“Stripping and Flipping” — Voter Suppression and Computer Fraud

The Democrats were defeated because of their own insolent incompetence, because of our antiquated electoral college system and because race is still the dominant factor in American life. That said, Clinton won more than the popular vote, and by over two million. She almost certainly won the Electoral College as well.

To go deeper, we have to get apocalyptic (to lift the veil from our eyes) and understand the dark side of our electoral system. Already in March of this year Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman warned of “Disturbing signs of the time-tested ‘Strip and Flip’ strategy for stealing elections”:

The core approach is to STRIP citizens of their voting rights, then FLIP the electronic vote count if that’s not enough to guarantee a win for the corporate 1%…Historically, “stripping” has been based on race. It’s rooted in the divide-and-conquer strategies of slavery and Jim Crow segregation. Today it centers on racist demands for photo ID and other scams designed to prevent blacks, Hispanics, the young and the poor from voting.

Why did industrial swing states (see below) won by Obama flip to Trump? Clearly, African-Americans and other progressives stayed home because Clinton couldn’t motivate them as he had, and some of his white supporters went to Trump.

Those innocents who naively believe the narrative of fair elections probably assume that this explains everything.

Damn the conventional wisdom. We may well find the answer in pursuing another question: Why, despite the polls favoring Clinton, did the vast majority of high-rolling, last-minute gamblers bet on Trump?

Yes, this was reported in the media, but no one seems to have paid it much attention, except for other gamblers. Before you cast the conspiracy theory hood over me (the conventional means of shutting down discussions), shouldn’t we ask what these pros knew? Did they think that the FBI revelations would sway large numbers of voters? Or did they know that millions of people would not be able to vote – or that their votes would not be counted? We might also ask, as Fitrakis and Wasserman do:

Those who dismiss such warnings as “conspiracy theory” might confront this simple question: “How will the electronic vote count in the 2016 election be verified?” The answer is simple: “It can’t be.”

In 2010, I wrote this in Chapter Ten of my book:

The U.S. is the only democracy that disenfranchises felons, over five million people, two million of whom are black. This simple fact has utterly determined the course of recent history. The more African-Americans a state contains, the more likely it is to ban felons. The average state disenfranchises 2.4 percent of its voting-age population but 8.4 percent of blacks. In fourteen states, the share of blacks stripped of the vote exceeds ten percent, and in five states it exceeds twenty percent. While seventy-five percent of whites register, only sixty percent of blacks can. Seven Republican senators owe their election to these laws. Had felons been allowed to vote in 2000, Al Gore’s popular vote margin would have doubled to a million. If Florida had allowed just ex-felons to vote, he would have carried the state by 30,000 votes and with it the presidency.

Since then, the number of disenfranchised voters has risen considerably. voterid-001-701x467 The vast majority of them are poor, working and incarcerated people, and had they been allowed to participate, they certainly would have propelled Democrats into landslide victories with progressive mandates. And this condition existed before the Supreme Court disemboweled the Voting Rights Act. This election was the first in fifty years without the full protections of the Voting Rights Act, and the numbers of the disenfranchised are certainly only the tip of the iceberg.

These numbers do not include Americans residing in Puerto Rico, American Samoa, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands and the U.S. Virgin Islands, all of whom are considered U.S. nationals, not citizens and can vote in primaries but not the general election. This is an aggregate population of nearly four million people – nearly all of them people of color.

They are part of a much larger group, those who for all reasons are ineligible to vote, including prisoners and college students on campuses not in their home districts. The adult population according to Wikipedia is 245 million, and 220 million are eligible to vote (about half of whom actually do). This results in a staggering number: some fifteen to twenty million American adults are not allowed to vote. votersuppression_infog-2_700 But many of them once could vote and have been stripped – quite deliberately, in Republican-controlled states – of their legitimate rights. Two articles by Greg Palast, here and here, show the grim details and the astonishing numbers of voter suppression in America.

Because of the Supreme Court ruling, fourteen states had restrictive new voting laws on the books this year: Alabama, Arizona, Indiana, Kansas, Mississippi, Nebraska, New Hampshire, Ohio, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia and Wisconsin. map_0Almost all of them saw decreased turnout and went to Trump, with the exception of tiny New Hampshire, Rhode Island and Virginia. These last three states are the only ones of the fourteen with Democratic governors. More on this later. Much more.

The liberal post-election narrative wants to blame African-Americans for Clinton’s loss. Clearly, thousands of them could not stomach voting for her. But those who retained their eligibility this year found it much harder to vote even if they wanted to.

In one of many examples, the changes to the Voting Act allowed the worst offending states to reduce the number of polling places by nearly nine hundred. In several states this means that people of color (most assuredly not white suburban voters) had to drive long distances in order to stand in line for several hours. Such scenes were repeated in African-American precincts in most of the swing states.

And when they finally got inside, hundreds of thousands – perhaps millions, according to Palast – learned that they would not be allowed to vote. tried-to-vote

Shall we go even deeper?

Read Part 6 here