in ballots rejected NPR did a study, and according to their calculations, their calculations are higher than mine. They said 13.8% about one in seven mail-in ballots are not counted one in seven. That's NPR. Now, here's my question for NPR. You did that analysis before the election. After the election, did you go back and take a look and say, remember what he told you about all those rejected mail-in ballots that flipped the election in Michigan? Why didn't they say that? One thing they also don't say is whose ballot is rejected? I told you that the state of Washington said, you're 400% more likely to have your ballot rejected if you're black, then if you're white.
(23:47):
Now, NPR would not say that. They just said ballots are rejected. Oh, it's just random. So if it's random, it doesn't matter anyway. They never go back after an election. They never tell you how the race of the voters, they never tell you the race of the voters who are under attack and it ain't random, and the race of the voters, that's where you get into ugly and no one touches that, and no one talks about whether it had turned over the election. I'm telling you, it overturned the election. So I'm telling you, and I'm using the official government numbers and NPR, where are you? We did have a story in the New York Times about vigilante voter attacks. They didn't mention that there were way over a million challenges. They just said, oh, there's some challenges, which they called an inconvenience for local elections officials, but after the election, they didn't go back and say, well, we had a million challenges overwhelmingly by all of them, by Geo P officials as far as we could tell all of them, and that changed the election.
(24:55):
No, they can't do that. They will never tell you that after an election. Everything is wonderful. Joe Biden, and I don't like to pick on people who are intellectually challenged, but he did say after the election that anyone who challenges the outcome of American election is undermining democracy. No, no, no. Actually, to me it's the KKK and their new modern counterparts who are a threat to democracy, not the people pointing it out any more than a bank robber could say, I wouldn't be here in prison if I weren't arrested. All I am is the journalistic cop on the beat. No, I'm not undermining democracy, Joe. No, I'm not.
Andrea Chalupa (25:43):
The battleground states,
Greg Palast (25:46):
Michigan,
Andrea Chalupa (25:48):
Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Nevada. Obviously Georgia under Brian Kemp, as you see in your film, vigilante Zinc was under assault aggressively, but Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Nevada, those states were largely under democratic leadership and had made great strides towards greater democracy in recent years. We made sure of that in the 2022 elections. Why weren't those states more vigilant of this issue and why can't there have been confrontations fixes in the immediate aftermath
Greg Palast (26:26):
There were Wisconsin, it's been a blood battle. Now, I have to tell you, back in 2020, the only reason Biden won, but he doesn't know it, probably doesn't even remember it, but in 2020, I did an analysis of the Purge List, the people they were about to remove from the voter rolls in Wisconsin. I did this for Black Voters Matter, and using the same team we used for the ACL U, that is the US Postal Service and the Amazon experts. We went through the purge list and we found out it was overwhelmingly wrong and we didn't just guess. So we gave the nonpartisan state board the list of all the voters that were being wrongly accused of not being legal voters. By the way, that was being pushed by a right wing group affiliated with the Bradley right-wing family group run by Cleta Mitchell, who was Trump's lawyer.
(27:28):
So he had his fingers in that in 2020. So we showed them tens of thousands of people who were being wrongly removed, and we did something else. We mapped it and we looked in Milwaukee and almost every single wrongly tagged voter, almost every single one was in a black precinct in Milwaukee. However, there were quite a few that were in student housing precincts around the University of Wisconsin at Madison. So they knocked out students, they knocked out black people. In 2020, the bipartisan board said, this list is unreliable. We're not using it. That's the only reason Joe Biden won Wisconsin in 2020, but by 2024, they were able to maneuver to get more Republican influence on that elections board, and they use that same poisoned list. The list we proved was racist and wrong, and they used that list to knock out tens of thousands of voters, and that's how Biden lost Wisconsin in 2024. Now, you do have voting rights groups, civil rights groups, all voting is local. There's a lot of very good groups. Again, black Voters Matter fund ACL U.
(28:52):
We tried to raise hell, but it was very difficult. I got it. In some of the local newspapers we try, but it's very, very difficult to break, and especially since so many Democrats, the Democrats are split on this. So many Democrats are saying, don't talk about vote suppression. The Democratic Party has done everything in the world to block me from doing these reports, just so you know, because the theory of part of the Democratic Party, not all of it, part of the Democratic Party is that if you raise the issue of vote suppression, people won't vote. They say, oh, my vote won't count. Stacey Abrams proved. Stacey Abrams proved that. If you say they're trying to steal your vote, then that motivates people to vote because they say, well, they won't steal it. If it's valuable, it must be valuable. I'm going to vote. So there's a split in the party, but it's not my job.
(29:44):
I'm nonpartisan. It's not my job to elect one party or the other. It's not my job to convince one party or another to take a position. My position is that these things have to be exposed and I'm happy when they're corrected. And I should say Jesse Jackson personally handed a copy of my film to Joe Biden and to Kamala Harris and said, you got to watch Greg's film. They know me. Watch Greg's film and do something about it. They did hire Mark Elias, I will say, a voting rights attorney to take this issue on, but he was so under, he was the voting groups versus 2020. In 2020, people were repaired in 2024. They were not prepared, did not have the resources to fight this avalanche of the KKK challenge plan because it was only in one state. Remember in 2020, by 2024, they ruled it out to couple dozen states. You went from, well, it was 180,000 challenges in 2020. We could beat that back by exposing by 2024. We're talking 2 million in several states, so people were overwhelmed.
(30:55):
You can't count on the media to stay on top of this, and you can't ask the media or the Democratic Party to save your vote. Don't wait for a party to save your vote. You save your vote. Join. There's a lot of good groups out there, rainbow Push, black Voters Matter Fund. There's so many good groups that maybe Transformative Justice Coalition and others. So these are good groups that you should be participating in. People asking what to do, join those groups. Also, protect your own vote. Always check your registration before an election. See if you've been purged.
Andrea Chalupa (31:30):
So you're saying in the 2024 election, yes, we know the Democrats had a big disruption. Biden stepped out of the race. Kamala replaced him. There were all these internal party debates. Whether that was the good course of action, should there have been an open primary? Should Biden have stepped out sooner? Why weren't there warnings ahead of time from Biden's inner circle of the state that he was in that was kept from the public except for moments when it was exposed through gaffes and other things? Certainly the debate with Trump in June, which Biden accepted, which, so there's a lot of stumbles that the Democratic Party itself created to worsen its chances in this already very close election during a time of high inflation. And so you're saying in addition to that, the Democratic party did not have a proper structure in place that was deeply funded and vigilant to protect against the new Jim Crow that has been widely documented, not just you, but Supreme Court verdicts stripping away the Voting Rights Act. So this is not like a secret. This has been in Mother Jones, so many books. They know what's happening. Like you mentioned Mark Elias, his very purpose for the Democratic Party is to monitor the assaults on the vote. So it's not like this was a shock to them. But you're saying that the Democratic Party had no playbook. The establishment had no playbook in 2024.
Greg Palast (33:07):
No, they're reacting and flying by the seat of their pants. I will say, and thank you, mark Lies did represent major Turner in federal court and that's great, but one vote and he got to hit millions. He couldn't get the other 4,000 voters that were voting or trying to vote with the major. He can only get the majors vote because the major flew all the way in. It's like, so do you understand you have a big name National lawyer flies into Washington, goes to federal court and gets one vote counted. So you can see what happens when they're going after millions of voters. I mean, I went into federal court again for black voters matter and with the A CLU study and naacp, but it's very, very hard. It's also very hard given the Supreme Court, and sometimes I feel like the Supreme Court should change from black robes to white robes at this point.
(34:03):
But the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act, and what I do not understand from our media or even the elements of Democratic Party who have this omerta about vote suppression, why do you think the Republicans passed laws in 30 states to make it harder to vote? Because they know that that's effective. So if you say that there's no vote suppression, then why? By the way, Kamala Harris said she was going to sign the voting the John Lewis Voting Rights Act. Well, Ms. Harris, here's my question for you. If vote suppression tactics made no difference in the election, why have a Voting Rights Act? You don't need it? Because if there's no vote suppression, why do we need the John Lewis Voting Rights Act? The answer is because they're shafting black people out of the vote, and you need to say it, and you need to warn people so that they can take action.
(34:54):
Believe me, Joe Biden was elected in Georgia and Arizona and in those states only because of the action of the voting rights groups, not because of the actions of the Democratic Party. But again, I'm not going to sit here and jump on the Democratic Party. It's our job to save our votes, not hope that some politicians somewhere, and don't forget the politicians of the Democratic Party were elected with the current voter rolls. Were reluctant under the current Jim Crow system. If you changed, if you let everyone vote, you'd have, not only would you have different leaders in office, you'd have a hell of a different Democratic party. Don't forget,
Andrea Chalupa (35:35):
And that is everything don't. That is why they don't want to adopt this issue and invest a lot of money into it because they might endanger their very own jobs, their power, their consultant contracts.
Greg Palast (35:48):
Oh, the consulting contract. Well, let me tell you something. Here's one of the problems. If you fund Rainbow, push NAACP or other actions to go into court to notify people, for example, black voters matter. When we got the purge list in Georgia in 2020, the only reason by the way, Biden will on Georgia in 2020, black voters matter took the names of the people we said were illegally purged, sent out 80,000 postcards. Southwest Voter Registration Education Project, which is a grassroots Latino group. They made 150,000 phone calls into Georgia for Latinos, pulled off the voter rolls, caught them to tell people to re-register your registration. We had Rosario Dawson, who's narrator in my film. We had a big electronic billboard over Atlanta saying, are you purged? Better check your registration. So we had this whole campaign, but we could focus to Georgia, and that's how Biden won by just 11,000 votes officially.
(36:48):
And by the way, that's the good news. You can't steal all the votes all the time. In fact, the suppression factor is, as I calculate, it's a minimum number, but it's 2.3%. That's all in a way, you could say, well, that's a small number. By the way, 2.3% still is three and a half million votes in America. But our elections are so close and because of our electoral college system where if you steal a few thousand votes in one state, a few hundred votes in another state, you win the electoral college. It doesn't matter what the national vote is, but it's only 2.3%. So you can overcome the steal as Barack Obama did.
(37:29):
There was plenty of vote suppression during the Obama oh eight and 12 races. I was a reporter for BBC television and doing these reports also Nation Magazine, and it wasn't as bad as it is now. They've cranked up the suppression tactics like the voter challenges, but still, so when you talk about all the stumbles and political scripts of the Democratic Party, yeah, I mean, they got it close enough to steal. You have to ask yourself, how did the Democratic Party get it close enough to steal? How did Al Gore get it close enough for George Bush to steal for those? My first original reports 25 years ago for The Guardian and BBC on what happened in Florida, Al Gore lost the presidency by just 537 votes in one state, 500 votes. That's what determined our presidency. But I uncovered that 58,000 black men were removed from the voter rolls, who they were accused of being ex-cons, felons who couldn't vote.
(38:34):
Not one zero of the 58,000 were illegal voters, but that's how Bush became president over Gore. Of course, gore never said a word, but that's what happened in that race. And so Jim Crow has elected our presidents throughout American history. Let's not forget when we talk about our great democracy, until the Voting Rights Act of 65, most black people in South couldn't vote. By the way, there was no law after the Civil War. Not one state had a law that said a black person can't vote. They just used these Jim Crow tactics like the KKK plan that was just resurrected by Trump literacy tests and all kinds of games that they would play, which you'll see in the film. But so it's an old story, but they can't, since the Voting Rights Act, it's real simple. They can't steal all the votes all the time, about 2.3%.
(39:32):
So obviously if you let, I think one of the things we have to accept is you don't win anymore by 50% plus one vote, 51% don't do it. You're going to have to win by at least 54%. It's that simple. And that means you get active. Again, I'm not pushing for the Democratic Party. I'm not pushing for anyone. That's not my job. I'm just a journalist. But we have a lot of work to do to get people to vote. Don't count on the Democrats. I mean, obviously Biden made a lot of mistakes with inflation and obviously the cover of his condition, though I think every journalist knew that once he skipped the Super Bowl interview. So this is now, if one year ago today, Joe Biden had done the interview and knocked it out of the park. It's a softball interview. He'd be president right now, but there was still that massive hill to climb against vote suppression, and it's our job to take down this ugly pile of trash.
Andrea Chalupa (40:48):
And how are we the people supposed to do that, especially when everything you're describing about the Democratic Party establishment sounds like what we call an authoritarianism, studies controlled opposition, where they're just going through the roles of, they're playing, acting, play, acting, pretending to be putting up a fight for the cameras, but really they're not putting in the meaningful work of actually protecting our elections and fighting for what's right. Al and the Democrats, they had stopped Bush in 2000. The world would be a very different place. We would not have had all those illegal invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, which gave birth to isis and on and on the list goes. And then the gambling done of Wall Street crashing, the global economy in 2008. Bush and Trump are neck and neck over who's the worst president of the United States ever. So I want to ask you, in your view, do you think the Democratic Party establishment is essentially controlled opposition? And the second question is, what can we the people do to ensure that we're going to have free and fair elections in the midterms, which is just two years away?
Greg Palast (41:58):
Well, a couple things.
Andrea Chalupa (41:58):
One year away, the midterms are one year away, right?
Greg Palast (42:02):
Yeah. Get ready. So part of it to the way the Democratic Party spends its money, like I say, Marco was way under resource to deal with millions of votes. Millions of voters purged, challenged shunted to provisional ballots. His little office wasn't going to do it. But here's the thing. You give money to Mark Elias. You give money to the vote, to the groups in the street that are bringing out voters, protecting their votes, et cetera. No consultant makes any money off that. If you put an ad on M-S-N-B-C, you get 15%. Kamala Harris spent a billion dollars on mostly useless television ads, but that means that someone on a billion dollars got $150 million in fees, and that's just the kickbacks from the networks. So look, both parties, there's one political party, HEZ Kel, the party of the Cash, and you would not have, again, the current Democratic Party is there because they were voted in under these Jim Crow laws.
(43:09):
They're not so crazy about changing at all. I mean, I saw this in California. Look, I've gone after my reports. I've gone after to the Democratic Party too. I don't pick on one. It's just that this year, these ugly systems are almost exclusive, exclusively Republican. But the Democrats have done some pretty ugly stuff themselves too, especially in the one party states that they control. Like California, until recently, New York was one of the last states to even allow mail-in balloting because God forbid minorities should be allowed to vote in New York. I mean, Andrew Cuomo wouldn't like that, especially now he's running for Mayor of New York, the Democratic Party as afraid of black people as the Republican Party. Well, they're different. Democrats are afraid the Republicans don't want them. That's a bit different. But that's Greg Palace political analysis. I mean, my thing is I'm a numbers guy. I want to warn you about the numbers so that you know the hard numbers. But there are things you can do, and I start with something simple. Save your own vote. You start, almost every state allows you to look up your registration, whether it's currently active, whether you've been challenged, purged or otherwise, and check it.
(44:29):
Martin Luther King's cousin Christine didn't think she had to check her registration after 50 years voting the same place, but she should have. I've done that and found myself removed from voter rolls too. Once I actually did it on air, I said, here's look how easy it's to check. Oops, no such voter. So I reregistered on the spot. Do that. Get all your friends and family to that. The second, tell him to watch a movie, go to greg palace.com, click on vigilantes Inc. Stream the movie and send that link after you see it and enjoy it. Send the link to everyone. And if you have a church or community group or whatever, we are set up to provide people DVDs, we're set up discs, high quality. If you want a theater, we have all the versions of the film and all the information posters. You need to have these showings because education is still our weapon.
(45:20):
If people know it's hard to steal votes from people who know, a guy like Major Turner is sharp. One of the reasons he flew all the way to Georgia, one of the reasons he said, where's my ballot is his father is the Reverend Harold Turner. Reverend Harold Turner is the co-founder of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference with Martin Luther King. That was his father. So he wasn't going to just let this go, but look at the effort he had to go through to get his one ballot counted. But you don't have to all go through that. Most of the time it is, for example, they want to give you a provisional ballot when you go into vote, say, no, don't give me one of those placebo bullshit nonsense ballot. I'm going to call the lawyers who are standing by at a one 800 hour vote, and I want a regular real ballot that's going to get counted.
(46:11):
Those are the steps you can take. And frankly, one of the reasons why Biden won as the Republican Secretary of State said in Georgia, the reason why the Democrats ultimately won Georgia by officially just a few votes, is that the nonprofit groups, not the Democratic Party, but the voting rights groups called people who were sent provisional ballots and said, you know what? You have got to physically come into the voting to your county voting office and what they call cure your ballots, show your id, et cetera. And people did that by the tens of thousands. They actually came in and cured their ballots, and the Republican party was shocked. Now, I don't care whether you vote Republican or Democrat, but no one should take away your vote. And if they try to, you've got to take steps to protect it. The second thing you do, like I said, so the first thing is protect your own vote.
(46:59):
The second thing you do is educate everyone by sending out my film, by sending out my articles, by telling them to watch this program. The other is to join activist groups, like I said, the Latino Group Southwest Voter Education Registration Project called 150,000 people. Well, they need you to call, especially if you can speak Spanish or Korean, because you have a lot of people whose main language is not English, and they need to be contacted and told they're in trouble. They got to do something. Join with the Rainbow Push, join with Black Voters Matter Fund, join their great divisions of the naacp. A CLU of Southern California sponsored the showing of my film, by the way, with Jamie Fox. And this is how we do it little by little. When Martin Luther King walked across that bridge, most black people in the South couldn't vote. He didn't just say, gee, this is too hard. Well, we can't overcome with all these obstacles. We don't have the power. Nothing we can do. No, he said, we shall overcome because there's still more of us than them.
Andrea Chalupa (48:10):
Exactly. Right. And to that end, do you recommend that groups of people maybe working for some of the organizations you mentioned, take the power into their own hands and take the John Lewis Voting Rights Act and get that legislation passed locally in their state where they live, especially if they have Democrats in charge, and even in states like Missouri, where we saw a lot of small d democratically spirited referendums passed by the voters. You can get a referendum in a state, a referendum on the ballot. You can get a referendum in a state like Missouri. Do you recommend that we do that, just like the far right has Alec, where they pump out all this legislation across the board to attack our democracy and strengthen corporate greed. Should we take it upon ourselves to get the John Lewis Voting Rights Act passed where we live on the ballot, no matter what kind of state we're in?
Greg Palast (49:10):
Well, yes, and it doesn't matter and don't count on Democrats. In fact, the Democratic Secretary of State of Michigan try to stop me from publishing, try to shut down our website when we said, here's how you re-register. Because she didn't like the fact that she had asked. We had gotten from her the Michigan Purge List, and we said, here's the people that have been purged. If your name's on here, and she tried to shut us down. I had to get the A CLU to back her off. There's a lot of Democrats who were very, very, very hostile to voting rights, very hostile, including, especially in Michigan, where the Democratic Party really does not want a black. Remember, if you let everyone vote in Michigan, you'd have a black Democratic party. And that's the last thing those politicians want. So like I said, the Secretary of State of Michigan, Democrat would do anything to stop us from getting black people back on the voter rolls. That's just the damn truth, and we have to be aware of it. On the other hand, other parties, and by the way, there is some Republicans with integrity. I told you about all these local elections officials in Georgia who refuse to accept these cockamamie challenges. They say, we don't care what the law says.
(50:21):
This terrible Jim Crow law in Georgia, we are not going to do it. We think it's unethical and violates federal law. Well, they don't have to worry about federal law anymore because there is no chance zero if the Trump administration is going to try to charge anyone for Voting Rights Act violations. I mean, we couldn't get the Biden administration to move on these things. And the Obama administration was pretty forth rate too. They didn't take voting rights seriously. Obama never had a, and I quoted him a private conversation that I knew about where he said, black people are responsible for 70% of their problems, and that was his response to the issue of vote suppression. So Obama was very hostile to us on the issue of voting rights. And he says, well, only takes a few minutes to vote. Well, yeah, if you have the Secret Service, kick everyone out of line for you and make sure that you've vote and you've got your passport, and you've got your chauffeur to prove your id.
(51:26):
So there is a problem, as you say, within the Democratic Party in terms of how much effort they want to put into this. They don't like the people that have been thrown off the voter rolls. They're happy to have them thrown off the voter rolls in many cases, but not everywhere. It's a split within the party. But that's why I say I stay out of the party stuff. We have to do it ourselves. Join the groups. There are very good. Like I say, a few Republicans with the real integrity, a lot of Democrat politicians. I'm not going to condemn the party. There are some great guys. Like I said, we successfully, I say we an action led by Jesse Jackson and Rainbow Pushed and one of the worst of the vote suppression tactic. It was called Interstate Crosscheck, and we killed that off successfully. So it's like whack-a-mole. Okay, interstate crosscheck. Then there's KK K voter challenges it, it's different stuff, but there's always something new that they come up with. And so this fight will never end, but just stay tuned. That's why we have this wonderful program. That's why I make these films because if I thought that it was impossible, I would never do it. If I thought that there was no way, if I was, I wouldn't be making a film about voting rights in Russia because there's no chance that we're going to see them within our lifetime. America still stands a chance. Like Leonard Cone said, democracy's coming to America. We'll get there.
Andrea Chalupa (53:17):
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(54:25):
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