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Trump Gets Booed and Falls Asleep at NBA Finals, Spreads Deranged CA Election Lies: A Closer Look

"The nasty little secret of American democracy is that we don’t count all the votes. Nor let every citizen vote."

--Greg Palast for the Thom Hartmann Report

Video source for GIF

Here are the numbers

By Greg Palast for the Thom Hartmann Report | Chicago, Jan 27, 2025

Trump lost. That is, if all legal voters were allowed to vote, if all legal ballots were counted, Trump would have lost the states of Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Georgia. Vice-President Kamala Harris would have won the Presidency with 286 electoral votes.

And, if not for the mass purge of voters of color, if not for the mass disqualification of provisional and mail-in ballots, if not for the new mass “vigilante” challenges in swing states, Harris would have gained at least another 3,565,000 votes, topping Trump’s official popular vote tally by 1.2 million. [....] As in Bush v. Gore in 2000, and in too many other miscarriages of Democracy, this election was determined by good old “vote suppression,” the polite term we use for shafting people of color out of their ballot. We used to call it Jim Crow.

Here are key numbers:

4,776,706 voters were wrongly purged from voter rolls according to US Elections Assistance Commission data.

By August of 2024, for the first time since 1946, self-proclaimed “vigilante” voter-fraud hunters challenged the rights of 317,886 voters. The NAACP of Georgia estimates that by Election Day, the challenges exceeded 200,000 in Georgia alone.

No less than 2,121,000 mail-in ballots were disqualified for minor clerical errors (e.g. postage due).

At least 585,000 ballots cast in-precinct were also disqualified.

1,216,000 “provisional” ballots were rejected, not counted.

3.24 million new registrations were rejected or not entered on the rolls in time to vote.

If the purges, challenges and ballot rejections were random, it wouldn’t matter. It’s anything but random. For example, 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. Rejection of Black in-person votes, according to a US Civil Rights Commission study in Florida, ran 14.3% or one in seven ballots cast.

[See more under the cut.]

Canada's food inspection agency has announced a temporary ban on livestock from the US state of Texas after flesh-eating screwworms were discovered in calves this week.

Cows and horses that were in Texas anytime within 21 days before crossing the border into Canada would not be accepted into the country, an agency news release said.

The announcement comes after the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) said the parasite had been found in a second calf in Texas - the leading US beef and cattle producer. Texas Gov Greg Abbott declared a state of disaster on Friday over the "imminent threat" the outbreak posed.

"This is likely to spread over the course of the summer," Abbott told reporters on Friday.