Palast Report for Democracy Now!: By Rejecting Recount, Is Michigan Covering up 75,000 Ballots Never Counted?
Officially, Donald Trump won Michigan by 10,704 votes. But a record 75,335 votes were never counted. Most of these votes that went missing were in Detroit and Flint.
How do you disappear 75,335 votes? I flew to Michigan to investigate.
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Thousands of bubbles filled in next to the candidate’s name couldn’t be read by the optical scanning machines in Michigan and Wisconsin but a much better machine, the
human eyeball, can easily read what the voter intended.
In Trumpville, rural Michigan, their hero, Bill Schuette, the Republican attorney general of Michigan shut down the recount. Schuette issued an order saying that no one would be allowed to look at the ballots in over half the precincts, 59%, in the Detroit area—the very place that most of the votes had gone missing.
Back in Detroit, some of the votes missing resulted when 87 machines, responsible for counting thousands of ballots, broke down. We went to speak with the secretary of state, whose spokesman said the missing votes in Detroit were simply people who waited in line but didn’t want to vote for president.
And so the recount slogged through, uncovering missing votes and missing voters that could change the presidency. So Republicans rushed in to shut down the recount completely. Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, here in Michigan—we may be way north of the Mason-Dixon Line, but the elections are still run by Jim Crow. For Democracy Now!, this is Greg Palast.
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Greg Palast (Rolling Stone, Guardian, BBC) is the author of The New York Times bestsellers, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and Billionaires & Ballot Bandits, now out as major motion non-fiction movie.
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Greg Palast has been a hero of mine for years. Right now, I have no money, but I’ve bought his books and films previously. Do what you can!
Palast is quite extraordinary, but at times given to hyperbole. I remember how he characterized one extraordinary Alaska, Etok (Charlie Edwardsen), to the point where he practically walked on water and raised the dead. The state of Michigan shouldn’t have shut down the count, but I’m not sure Palast comes anywhere near making an actual case for the notion that a recount would have given the state to Hillary.
She was a victim of Comey, of hacked emails, of Alt-right conspiracy theories, but more than all else, of her own hubris. She screwed us all when she used the DNC to trash Bernie’s campaign. We wouldn’t have Trump now were it not for her. The “R”s produced the nomination for the most beatable of all candidates, yet she blew it.
To get an idea how bad it was, Cooper won the governor’s race by 10,157 votes in North Carolina over the loony incumbent governor, McCrory. But at the same time, voters gave Trump a margin of 173,313 votes. So she lost by 183,470 votes from people who couldn’t bring themselves to vote for her, even though they voted for the Democratic gubernatorial candidate.