Greg Palast & Helen Butler, co-plaintiffs in Kemp lawsuit
Palast has been fighting Kemp to release his hidden purge lists and methods for six years, for
Rolling Stone,
al Jazeera,
Salon,
Democracy Now and currently,
The Guardian.
Palast said, "Kemp and the new Sec. of State of Georgia want to keep the
lid on their methods for removing literally hundreds of thousands of
low-income, young and minority voters on the basis of false
information. They cannot hide any more. This is a huge win and
precedent for reporters trying to pry information from the hands of
guilty officials."
A key issue at stake are the "Interstate Crosscheck" purge lists
secretly provided to Georgia by the Kansas Secretary of State in 2015
and 2017. Kemp had turned over Georgia’s voter rolls to Kansas official
Kris Kobach, who worked closely with Donald Trump, and is known for his
racially biased vote suppression techniques.
"Kemp tried to hide the Crosscheck lists which he got from his crony
Kobach. The lists are at least 99.9% wrong. Kemp’s office claimed he
did not use the lists to purge voters, an assertion contradicted by his
GOP predecessor. Moreover, Zach D. Reports of the Palast investigative
team obtained the Georgia 2013 purge list provided by Kobach through
(legal) investigative techniques—so we know, and the judge knows, he has
more squirreled away.
"Kemp finally turned over evidence that he purged 106,000 voters,
overwhelmingly voters of color, that were on the Crosscheck list. But
that’s just the tip of the purge-berg."
Palast’s co-plaintiff Helen Butler is the Executive Director of the
Georgia Coalition for the Peoples Agenda, a non-partisan group founded
by civil rights legend Rev. Joseph Lowery. Lowery, commenting on the
Crosscheck purge system, told Palast, "It’s Jim Crow all over again."
Oddly, one of Kemp’s defenses was that he turned over Georgia’s
confidential voter information to Kobach so it could be used to purge
voters in 29 other states, but not Georgia. Kobach’s list showed
thousands of Michigan voters supposedly also registered or voted in
Georgia. Michigan removed tens of thousands of voters with names like
"James Brown" and "Mohammed Mohammed"—almost all with mis-matched middle
names.
The Michigan purge of Georgia voters was key to Trump’s official victory
margin of 10,700 in Michigan, putting Trump over the top in the
electoral college.
While Palast says, "The evidence is overwhelming that Kemp used the
Crosscheck list in some way to purge Georgians — 106,000 is not a
‘coincidence’— I do want to find out why Kemp was using Georgia voter
rolls to remove voters in
other states."
The Crosscheck list identifies over half a million Georgians — including
one in seven African-Americans in the state — as having moved out of
Georgia, according to an investigative report on Kemp and Kobach
published by Palast in
Rolling Stone in 2016.
"My job as an investigative journalist is not to change laws or affect
elections, but to expose official shenanigans. I thank my lawyers Brian
Spears of Atlanta and Jeanne Mirer of New York for taking this case pro
bono to rip the cover off Kemp's and the state of Georgia’s racially
poisonous undermining of democracy."
The Palast team is providing investigative reports to
The Guardian’s "Fight for the Vote" series.
* * * * *
The Palast team is completing work on our short film of how exactly
Brian Kemp illegally eliminated 340,134 voters from the rolls, stealing
the election from Stacey Abrams. The Palast film then takes us to
Wisconsin where the "Kemp" techniques are the center of a push block
247,000 voters, mostly Democrats and thereby keep Wisconsin, the swing
state of swing states, in the Trump column.
Help us complete our investigation, dig into the purge lists and finish
this film? It’s not about candidates, it’s about democracy.
Donate $1,000 and you’ll be listed in the credits as a producer,
$500 as a co-producer,
$100 as a supporter or simply
donate what you can.
And you’ll get a signed copy of the film! We have a team of 15 digging
into the heist of 2020—there is nothing like it in US journalism.
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