In June 2018, the conservative majority of justices on the U.S. Supreme Court upheld Ohio’s controversial “use-it-or-lose-it” voting law by a narrow 5-to-4 margin. The law allows the state to purge voters from the registration rolls if they fail to return a mailed address confirmation form and don’t vote for another four years, or two federal election cycles. Earlier this year, Ohio removed 265,000 voters from its voting rolls. Now the state is moving once again to purge an additional 235,000 voters, despite investigations by journalists and voting rights groups that found repeated errors on the state’s voter registration list.
In 2018, Brian Kemp, the Republican secretary of state of Georgia who ran for governor against Democratic candidate Stacey Abrams, removed over half a million voters from the registration rolls in advance of the Nov. 6 election. Investigative reporter and author Greg Palast sued Kemp in federal court and got the names and addresses of all the voters who’d been removed. Palast and his team proved that more than 340,000 voters removed from the rolls were purged improperly as they hadn’t moved from their original registration addresses. Abrams, the first black woman to run for governor in the U.S., lost the election by 50,000 votes, a margin that was most certainly affected by the GOP voter purge.
Between The Lines’ Scott Harris spoke with Greg Palast, known for his investigative reports on partisan voter purges going back to the stolen presidential election of 2000 in Florida. Here, he discusses his current investigation into both Ohio and Georgia’s massive purge of voters and the impact these actions have had on the integrity of elections and democracy itself.
GREG PALAST: In the case in June of 2018, the U.S. Supreme Court said that it was okay for Ohio to remove hundreds of thousands of voters and they just did it again on Friday – 234,000 more voters – on the grounds that they failed to vote and they didn’t return a postcard. So you miss a couple elections, which some people do, you know. A lot of people didn’t feel like voting for who we had on the ballot in ’16. A lot of people don’t bother with the midterms, especially in black areas where there is no contest. The gerrymandering results in black districts which are either stacked or cracked, as they say in the biz. They use another word, which I can’t use on the air, but if it’s stacked, they just make it so that a black Democrat wins with 92 percent of the vote and they suck out all the black voters and then put them in one district.
Or are spread – they crack the district and they scatter black votes in a sea of white votes where they have no influence. So there’s a lot of reasons why black folk especially will not vote in midterms if there is no real candidate for them to vote for. There’s no contest. Now, this is interesting because the court said they could do that, Scott, that they could do that in Ohio except for one thing. They said because the National Voter Registration Act says right at the very top – right at the very top – you may not lose your vote for not voting. You have a right to vote in America and you have a right not to vote.
So you may not lose your registration for not voting. So what’s going on here? The answer is that the (former) secretary of state of Ohio, John Husted, said that “This was the best way for us to determine if someone has moved. They’ve left the state. And of course, they left the state, they shouldn’t vote or be allowed to vote in Ohio. Or, if they’ve left their county of residence, you know, moved from Cleveland to Toledo – well they’ve got to re-register. So they can’t vote in Cleveland because (they’ve) moved to Toledo.” And so that’s what the court said. It said, “Look, according to Mr. Husted, the expert, not voting a couple of times and they send you a postcard. Hey, all you have to do is fill out the postcard. If you don’t fill out postcard, hey, okay, you’ve lost your vote ’cause you’re not there anymore. Clearly.”
Problem is Scott, that’s a lie and they know it’s a lie. But no one had the evidence that it was a lie and unless you can prove that that system is racist and let’s agree that that’s a system is false. Well, the Husted system, which is kind of what I call purge by postcard – it’s legal until you prove it otherwise. And we have the same thing in Georgia where, if you didn’t vote a couple times and they sent you a postcard and this guy Brian Kemp who’s running for governor, sent you a postcard. You didn’t return Mr. Kemp’s postcard, you lost your vote. Same in Georgia as in Ohio, the same exact purging system which is used in lots of Republican-controlled states. But then we were able to prove that in fact they are more than 70 percent wrong. Proveably so.
BETWEEN THE LINES: Are actual postcards being sent to these individual voters? Shed some light on actually what the scam is here that you’re alleging in terms of a genuine effort is not being made to identify who has moved, who has not moved, who’s a legitimate voter and who’s not.
GREG PALAST: So you asked a very good question: How did this happen? How does this happen? And number one, they say they send out postcards, but in about a third of the cases they are completely lying. Because when we filed in federal court, Brian Kemp for example, admitted that well over a 100,000 people were never sent postcards.
The second thing is that postcard thing is a wonderful Jim Crow trick. It’s Jim Crow by mail. Are you ready for this statistic? The Census Bureau tells us that if you are a black urban renter, you are 900 percent less likely to return a postcard from the government than a white older suburban homeowner. And a lot of that has to do with the simple fact that renters move between like – two or three elections – talking like a 12-year period, renters move. We had a woman who lost her vote because she moved from one apartment in her building to another apartment in her building. And you can’t forward this piece of mail.
BETWEEN THE LINES: We have a critical election coming up in 2020. What are the prospects that many of these people purged from the voting list in Ohio and in Georgia and other states – what’s the prospect that they’ll have their vote restored in time for the November 2020 election?
GREG PALAST: Very little. I’m going to be honest. The courts move slowly. But we’re hoping that exposure through the media, that bringing the cases get more exposure, that having legislative action, that having political action – a lot of it is shedding light on the cockroach as they run to the walls. There is a real simple way to defeat this purge by postcard. A real simple way to defeat Crosscheck. Re-register. And you’re thinking, you’re listening. “Oh, I’m registered. I’ve been voting the same place for 20 years.” Well, everyone, three months before an election – three, four months before an election — should check to see if you have been removed.
For more information, visit Greg Palast’s website at gregpalast.com.
