Trump Lost. Vote Suppression Won.

Trump Lost. Vote Suppression Won. Here are the numbers...

by Greg Palast
for the Hartmann ReportJanuary 24, 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.

https://www.gregpalast.com/trump-lost-vote-suppression-won/

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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.

There are also the uncountable effects of the explosive growth of voter intimidation tactics including the bomb threats that closed 31 polling stations in Atlanta on Election Day.