May 9, 2025 Topic: Voter Suppression

by Mike Allen

I was asked to write summaries of some issues that folks in the group might find of interest. This is the first, a short summary of an article on voter suppression done by Greg Palast, a leading expert. It is an expression of his thoughts alone and contains a great deal of his own language. The goal was to create a detailed but short and readable account of a very large and complex issue. Much is left out but a link to the original article, along with a short biography of the author, are included at the end of the summary.

The outcome of the 2024 US presidential election was determined by voter suppression. According to the US Elections Assistance Commission, more than 4.7 million voters were wrongly purged from voter rolls. If all legal ballots were counted, Trump would have lost the states of Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Georgia, and Harris would have won the presidency with 286 electoral votes and by more than 1.2 million popular votes.

These purges included “vigilante” challenges to more than 317,000 voters in swing states. These non-government, self-appointed, individuals used KKK tactics not used since1946. More than 2.1 million votes were rejected for minor clerical errors. 585,000 votes cast in-precinct were disqualified. More than 1.2 million provisional ballots were rejected. More than 3.2 million new registrations were rejected or not entered on the rolls in time to vote. An audit by the State of Washington found that a black voter was 400% more likely than a white voter to have their mail-in ballot rejected. One study done for the United States Civil Rights Commission found that a Black voter was 900% more likely than a white voter to have their mail-in or in-person ballot disqualified. In addition, voter intimidation tactics in the form of bomb threats closed 31 polling stations in Atlanta on Election Day.

The charge of “voter fraud” is an old excuse for new Jim Crow laws. According to the Brennan Center for Justice, since the 2020 election, at least 30 states enacted 78 restrictive laws to blockade voting. Baseless charges of fraud before the 2024 election empowered 22 states to impose 38 new restrictions on the ability to vote absentee that were not in place in 2020. These restrictions affect black voters disproportionately. Republican Governor of Georgia, Brian Kemp, signed SB 202, which slashed the number of drop boxes by 75% only in Black-majority counties and locked them away at night. As a result, mail-in and drop box balloting, used by the majority of Democrats in 2020, were reduced by nearly 90% in the 2024 race.

https://www.gregpalast.com/trump-lost-vote-suppression-won/

Greg Palast is a forensic economist who worked for over 20 years for government agencies such as the US Justice Department. He provided expert calculations of vote suppression for the ACLU, NAACP, and RainbowPUSH. Palast won the Global Editors Award for his data journalism on vote suppression measurements for reports done for Al Jazeera, BBC, Rolling Stone, and The Guardian. He taught statistics at Indiana University and is the author of New York Times bestsellers, including The Best Democracy Money Can Buy.