The following video is courtesy of Greg Palast, the journalist who previously tipped Salon off to the widespread voter disenfranchisement in Georgia earlier this month. In the video above, watch Palast lay out his investigation into why 550,702 Georg...
The following video is courtesy of Greg Palast, the journalist who previously tipped Salon off to the widespread voter disenfranchisement in Georgia earlier this month. In the video above, watch Palast lay out his investigation into why 550,702 Georgians were purged from the voter rolls in 2016 and 2017.
Palast details how Brian Kemp, Georgia's current Secretary of State who is running for governor against Democrat Stacey Abrams, allegedly pulled off this mass purge, including identifying voters who were thought to have moved out of state or moved out of their congressional district.
Some tactics, detailed by Palast in the video, include the "postcard trick," which asks voters who missed previous elections to reply to a mailer (which looks a lot like junk mail). If they failed to respond, the state assumed they no longer lived at the address and thus removed the voter from the rolls.
But most of them hadn't moved. As Palast shows in the video above, he talked to experts about the tactics that were used to target voters and the strategies behind them, including questioning why the state employed methods that are proven unreliable.
After much resistance from Palast, Kemp turned over the names and addresses of each one of the purged voters in response to a threat of a federal lawsuit, which he filed in federal court in Atlanta. Of these, Palast tells Salon, at least 340,134 were wrongly removed-with no notice that they were purged.
Earlier this month, Palast's foundation listed all the names of the purged voters at GregPalast.com.
Watch the video above to see Palast's reporting in action. The journalist, who has been investigating Kemp for five years, reveals the deeper reasons why Kemp targeted certain districts in Georgia.