Billionaires & Ballot Bandits by Greg Palast

Author:Greg Palast
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Billionaires, Election 2012, ballot bandits, Greg Palast, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., voting, koch gang, karl rove, ted rall, vote theft, seven stories press, Greg Palast investigation, politics, Obama, Romney, tales from the crypt of democracy
ISBN: 9781609804794
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
Published: 2012-09-18T04:00:00+00:00

Now, instead of being prosecuted for crimes, Tim became the prosecutor. At Karl Rove’s behest, Tim Griffin was appointed US attorney for Arkansas.

19.

The Purge’n General

Maybe you fall asleep reading pulp fiction, but I like to read tables of statistics. Unfortunately, this one popped me wide-awake: the US Election Assistance Commission’s Annual Report.

(President Bush’s Senior Advisor Mr. Rove created the Federal Election Assistance Commission as a supposed way to prevent “another Florida.” When Rove and Bush tell you they want to “assist” your elections . . . well, you get the joke.)

A page-long table in teeny-weeny type, titled Voter List Maintenance: Removal Actions, listed the fifty-six states (don’t forget the Virgin Islands, DC, Samoa, etc.), showing the number of names scrubbed by each secretary of state, a digit followed by a dot and a digit: Wyoming 4.5 percent, South Dakota 5.4 percent, and so on. But one state stuck out, literally, like an inflamed pimple, with its extra digit: Colorado: 19.4 percent.

That had to be a typo. If not, that meant that the secretary of state, Republican Donetta Davidson, had removed 19.4 percent or nearly one in five voters from the voter rolls. I checked the raw data and checked again. Yes, nearly half a million voters had been made to vanish with the stroke of the DELETE button.

Boy, is Katherine Harris going to be jealous when she hears about this.

And Colorado is the swingin’-est swing state there is. The pundits watched the state swing from 2008 Democratic victory to a Republican landslide in two years. The pundits gassed on about the Tea Party. Nothing about the voter lists.

I called the secretary of state’s office for confirmation of numbers and an interview. No one would return my calls.

Maybe they had phone line trouble. So I flew to Denver with the voter roll info in hand and evidence I’d gathered from the clerks’ offices in several counties (thanks to the help of a team on the ground led by Claudia Kuhns of the Public Integrity Project), and went to the office of the secretary of state. Where I was locked out.

I called the secretary of state’s PR flunky on my cell.

“Greg Palast here. Rolling Stone and BBC TV. Listen, I’d love to speak with the secretary, or with you or with anyone who can explain what’s going on here with these voter rolls.”

Click. I wasn’t even allowed up the elevator.

Since I’d already burned up my frequent flyer miles to get to Denver, I stopped by the office of Paul Hultin. He directed the Colorado governor’s task force on voting. (When politicians want to avoid a problem, they organize a task force.) Hultin, an attorney of unquestioned integrity, knows his stuff. The purge in Colorado made him ill.

While the task force was busy with its task (assigned to report one month after the election), the secretary of state was busy with the voter-roll scrub brush. And Hultin’s task force was kept in the dark.

Hultin had other matters to deal with. A federal judge

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