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Unknown A
Greg palace, thanks so much for joining us. We appreciate it.
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Unknown B
Always happy to be with you.
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Unknown A
All right, so let's start very, very simple. Who won the 2024 election?
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Unknown B
Okay. Well, I've heard that Trump won, at least according to Elon Musk, but I have to tell you that I did a careful analysis of the numbers. And if it were not for ugly Jim Crow racist vote suppression tactics, Kamala Harris would have had an additional 3,565,000 votes. She would have won Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Georgia. She would have had 286 electoral votes. She'd won the popular vote by about a million and a quarter and the electoral college by 200 with 286 electoral votes. Now, how the heck do I get this stuff? It's all from government figures I've been doing for 25 years. I've been doing work as a forensic economist. This is my specialty for the U.S. justice Department, for several American attorneys general. And in the past couple years, I've been doing and for 25 years, I've been working on vote suppression calculations.
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Unknown B
And these are numbers that I've provided in reports, technical reports for the aclu, naacp, Black Voters Matter. And we go into federal court with these numbers. These are hard numbers from US Government statistics. Three and a half million more votes for Kamala Harris if it weren't for ugly tactics. And I'll give you a few and give you some of the breakdown if you'd like.
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Unknown C
Yeah, let's talk. You focus in your film before the election, which really previewed some of what was to come. You really focus a lot on the state of Georgia in particular. So maybe tell us specifically about some of the tactics that were used there to disenfranchise voters that they suspected would vote Democratic.
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Unknown B
Georgia's a swing state of swing states. It's also the test kitchen for GOP vote suppression tactics against people of color. And I'm not being partisan about this. I'm not in any party, but it's the gop. It's going after voters of color. And so when I talk about Georgia, it's the nation. But for example, the year before the election, leading up to the election, and this is an official figure from what we call the United States Elections Assistance Commission, believe it or not, we have an agency until Mr. I'm afraid to mention it to Mr. Musk because it'll be gone tomorrow. But we have an agency which not only tracks all our voting, but it tracks all the non votes because the nasty little secret of American democracies We don't let everyone vote, every citizen vote, and we don't count every ballot. There's no other nation which disqualifies so many voters.
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Unknown B
So According to the US Elections Assistance Commission, just before the election, 4,776,706 voters, almost 5 million voters, were purged from the voter rolls. They were literally eliminated from the voter rolls without any solid evidence. Zero. I'm not talking about people who died. I'm not talking about people who moved or people who are too crazy to vote and have a court order that says they can't vote. And let's go to Georgia to tell you how this breaks down. For the ACLU and for Reverend Jesse Jackson's legal team, Black voters matter, we went into federal court. I had done a study for the ACLU in which I took the half million people that they purged in Georgia and I brought in the experts who work with Amazon and also the United States Postal Service turned over the list to these experts and with their computers and believe me, Amazon knows where you live.
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Unknown B
They do, and so does the Postal Service. And what they came back with was 198,000 people on that list who supposedly didn't live in Georgia anymore or their voting address. They gave us the names and addresses of 198,000 voters who should never been removed from the voter rolls. That alone took Georgia. There were other tricks too, and it's not just any. If it were random, it wouldn't matter. But we, we, for those of you who are statisticians, I used to teach statistics. We did a sample of 800 of these people who were purged. And what we found is that overwhelmingly they were voters of color, black people and a lot of young people who are also voters of color because the color is blue. It's not random. You remove 198,000 legal voters and not just. And by the way, those are numbers. I want to remind you, if you saw my film, I was at the polling station in Atlanta when one black person after another is being thrown out.
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Unknown B
Oh, you're not on the rolls, you can't vote anymore. But then there was one 92 year old woman in a walker who was thrown out after she'd been voting at that same station for 50 years. They said, no, no, you can't vote here anymore. And so I went with her to the house down the street that they said she didn't live in anymore. And there was a picture on the wall of Martin Luther King having dinner with her. I said, you knew King? She said, My cousin, he came here after church every Sunday. Martin Luther King's 92 year old cousin was thrown off the voter rolls. If they can throw her off, you can imagine a lot of other black people thrown off. So that's, these are the hard numbers of how it's done. There's also some other tricks. And if you saw in my film Vigilantes and I'm not making money off this, you can.
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Unknown B
Leonardo DiCaprio and Jamie Foxx have put up the funds to make this film available for free streaming@gregpalace.com and what you'll see is the brand new trick, the KKK trick. It's vigilante vote challenges. Our film is called Vigilantes Inc. America's New Vote Suppression Hitmen for good reason. For the first time since 1946, we've had mass challenges of voters. And what does that mean by individuals now? What I mean by that is, for example, Greg palace can say crystal ball should not be allowed to vote. I don't know where you live in New York or whatever. She doesn't live where she says she lives. Don't let her vote. Now who's Greg palace to say that? The answer is nobody, except I'm just a self appointed vigilante. And this is something that the, that the Trump campaign resurrected for 2024 nationwide, the old Ku Klux Klan method of individual challenges of voters because they realized that they still have these old Jim Crow segregationist laws on the books where people could be challenged.
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Unknown B
In 1946, the Ku Klux Klan set out to challenge every single black voter in Georgia and they removed enough through these individual challenges. Again, this is not government challenging people. These are self appointed vigilantes knocking you off the voter rolls. And in 46, they elected a Klansman, Eugene Talmadge, as governor of Georgia. He was about to get arrested, but he drank himself to death just before the FBI was about to handcuff him. And now the Trump campaign has resurrected this through a group called True the Vote. As of August, beginning of August, four months before, three months before the election, they had already challenged, proudly claimed that they had challenged 317,886 voters. And if you see the film, you get to see some of the challengers. Like there's one woman who works for Marjorie Taylor, works at Marjorie Taylor Greene in Georgia. And you'll see the, the lady in red, if you remember names, Pam reardon, she's a GOP official.
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Unknown B
She personally challenged 32,000 of her neighbors, 32,000 people in Cobb County. One person. How does she do that? Because the Klan has gone from white sheets to spreadsheets. And what she did was she took this list from the Trump operatives and simply sent in a spreadsheet saying, don't let these people vote. I don't believe that they're proper voters. 32,000 voters in Georgia. One single GOP official did that. Another one who actually dresses like a vigilante. He dresses like Doc Holliday, the vigilante. And he came to our interview wearing, by the way, the lady in red chased me out of her house. Because she had a loaded arm to you. No, no. She had a loaded AR15 next to the door. So I didn't get into a big fight with her over leaving. So you'll see that. But also, you'll see the guy who dresses like Doc Holliday.
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Unknown B
And we might think it's cute and funny because he, you know, with his six gun, which, by the way, was loaded, it was kind of bit touchy. But this guy challenged. He's the vice president, vice chairman of the GOP in southern Georgia, and he. He challenged 4,000 voters, most of them black soldiers out of Fort Benning.
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Unknown C
Wow.
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Unknown B
And you will meet one of those soldiers in the film, Major Gamaliel Turner, who is career military Pentagon expert, who was assigned to a base in California. And so he's waiting for his absentee ballot, because you know what? Soldiers get to vote absentee, even if they're black soldiers, they're supposed to be allowed to vote. So he didn't get his ballot. He calls up his county and says, where's my absentee ballot? They said, well, Mr. Turner, you've been challenged. What does that mean? And they said, no problem. Just come in, prove you're a citizen, and show your address, and we'll give you a ballot. He said, you're telling me two days before the election to fly 2700 miles to prove I'm a citizen. This is this our career military. Prove I'm a citizen again, and then you'll let me vote? Well, I don't have to tell you, Major Turner is African American.
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Unknown B
And by the way, he did fly 5,000 miles round trip, ultimately, to get his vote count that he needed a federal court order, but federal 4,000 others, again, mostly black soldiers, were removed and were not allowed to vote. This is what's going on. The total number of challenges you'll see at the beginning of the film, Martin Sheen, who's also one of my producers and my favorite president, President Bartlett, he noted that the Trump Organization True. The Vote said that their goal by election day was 2 million challenges. I know speaking to the president of the NAACP in Georgia, he was at 200,000 challenges on election Day. This is after the purges. This is challenge. The challenges. So this is how it's done over and again. It's overwhelmingly racial, or wouldn't matter.
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Unknown A
So let me ask you this. How many states have these vigilante laws where they just assume that the person challenging your right to vote is correct?
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Unknown B
Our last count was 20 states, and that included swing states and Pennsylvania, by the way, Trump's lawyer, Cleta Mitchell, she set up her own challenge organization and she challenged 10,000 people in Philadelphia, you know, the swing state. And. And I don't know how many by Election Day. These are very. So this is a. This is a whole new. Well, I won't say whole new way. It's from 1946, from the clan. By the way, the reason our film is called Vigilantes, Inc. Is that for the clan to cover its tracks, because they thought that what they were doing was illegal, they incorporated themselves. The Ku Klux Klan incorporated itself as Vigilantes Incorporated. And so this is a dangerous new business. There was a small article in the New York Times, Atlanta Journal Constitution, other places about these vigilante vote challenges, but no one other than my team has reported on the size of it.
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Unknown B
And it's racial characteristic, which is what bent the election. It's not small.
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Unknown C
Yeah, there was no question.
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Unknown B
Yeah, go ahead.
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Unknown C
That was one of the things that really comes across in the film is I think a lot of people in the country probably kind of take their right to vote for granted. Many people don't vote for any number of variety of reasons. Like the people you talk to. This was deeply hurtful to them. I mean, these are people who they themselves or their very close relatives had fought these battles for civil rights for black people to have the right to vote. I mean, you're talking about the state of Georgia to be stripping black people by the hundreds of thousands of this right that is held so sacred. That was part of what really hit home to me as well, is just what the level of cruelty that that took to do as well.
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Unknown B
Oh, it was. It was horrible. I mean, I can't tell you how many people were in tears. You'll see in the film just people hysterical about losing their right to vote. Especially black people have been through this. Major Turner's father, by the way, is the Reverend Harold Turner, who co founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference with Martin Luther King. So that's why he was willing to fly 5,000 miles round trip to save his votes and try save others. But this is, this is a dangerous new thing. And that's only the beginning of the problems we've run into.
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Unknown A
Yeah. Let me ask you, Greg, I'm very curious. Let me ask you tell everybody what a spoiled ballot is and what happened with those.
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Unknown B
Okay. You don't spoil a ballot by leaving it out of the fridge. We, one of the weird things in America is we have a massive number of ballots which are not counted. Disqualified, that is. Well, in fact, my sister, who's a lawyer, by the way, lost her ballot because they didn't count her ballot because she didn't fill in a bubble next to candidate name. She probably put an X or something. So if instead of a bubble, so it wasn't readable by a scanner, ballot disqualified. And the GOP made sure that her ballot was disqualified. Now, if it was random, so, and then you use the. Also, this involves a lot of mail in votes too. If you use the wrong envelope postage, do all that, but just the, the in precinct spoiled ballots, that is, it's folded wrong. You use the wrong color pen, marked it wrong.
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Unknown B
Anything that they can look at and say, gotcha. There are about 585,000 ballots spoiled in this past election, over half a million. Now, if it were random, once again, hey, so, you know, it happens. It's ever, you know, but it's not random. According to the United States Civil Rights Commission, the chance your vote will spoil and not be counted is 900% higher if you're black than if you're white. That's, that's the US Government numbers. Remember, when I'm giving you these numbers, it's government numbers. And it's been very difficult to get, which is why it took a long time reporting these things. In fact, the NAACP had to go to court, sue the state of Georgia and federal court to get some of these numbers. And so that, so spoiled ballots, sometimes that includes what they call under undervotes, overvotes. Like I'll never Forget back in 2,700 ballots were disqualified in a black county in Florida where people had checked the name Al Gore for president, but it said writing candidates names.
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Unknown B
So 700 people wrote in Al Gore and they disqualified their ballots because said, we don't know who they're voting for. They checked Al Gore, they wrote Al Gore. Who did they vote for? But that's, Remember, George Bush won by 537 votes if they had counted those spoiled black ballots.
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Unknown C
Wow.
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Unknown B
Would have been president.
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Unknown A
I'm feeling trauma at the moment, Greg. Now, let me ask you about provisional ballots. Tell everybody what happened with provisional ballots.
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Unknown B
Oh, boy. So after Florida, we won the right to have a provisional ballot. So if your name is. If you have been purged, the 4.7 million people who had their, who were purged in this past election, you show up and they say, oh, your name's not here. Hey, Kyle, you know your name's not here. So we're gonna, don't worry, we're gonna give you a provisional ballot. Just fill out this paper ballot, stick it in this envelope, fill out the outside of the envelope, they'll check your registration, and then they'll count your ballot. No, they won't. No, they won't. Because whatever stopped you in the first place, they're going to keep you off those rules. You have to physically go into the office of your county clerk, get your ballot counted. Now, it's not small. It's not small. There were, according again, to the United States Elections Assistance Commission, not Greg Palast.
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Unknown B
I know you see the hat. I'm an investigative reporter, but I rely on the government numbers. According to the government, 42% of all provisional ballots, almost half are just thrown in the dumpster, are never counted. And if it were anyone, and by the way, you know how many that is? For this last election, 1,216,000 ballots were thrown in the electoral dumpster. Provisional ballots. Over a million provisional ballots were thrown away. Who disqualified. And if, again, it's not random, according to the Brennan center for justice and the government agencies, if you are black, the chance you'll be shunted to Provisional ballot is 300% higher if you're black, Hispanic or Asian American than if you're white. And young people, especially young people of color, are given provisional ballots. Like candy. I call them placebo ballots. You know, you think that you voted, you feel like you voted, but you didn't.
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Unknown B
And, but again, it's, it's, it's racially bent, it's racially biased, and that's one of the worst things.
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Unknown A
What happened with the mail in ballots?
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Unknown B
Oh, boy. Mail in ballots, 2.12 or 2. 2,120,000 mail in ballots were disqualified in this election. Say what? This is in America. This is what we do. And how does that happen? Well, according to this one, I got some from several sources. National Public Radio, NPR calculated that 13.8% of mail in ballots never get counted. That's one in seven ballots. Now, MIT did a study and they said it is that the loss is much higher than 1 in 7. But let's take that lower number and not even that lower number. Just I took the lowest even I just took half of that. And you still have 2 million mail in ballots disqualified. And again, if it were random, hey, so what? But the state of Washington did a study and they found that if you're black, you're 400% more likely to have your ballot disqualified.
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Unknown B
A mail in ballot is qualified that if you are white, 400% higher. And, and remember Washington state probably has the least vote suppression. Imagine what it is in Georgia and in fact the, the other things that they do. So 2 million ballots. And again, it's not random. Now if you're adding up my numbers to say, whoa, that's way, way more than three and a half million votes that Harris lost because some people don't vote. Some people would have voted for Trump. So we, so we have to cut it way back down. But nevertheless, three and a half million votes. And, and then they pull tricks like make it hard to do mail in balloting in Georgia. They SB202. They signed a bill that said that literally by state law closed 75% of the drop boxes in Georgia in only, only in the black counties of Atlanta and, and Savannah counties and, but in white counties they ordered by law and increase the number of, of ballot Dropbox, you know, where you can just drop in your mail and vote because people don't trust the post office and they shouldn't.
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Unknown B
Major Turner, remember he was challenged and, and had a fly 2005. Well, he lost his next ballot. He was actually I, we filmed him showing young soldiers how to fill out an APSI ballot and he said, yeah, here's how you fill it out so they don't disqualify it. Mail it in on time. He did. They said his ballot arrived late. So the majors major losses vote a second time because the post office was as you know, slow walk that mail. Because if you're Democrat, you're 51% more likely than a Republican to vote by mail and they know it. So if they just have to slow down the mail and you end up with Agent Orange as president, not by, you know, look, if people voted for Trump, if everyone was allowed to vote and he won, he won. That's our democracy. But unfortunately, I think vigilantes, not voters, picked our president and that's what's frightening.
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Unknown C
Can you talk about the tactic that's used to disqualify a lot of people who have Similar names like Jose Garcia or James Brown, I think are some of the examples that you use.
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Unknown B
Oh, yeah. So we've had two things. One of the things that they do is we saw this in Florida where they try to remove 800,000 people saying that they were illegal aliens. Well, they took deportations list. There's a lot of Jose Hernandez. So Jose Hernandez gets deported to Salvador. And they, and they find Jose Hernandez on their voter rolls. They go, oh, my God, he's come back to vote. Or in the state. There was a system called interstate cross check that I investigated for Rolling Stone magazine. And there, there was an attempt by the GOP to challenge 7 million voters they ultimately knocked off before the 2016 election with Hillary. Between Hillary and Trump, they knocked off almost a million voters, overwhelmingly voters of color, because what they did was they took common names. In Georgia, there were 238 voters named James Brown that lost their vote because he said the same guy keeps voting again and again and again.
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Unknown B
James Brown. Well, they say, you know, now you might say it's a common name. James Brown, not for a Republican. That's one of the tricks. And, and they were. Now we were able to stop some of this in this last election, working with Rainbow Push and the aclu. Again, we were able to stop their use of that system. Exactly this time. But then they use other things like they, the, the Great Felon Purge, where they take. We have where in Florida back in 2000 in the bush Gore campaign, I uncovered when I was working for BBC and the Guardian and did an investigation and found out 58,000 black men were removed from the voter rolls as felons. And then we checked with the attorney general, you know what he said? Not one zero were illegal voters, but they had common names. And so, for example, Willie Steen, a Georgia Gulf water, excuse me, a Florida Gulf War veteran, was matched with a white guy who'd been convicted in Ohio of a felony named Willie Osteen.
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Unknown B
But it was good enough for the state of Florida to knock off a black man. And it was overwhelmingly black men that were being removed. And again, it's a, it's a game that they play with common names. Now, I've for BBC, I have covered elections all over America. England, Mexico, Liberia, Italy, you name it. No other civilized nation, no other real democratic nation, you know, I'm not talking Russia here, knocks off literally millions of voters off the voter rolls or disqualifies ballots in this manner. They just don't do it in democracies. And this is what's so frightening. And what made it worse this year for 2024 is, as the Brennan center for Justice at NYU noted, and you'll see a chart and if you go to gregpalis.com, you can read my article and you'll see a chart from the Brennan Center. Thirty states, almost all red states, changed their laws to make it harder to vote.
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Unknown B
And as the Brennan center said, they were targeting voters of color to make it harder to vote. So these new vote suppression tactics and laws, especially the new vigilante challenge, some of these have been around a while. But the vigilante challenge is a new and frightening game. And that's what I'm worried about right now.
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Unknown A
Tell me about the conspiracy movie from Dinesh D'Souza called 2000 Mules. Talk about the impact that that had. I know, for example, there are 16 states that banned ballot drop boxes as a direct result of that movie. What other impacts has that movie had? All right, guys, you are not going to want to miss the rest of this interview. Sign up below. On Substack, Greg palace lays out for us Trump's sinister plan. Had the outcome of the 2024 race been different. He gives all the details in what went down. Just a phenomenal interview. Tremendous amount of evidence presented about what really happened in the 2024 election. You're not going to want to miss the rest of it.