*Stolen again. Democrat Dan McCready supposedly lost the special election in North Carolina’s 9th Congressional District to Republican Dan Bishop by less than 4,000 votes. However, racially-biased vote suppression schemes easily account for the supposed GOP victory margin.
Under the violently partisan Elections Board chief Kim Strach (pronounced “Strake”) — her husband was the attorney for the state’s Republican Party — North Carolina targeted half a million voters (561,693) based on the measurably racist and absurdly wrong Crosscheck list created by the discredited Kris Kobach of Kansas. The vote scam, which I exposed for Rolling Stone and Al Jazeera, showed that well over 100,000 voters were wrongly purged for supposedly being registered or voting in two states.
North Carolina from The Best Democracy Money Can Buy
I met one of those dastardly double voters, Kevin Antonio Hayes in Durham, North Carolina. Kevin Antonio was supposedly the same voter as Kevin Thomas Hayes of Virginia. Mr. Hayes is, like most on the Crosscheck list, a voter of color.
Here is a detail from the Crosscheck list for North Carolina voters also supposedly registered or voting in Virginia. Note that almost none of the middle names match.
In 2014, I watched Strach give blatantly false testimony to the North Carolina legislature to get approval for the Crosscheck mass purge. The chart below presented by Strach claims that 155,692 voters in Carolina voted in a second state in the same election, a felony crime. Yet, after a year of investigation, they could not find one such double voter. Nevertheless, tens of thousands of voters lost their right to vote for a crime for which none were found guilty let alone charged.
Our experts estimate the number of illegally removed black voters is well above the meager 4,000 vote margin separating McCready and Bishop.
Strach was deservedly fired a few months ago in light of blatant vote theft in the Ninth Congressional District She may be gone, but the damage she did remains, with voter rolls bleached white by her years of purge-mania.
North Carolina from The Best Democracy Money Can Buy
When the media says that there was a drop in the number of African Americans who turned out to vote, the truth is that Black folk turned out to vote but were turned away, having been purged. But the US media, unlike my colleagues in other nations, never reports the total of people ejected nor provisional ballots rejected. The census shows that African-Americans have a higher voting percentage in North Carolina than white people.
Unfortunately, Crosscheck is not the only vote suppression trick in North Carolina’s Jim Crow handbook. Lawsuits by Common Cause, the League of Women Voters and the Rev. William Barber have challenged GOP trickery through such laws and rules as prohibiting same-day voter registration (which could cure illegal purging), shortening the early voting period (70% of African Americans vote early), and even such petty but very partisan rules as ending the pre-registration of the state’s high school graduates.
Unfortunately, the list goes on, and so does Jim Crow, the real winner of the Ninth Congressional race.
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Our award-winning investigation in Carolina was documented in my film The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, now available free from Amazon Prime. Also available, the shortened activist version commissioned by the Rev. Jessie Jackson, which you can screen for FREE at your church, campus or college.
= Palast, a Puffin Foundation fellow in investigative reporting, is the author of the New York Times bestsellers, Billionaires & Ballot Bandits and The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. His investigative reports can be seen on BBC Television Newsnight.
“Greg Palast is one of those inconveniently stubborn journalists — much like Glenn Greenwald and the late Gary Webb — who gets his teeth into a story and shakes it bloody right there in the middle of the parlor, dreadfully inconveniencing the pampered swells of the elite political press, and revolting the serious thinkers who get to go on PBS and moan about the genuine crisis of American political civility. Palast has been on the voter-caging story ever since people like Pastor Whiting got screwed 14 years ago. Palast [has] dropped a bomb into the elections that has left credibility shrapnel all over the democratic process, if anyone cares to look for it.” Charles Pierce, Esquire
Greg Palast, America’s wittiest (and wickedest) muckraker. An award-winning Guardian investigative journalist, he is causing crooked election officials all over the country to shiver in their shoes as they wait for a knock on their door from the FBI – thanks to his explosive exposes. Palast, is the author of the New York Times bestsellers, Billionaires & Ballot Bandits and The Best Democracy Money Can Buy.
source:
Ilene Proctor
[email protected]
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