25 July 20
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With urgency.
Marc Ash
Founder, Reader Supported News
Founder, Reader Supported News
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25 July 20
Greg Palast | 1,913,369 Ballots Thrown Away, How Trump Did - and Will - Disqualify Your Vote
Greg Palast, Reader Supported News
Palast writes: "It's official: 1,913,369 ballots were cast but never counted in the 2016 presidential race. That's from the US Elections Assistance Commission."
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Greg Palast, Reader Supported News
Palast writes: "It's official: 1,913,369 ballots were cast but never counted in the 2016 presidential race. That's from the US Elections Assistance Commission."
And not just anyone’s ballot gets tossed into the electoral dumpster. The US Civil Rights Commission took a look at Florida’s throw-away pile and calculated that your chance of having your vote simply go uncounted, “spoiled,” is 900% higher if you’re Black than if you’re white.
Trump’s call for an army of 50,000 vigilantes is laughable: some schmuck in a Hawaiian shirt and MAGA cap won’t scare off voters of color. But 50,000 challengers, challenging every single ballot for Biden – that could succeed. It did for Trump in Michigan in 2016.
Here’s how Michigan – and so the Presidency – was stolen four years ago.
This little chapter from How Trump Stole 2020 tells you how they did it in 2016 … and can do it again in 2020:
Michigan Michigass
Here’s what you know: In 2016, Donald Trump won Michigan by 10,704 votes. Officially.
Here’s what you don’t know: 75,355 ballots were never counted. That’s official, too. Just “spoilage,” that is, ballots that were, for some technical reason, un-tallied.
But not just anyone’s vote “spoiled.” Most of these vanished votes were cast in Detroit – where only one in ten city residents are white. Motown. Not exactly Trump-ville.
Exit polls showed Clinton won Michigan. And now the pollsters were apologizing for their “mistake.”
I didn’t buy it. If you counted those ballots in the dumpsters in Detroit, Clinton would have won. And if this pattern held in the other two states’ exit polls that reported she won, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, Clinton should have won the Electoral College.
I’m not sure what’s wrong with me. The election was over. Hillary and hubby had moved on to lucrative book contracts, six-figure speaking gigs, and their “charity.” Trump was triumphant and the country, too, had moved on.
But it bothered me, the 75,355 ballots no one counted in Michigan.
The usual outlets for my investigations, like Rolling Stone, weren’t bothered either. They had “moved on” too. So I borrowed a few more bucks from my pension plan, begged my readers for some spare change, and bought a ticket for Detroit.
To do this investigation, I needed a break. And I got it: a surprise call from Jill Stein. The Green Party Presidential candidate. She offered me a scoop. Stein was ready to raise $9 million for re-counts in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan to prove that Trump lost – that is, if you counted all the votes in those states. She could literally overturn Trump’s election.
I broke the story, she raised the $9 million in days, and the recount began.
But “recount” is the wrong word. In Michigan, the funds were meant for counting those 75,355 ballots that were never counted in the first place.
In Michigan, you vote on paper ballots – which you shove into a scanner to get counted. But a funny thing happened in Detroit: 87 machines broke down, they could not read the ballots. Once in Detroit, I met with information specialist Carlos Garcia. He told me his precinct’s scanner was already busted when he arrived at the opening of voting at 7 a.m. It was finally fixed at 9:30 a.m. He stayed and saw that those ballots cast during the morning vote rush, while the machine was broken, were never run through the scanner, never recorded.
That non-count was repeated throughout the city. It was easy to catch ... because the number of ballots in the broken machines did not match the total of ballots these machines said it counted. But – ready for this? – the Republican Attorney General ruled that if the number of physical ballots did not match the scanner count, these precincts could not be re-counted. Get that? The precincts with the missing count – the ones you’d want to review – were barred from the re-count.
Occupied Territories
One f’d-up machine in a precinct is bad luck. No big deal. But 87 broken machines, 87 machines not counting thousands of ballots, is a very big deal, an electoral crime wave. A stolen election.
And they knew it. Republican state officials knew before Election Day that Detroit’s scanning machines were already busted, dysfunctional, or likely not to survive the day. Well before November 2016, the Detroit City Clerk Janice Winfrey pleaded to fund her budget to replace the bad ballot scanners. But there was a problem: Detroit was bankrupt – and every penny spent had to be approved by “managers,” overlords appointed by the Republican Governor Rick Snyder.
In 2016, Detroit was an Occupied Territory, as was Flint, Michigan. In Flint, the State-appointed managers cut the budget for the water system – and poisoned Flint’s kids with lead. The stories of Detroit scanners and the Flint water supply go together. If you’re going to poison someone’s children, you’d better take away their right to vote against the poisoning.
The Michigan ballot count was Jim Crow’d by bad scanners, and Trump was triumphant. But Jill Stein was going to spoil the celebration. Her recount would pay for an extraordinary machine that could read those uncounted ballots: the human eyeball.
But something funny was happening at the government re-count centers.
Whistleblower
Late November in Michigan sucks. From a Hampton Inn on a truck route north of the city, it was a long slog through dirty slush and wet snow to meet a whistleblower at a roadhouse bar, and a couple stiff drinks to get her to loosen up, to talk without a stutter or fear on camera. “Sue” told me she faced retribution in her white suburb, even from in-laws who were not happy about her blowing the whistle.
Sue is a computer programmer who thought it would be interesting, and just a good thing to do, to volunteer for the recount operation at the county building. She didn’t even have a strong preference in the election.
What she experienced disturbed her enormously:
We saw a lot of ballots that weren’t originally counted because those don’t scan into the machine.
Ballot reviewers were adding previously uncounted ballots to the Clinton column; and Trump operatives were challenging every Clinton vote and every decision for Clinton. They are creating chaos and slowing up the process, and making up nonsense rules to disqualify ballots. At the same time, the Democratic Party had brought in “observers” [who] refused to take part in the ballot count nor even bother to get in the way of the GOP obstructers.
Despite all the obstruction, it was clear that if the count went ahead unimpeded, Trump would lose Michigan. So Trump did the only thing he could do: stop the count.
Get the rest of the story … in How Trump Stole 2020. And learn how to steal it back.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
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A federal officer pepper sprays a protester in front of the Mark O. Hatfield U.S. Courthouse on July 20, 2020, in Portland, Oregon. The federal police response to the ongoing protests against racial inequality has been criticized by city and state elected officials. (photo: Nathan Howard/Getty Images)
ALSO SEE: Portland Federal Agents Accused of War Crimes for Destroying Medical Supplies
This Is What Happens When the War on Terror Is Turned Inward, on America
Hamilton Nolan, Guardian UK
Nolan writes: "A strange and necessary ingredient of America's descent towards fascism is that it will have little impact on the majority of people."
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Hamilton Nolan, Guardian UK
Nolan writes: "A strange and necessary ingredient of America's descent towards fascism is that it will have little impact on the majority of people."
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Mitch McConnell. (photo: CNN)
McConnell Says Stimulus Deal Could Take 'Weeks,' Which Would Put Millions of People in Limbo
Joseph Zeballos-Roig, Business Insider
Zeballos-Roig writes: "Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said on Friday he would like to negotiate a new stimulus package with Democrats 'in the next few weeks.'"
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Joseph Zeballos-Roig, Business Insider
Zeballos-Roig writes: "Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said on Friday he would like to negotiate a new stimulus package with Democrats 'in the next few weeks.'"
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Immigrant children in a detention center. (photo: Ross D. Franklin)
Despite Judge's Order, Migrant Children Remain Detained Amid COVID Outbreak
Jacob Soboroff, NBC News
Soboroff writes: "Nearly a month after a federal judge ruled the Trump administration must release migrant children 'with all deliberate speed' from Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention centers because of COVID-19, 346 parents and children are detained in facilities with outbreaks and court filings show releases remain rare."
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Jacob Soboroff, NBC News
Soboroff writes: "Nearly a month after a federal judge ruled the Trump administration must release migrant children 'with all deliberate speed' from Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention centers because of COVID-19, 346 parents and children are detained in facilities with outbreaks and court filings show releases remain rare."
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Donald Trump. (photo: Scott Olson/Getty Images)
How the Republican National Convention Came Undone
Michael Scherer, Josh Dawsey and Annie Linskey, The Washington Post
Excerpt: "For months, President Trump insisted on packed crowds at his nominating convention."
Michael Scherer, Josh Dawsey and Annie Linskey, The Washington Post
Excerpt: "For months, President Trump insisted on packed crowds at his nominating convention."
“Since the day I came down the escalator, I’ve never had an empty seat and I find the biggest stadiums,” he told North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper (D) in a phone call on May 29, according to two people familiar with the call who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share its contents. “We can’t do social distancing.”
But behind the scenes, advisers were scrambling to plan a massive multi-day event amid a pandemic. They asked the federal government to provide protective equipment, lined up labs to test thousands of attendees each day, and shifted from an indoor arena in Charlotte to one in Jacksonville, Fla., and then again to a covered practice field used by an NFL franchise nearby.
But ultimately, the rising coronavirus caseload — and the political cost of forcing risky behavior on thousands just months before the election — proved too great. Advisers convinced Trump that canceling the convention could help him politically as he tries to pay closer attention to the coronavirus, show that he cares about the health of Americans and improve his sagging poll numbers.
The chaotic unraveling bears many of the hallmarks of the tumultuous Trump presidency: the public dismissal of scientific expertise, Trumpian allegations of political conspiracy and advisers run ragged to carry out a task that was next to impossible from the start.
Even as Democrats began to rethink their event last spring, Republican planners moved forward at Trump’s urging.
The president publicly mocked former vice president Joe Biden on Twitter for planning a virtual convention “where he doesn’t have to show up.” He accused Democratic governors of denying him rally permits for political advantage and dismissed the warnings against mass gatherings.
Republicans were hoping that the viral threat would ease over the summer, effectively nullifying the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines, which discourage gatherings of more than 10 for “organizations that serve higher-risk populations,” a description that fits a significant share of Republican convention attendees — including Trump himself — who are over the age of 65 or have medical conditions.
Instead, the coronavirus caseload — and the death rate — spiked across the country. The city of Jacksonville was particularly hard hit, with hospitals filling and daily case counts rising from a few dozen in the county to sometimes more than 700 a day.
The spiraling situation convinced Trump that his event would not allow the crowds he hoped for because of social distancing requirements. “When it wasn’t going to be the kind of convention he wanted, he wasn’t as excited about it as you’d think,” said one senior Republican, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations. “People kept telling him cases in Florida were going up. And he saw a way to get some good headlines out of canceling it.”
Republican officials were staking out other ideas, including a speech with a stage and regional and virtual events.
For months, RNC officials had been working on the convention in Charlotte, which was awarded the contract in 2018. In late May, Trump upended their work with a Memorial Day tweet threatening to move the festivities if he was not allowed to supersede health restrictions.
Republican officials traveled to scout locations in Tennessee, Texas and Nevada. Several governors optimistically courted the event.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) was among the most aggressive in seeking the prize, assuring the president’s team that he’d treat them better than Cooper, a person familiar with the matter said. Just days before Trump called Cooper to demand a non-socially distanced event, DeSantis had all but declared victory over the virus for his state in a news conference with Vice President Pence outside a nursing home.
“We have succeeded and I think that people just don’t want to recognize it, because it challenges their narrative,” DeSantis declared about his state’s relative caseload compared with parts of the Northeast and Midwest.
Jacksonville offered other draws, as well. Republicans held a supermajority on the city council and the mayor, Lenny Curry, was a former state GOP chairman, who was determined to send the message to the rest of the country that his city was back open for business.
The downtown area was filled with several potential venues — a football stadium, a hockey arena, a concent venue — and the nearby resort of Amelia Island was available to host the president’s high-dollar fundraisers.
City officials even discussed with the RNC putting attendees on a cruise ship, though the idea was scuttled, one person familiar with the situation said. Other donors spoke of anchoring yachts on the St. Johns River to host after-party celebrations.
But nearly as soon as the announced move was made, the caseload began to rise. By late June, bars had been shut down, and masks were required in most public spaces. For local elected officials, the event began to look more and more ominous. Party talking points shifted from insisting on a mask-optional event without social distancing to a pledge to follow the guidance of local health authorities.
On July 6, the convention host committee announced that “everyone attending the convention within the perimeter will be tested and temperature checked each day,” an enormous undertaking that was never fully explained. Party officials said the plan was to send the tests away for processing in the mail.
At the same time, local officials began to sound the alarm. “Every effort has been made, countless hours spent, and all have been committed to the mission to keep our city safe. And at this point, we’re simply past the point of no return to execute the event safely,” Sheriff Mike Williams, a well-respected Republican, said in a Monday news conference.
That sent the White House scrambling. White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows talked with Williams on Wednesday, and another call was set up for him later in the week with the Department of Homeland Security, according to a person familiar with the planning.
Democratic City Councilman Garrett L. Dennis noted that the sheriff is term-limited. “He knew that it was going to be on his hands,” Dennis said. “If it went south, if it went bad, and there were riots, it was going to be on him.”
A further complication arose when the mayor sent a bill to the city council to authorize him to spend $33 million on the convention, with the promise of reimbursement later by federal grant. The bill laid out a number of zoning changes for the events, but offered only one mention of covid-19, in a section explaining why gas masks would be prohibited in the convention perimeter but other face masks would be allowed.
A workshop to discuss the council’s concerns had been scheduled for Friday, promising to put both the Republican Party and the mayor on the record in defense of the convention. The local Republican Party, hoping to help whip votes, asked its supporters to call their local elected officials to push for the bill’s approval.
“There was going to be a lot of opposition,” said Dennis, who planned to oppose the bill. “Our mayor unilaterally sought out the convention. It was wrong. He jeopardized lives and our money in going after this thing.”
Then on Thursday, a representative of the mayor asked the city council to delay the hearing through the weekend.
One Florida Republican, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations, said the mayor had been working even hours before Trump announced the cancellation. “I was confident it was going to come together,” he said, though, “it was certainly not a good sign that we had to delay the city council vote.”
When Trump pulled the plug, Florida officials were given about an hour’s notice. RNC officials had already begun working with two health care firms to provide testing for the site.
By Thursday night, Trump had announced that he would cancel the event, giving himself credit for accepting a reality Democrats had embraced months earlier.
“I have to protect the American people,” Trump said Thursday at the White House. “That’s what I have always done. That is what I will always do. That’s what I am about.”
But he also made clear he was worried he would be seen as endangering people for his own benefit. “I could see the media saying, ‘Oh, this is very unsafe.’ . . . I don’t want to be in that position.” Officials said most sponsors and donors would not get their money back in either city.
For some, the decision seemed a long time coming.
“I’m not a fortune teller, but it goes without saying that the virus has been really penetrating the southern part of the country since early May,” said Malcolm Graham, a member of the Charlotte City Council who opposed having the GOP convention in his city amid the pandemic. “So you can read the writing on the wall, that whether it was an RNC convention, or a DNC convention, or a Tupperware convention, there would be some issues.”
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An Evo Morales supporter confronts Bolivian police in La Paz. (photo: Natacha Pisarenko/AP)
Bolivia: Evo Morales Denounces Right-Wing Collusion to Seize Power
teleSUR
Excerpt: "Bolivia's former president Evo Morales Ayma, denounced on Thursday that right-wing organizations collude to seize power in several departments, neglecting the Movement to Socialism (MAS) political party."
teleSUR
Excerpt: "Bolivia's former president Evo Morales Ayma, denounced on Thursday that right-wing organizations collude to seize power in several departments, neglecting the Movement to Socialism (MAS) political party."
MAS’ supporters denounce the postponement as a way to prolong the de facto president Jeanine Añez's time in office. They also condemned political prosecution against MAS members.
"The right-wing of the coup aims to extend itself, outlaw MAS-IPSP, and assault the state. Now they are planning coups in departmental and municipal governments, among them the department of Pando," Morales tweeted.
On July 23, the Bolivian Supreme Electoral Court postponed the general elections alleging sanitary risk, due to Bolivia’s exceptional health situation because of COVID-19.
MAS’ supporters denounce the postponement as a way to prolong the de facto president Jeanine Añez's time in office. They also condemned political prosecution against MAS members.
“The Supreme Electoral Court (TSE) and the de facto government agree in trying to undermine the value of the Legislative Assembly. The resolution to postpone the elections aims to close the Assembly, a State body born of the people's vote. No to the coup d'état,” Morales added.
Mercados and Muestras SRL, Captura Consulting, Ciesmori, Misky Utaha'a, and Celag pollsters revealed MAS candidate Luis Arce leads Bolivians vote intention.
TSE president Salvador Romero announced elections would be held on October 18 and the run-off election would be conducted on November 29.
A caribou. (photo: Alamy)
What's Really Behind Dwindling Numbers of Woodland Caribou?
Tara Lohan, The Revelator
Lohan writes: "A logged forest is a changed forest, and for woodland caribou that could mean the difference between life and death."
Tara Lohan, The Revelator
Lohan writes: "A logged forest is a changed forest, and for woodland caribou that could mean the difference between life and death."
Wolves often get the blame for killing caribou in Canada’s boreal forests, but the real threat is human activity, new research finds.
A recent study in the Journal of Wildlife Management tracked the survival rates and population growth of woodland caribou (Rangifer tarandus caribou) across two areas of northern Ontario, Canada. In one area about a third of the forest had been logged 30 to 50 years ago. In the other, the only disturbances were from natural events.
The research found “substantial differences” in the survival of adult caribou between the two areas.
The animals, it turned out, fared considerably worse in the previously logged landscape — so badly that the researchers, led by John Fryxell, a professor at the University of Guelph and executive director of the Biodiversity Institute of Ontario, concluded it would lead to a dwindling population. The unlogged habitat, however, they found “should be considerably more capable of sustaining caribou.”
The high mortality rates for the caribou in the logged forest are mostly due to wolf predation, but human changes to the landscape help make that possible. Development has been a driving force behind declining caribou numbers throughout their range.
As a result of these human disturbances, the caribou population in North America is in a precarious position. Woodland caribou once ranged across half of Canada and the northern reaches of the contiguous United States. But they’re now gone from their southern range. In Canada’s boreal forests, the animals are listed as threatened under the federal Species at Risk Act, Canada’s version of the Endangered Species Act.
While woodland caribou have evolved to live with forests disturbed by wildfire, they haven’t fared well in forests disturbed by people. One of the biggest threats is habitat fragmentation from commercial logging, mining, oil and gas — and all the roads associated with those activities.
But here’s the twist: Moose do better in these disturbed landscapes, and that puts caribou further at risk, albeit indirectly.
Previous research has found that moose prefer the vegetation that grows in these early successional forests that follow a large-scale disturbance, like commercial logging. And a higher density of moose attracts more wolves, which are also able to move faster and hunt farther by following linear clearings like roads and pipelines in these developed areas.
While moose are the primary prey for wolves, caribou that wander into these forests become another tasty target.
“The bottom line,” Fryxell explains, “is that the combination of vegetation changes, increase in road density, increase in moose, and consequent increase in wolves threaten long-term viability of woodland caribou in boreal landscapes of Ontario, in a similar fashion to many other parts of Canada.”
A national assessment found that around 70% of Canada’s local populations of woodland caribou were no longer self-sustaining.
So what’s to be done?
Last year provincial managers in Quebec floated the idea of killing wolves to protect caribou herds. Their idea met with public backlash, but wolves in British Columbia weren’t so lucky. During the winter of 2019-2020, a whopping 463 wolves were killed by the B.C. provincial government for the stated purpose of protecting populations of southern mountain caribou, another caribou ecotype.
Some of the money to pay for the kill came from Coastal GasLink, a company actively clearing land in caribou habitat for a pipeline, the Canadian news outlet the Narwhal reported.
And a recently published study in the journal Biology and Conservation found that the culls were not likely to aid caribou and pointed out several shortcomings in previous research that called for such wolf-control measures.
There are other, and better, options — like habitat protection and restoration.
Fryxell’s study concluded that “the most secure conservation measure would be to set aside extensive tracts of boreal forest with natural patterns of disturbance to sustain viable caribou sub‐populations.”
Research shows that the animals need at least 65% of their range undisturbed to have a good shot at survival.
And helping caribou will come with other environmental benefits. Canada’s 2018 federal action plan to restore caribou stated, “Boreal caribou is also considered by many to be an indicator of the overall state of Canada’s boreal forest ecosystem.” So keeping forests intact or restoring habitat is a proposition that would benefit not only caribou but many other species.
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