“DOGE and OMB also found that there was about to be $50 million taxpayer dollars that went out the door to fund condoms in Gaza.”
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt arrives to speak with reporters in the James Brady Presidential Briefing Room at the White House, Tuesday, Jan. 28, 2025, in Washington. (AP)
There is no evidence that President Donald Trump’s foreign aid freeze stopped $50 million worth of condoms from going to Gaza, despite White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt’s statement during her first press briefing.
The Department of Government Efficiency, an advisory board, and the Office of Management and Budget “found that there was about to be $50 million taxpayer dollars that went out the door to fund condoms in Gaza,” Leavitt said Jan. 28, while discussing the need for a pause on most federal aid.
A day later, Trump repeated the claim.
“We identified and stopped $50 million being sent to Gaza to buy condoms for Hamas. $50 million,” Trump told reporters Jan. 29. “You know what has happened to them? They’ve used them as a method of making bombs.”
Trump was likely referring to a February 2020 Jerusalem Post articlethat said Hamas had been launching improvised explosive devices in condoms.
But there’s no evidence that the U.S. had earmarked or spent $50 million for condoms for Gaza. A State Department spokesperson said on X that the freeze stopped $100 million in funding to Gaza which included funding for contraception. But the emergency relief group that, according to news outlets, would have received that aid, told PolitiFact it did not use U.S. funding for condoms.
There is a U.S. program that provides contraceptives internationally — and it spent $60 million worldwide in one year — but Gaza was not among the recipients, a 2024 U.S. Agency for International Development report said.
Here’s what we know about the funding the White House froze to Gaza, and the funding the U.S. gives other countries for contraceptives.
White House stopped $100 million of health aid to Gaza
State Department spokesperson Tammy Bruce said in an X post that the department “prevented $102 million in unjustified funding to a contractor in Gaza, including money for contraception.”
The state Department declined to say on the record what the full scope of those grants was, and it did not provide documentation PolitiFact requested before deadline.
Multiple news outlets reported that state department officials said the administration stopped two $50 million tranches of funding for the International Medical Corps’ work in Gaza. The funding “included” family planning programming, which can include contraception, sexual health care and sexually transmitted disease prevention.
The International Medical Corps operates a range of emergency health services in Gaza, but spokesperson Todd Bernhardt told PolitiFact it has not used U.S. funding to buy or distribute condoms in Gaza. The organization is not focused on contraception, and there’s no evidence that $50 million of the funding was intended to pay for condoms.
The International Medical Corps operates two field hospitals in Gaza, Bernhardt said, which serve around 33,000 civilians per month. It performs emergency maternal and newborn care and has helped deliver about 5,000 babies since the war in Gaza began, Bernhardt said. It operates a neonatal intensive care unit and a stabilization center for severely malnourished children.
The group also provides care in pediatrics, orthopedics, pulmonology and cardiology, Bernhardt said.
“If the stop-work order remains in place, we will be unable to sustain these activities beyond the next week or so,” Bernhardt said.
Since the war in Gaza began in October 2023, the International Medical Corps has received $68 million to support its operations, Bernhardt said. We weren’t able to review the details of the grant Leavitt referred to, but it is unlikely the group would receive close to three-fourths of all the funding it’s received so far for condoms alone. And the State Department did not respond to our request for more details on the grant.
The Trump administration on Jan. 29 withdrew its memo that directed a freeze on most federal aid a day after a judge blocked the effort, but Leavitt said on X the funding freeze was still in place. The State Department did not say whether the planned Gaza aid would resume.
No contraceptives funding went to Gaza in fiscal year 2023, the latest available data
For decades, the U.S. has invested in reproductive health and family planning programs worldwide. Public health groups distribute condoms in low-income countries primarily to prevent the spread of sexually transmitted diseases, including HIV.
The U.S. “is the largest donor to (family planning/reproductive health) in the world. It is also one of the largest purchasers and distributors of contraceptives internationally,” according to a 2024 KFF report.
The U.S. spends about $600 million annually on international family planning and reproductive health programs globally, the KFF report said. That includes things like birth spaces, STD testing, prenatal and postnatal care, and other interventions beyond contraception.
According to USAID, it partners with 41 countries for its family planning and reproductive health program. Neither Israel nor Gaza and the West Bank are on the list.
In fiscal year 2023, which ended in September 2023, the U.S. government spent $60 million on contraceptive care which includes condoms, a 2024 USAID report said. A small portion of that — $8.2 million — was spent on male and female condoms, with the rest going to other contraception methods.
The majority of the funding, $54.3 million went to countries in Africa. The Middle East, where Gaza is, got the smallest funding share — about $45,000. All the funding to the Middle East went to Jordan; the report didn’t mention any funding to Israel or Gaza.
Most of USAID’s Family Planning Program funding is used on contraceptives other than condoms such as oral contraceptives, injectable contraceptives and contraceptive implants. Around $7 million went to condoms for men.
Gaza has around 2.14 million people, according to the CIA. If the U.S. spent $50 million on condoms it would have spent around $23 on condoms per person in Gaza or about $46 per male in Gaza. On average, condoms cost about $1 each, according to Planned Parenthood. That does not include a likely lower price for bulk purchases.
Our ruling
Leavitt said officials found “there was about to be $50 million taxpayer dollars that went out the door to fund condoms in Gaza.”
The White House and State Department didn’t provide evidence the funding it blocked was intended solely for condoms. A State Department spokesperson said that the freeze stopped $100 million in funding to Gaza that included funding for contraception. But there’s no evidence the emergency relief group that would have received that aid would have used it for condoms; a spokesperson for the group said it has not used any U.S. aid so far to procure or distribute condoms.
A separate U.S. program that provides contraceptives internationally spent $60 million worldwide in one year, but Gaza was not among the recipients.
It all traces back to billionaire-backed fearmongering in the 1960s—weaponizing panic around socialism and communism to crush unions, cut taxes, and hoard profits…
By Thom Hartmann/ HartmannReport.com/ January 31, 2025
In Wednesday’s Daily Take here on Hartmann Report, I mentioned Russell Kirk and the origins of today’s hard right GOP. A few people replied with, “Who’s that?” and similar questions; others were incredulous that Republicans actually believed the middle class created by FDR’s New Deal was a bad thing. So, here’s the backstory to what I mentioned.
I was thirteen years old in 1964 when my dad, a Republican activist, gave me a copy of John Stormer’s book “None Dare Call It Treason.” The Goldwater campaign had sent it to him, and its claim that the State Department was filled with communists intent on handing America over to the USSR had his friends buzzing.
Ironically, Stormer’s book and the movement it ignited within the GOP is largely responsible for that party today standing on the precipice of fully endorsing fascism as an alternative to democracy in the US.
And it was started by morbidly rich men (it was all men back then) who wanted to use the threat of a “communist menace” to gut the union movement to increase their own corporate profits and CEO pay.
Kirk argued that the middle class was becoming a threat to America; without clearly defined classes and power structures — essentially without the morbidly rich in complete control of everything — he worried that society would devolve into chaos.
The opening chapter of his book was about Edmund Burke, the Irish conservative who wrote, in 1790, that hairdressers and candlemakers should not be allowed to run for political office or even to vote:
“The occupation of a hairdresser or of a working tallow-chandler cannot be a matter of honor to any person — to say nothing of a number of other more servile employments. Such descriptions of men ought not to suffer oppression from the state; but the state suffers oppression if such as they, either individually or collectively, are permitted to rule. In this you think you are combating prejudice, but you are at war with nature…”
Kirk and his followers essentially predicted in 1951 that if today’s “hairdressers and working tallow-chandlers” — college students, women, working-class people, and people of color — ever got even close to social and political power at the same level as wealthy white men, there would essentially be a communist revolution in the US, handing us over to Stalin and his Politburo.
(Keep in mind, this was when racial segregation was legal and brutally enforced, the voting age was 21, campuses were almost entirely all-male, both abortion and birth control were illegal in most states, and women couldn’t open checking accounts or get credit cards without a husband’s, brother’s, or father’s signature.)
Throughout the 1950s, Kirk and his warnings of the dangers of an activist middle-class developed a small following; the most prominent of his proponents were William F. Buckley Jr. and Barry Goldwater. Most Republicans, though, considered him a crackpot.
But when the birth-control pill was legalized in 1961 and the Vietnam War heated up a few years later, those marginalized groups Kirk had warned his wealthy white male followers about began to rise up in protest.
Kids were burning draft cards, women were burning bras, and Martin Luther King Jr. was leading a movement for racial justice that the white power structure blamed for American cities burning. Gay liberation was also having a moment.
Meanwhile, the Arab Oil Embargoes of the 1970s had lit the flame of inflation, and unionized workers were striking all over America for wage increases to keep up with the rising cost of living.
Wealthy white conservatives freaked out as the morbidly rich promoted the idea that America was experiencing a “moral decline” that could only be fixed by ending the union movement and other “liberal” causes that shared the union movements’ populist goals.
They became convinced that they were seeing Kirk’s prophecy play out in real time on their television screens every night: the “communists” — those uppity racial minorities, women who’d forgotten their “rightful place in society,” students who objected to Vietnam, unionized workers, and gender minorities — were on the verge of “taking over” America.
These five movements all hitting America at the same time got the attention of conservatives and Republicans who had previously ignored or even ridiculed Kirk back in the 1950s. Suddenly, America’s most powerful and well-known conservative commentators (like William F. Buckley Jr.) were telling Republicans that Russell Kirk was, indeed, a prophet.
They’d finally found a politically acceptable “hook” to destroy the wealth of working-class people and transfer trillions into their own money bins: fear of communism and a prophesied social decay caused by an activist middle class.
The Republican/Conservative “solution” to the “crisis” these five movements represented was put into place in 1981 when Ronald Reagan was sworn into office: the explicit goal of the morbidly rich white men funding the so-called Reagan Revolution was to take the middle class down a peg to end the protests of the ’60s and ’70s, restore “social stability,” and increase corporate profitability.
Their plan was to declare war on labor unions so wages could slide back down again, end free college across the nation so students would live in fear rather than be willing to protest, and increase the penalties Nixon had already put on drugs so they could use those laws against their scapegoats, particularly the hippy antiwar protesters and Black people demanding an end to police killings. They also wanted to outlaw abortion, to put women “back in their place.”
Thus, Reagan massively cut taxes on rich people and raised taxes on working-class people 11 times. For example, he put income taxes on Social Security and unemployment payments, and put in a mechanism to track and tax tips income, all of which had previously been tax-free but were exclusively needed and used by middle-class people.
He ended the tax deductibility of credit-card, car-loan, and student-debt interest, overwhelmingly claimed by working-class people. At the same time, he cut the top tax bracket for millionaires and billionaires from 74% to 25%. (There were only a handful of billionaires in America then, in large part because of previous tax policies; today’s democracy-destroying explosion of billionaires followed Reagan’s, Bush’s, and Trump’s massive tax cuts on the rich.)
Reagan declared war on labor unions, crushed PATCO in less than a week, and over the next decade the result of his war on labor was that union membership went from about a third of the American workforce when he came into office to around 10% at the end of the Reagan/Bush presidencies. It’s just now beginning to recover from its low of 6% of the private workforce.
He and Bush also husbanded the moribund 1947 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trades (GATT, which let Clinton help create the WTO) and negotiated NAFTA, which Clinton signed and thus opened a floodgate for American companies to move manufacturing overseas, leaving American workers underemployed while radically cutting corporate labor costs and union membership.
And, sure enough, Reagan’s War on Labor cut average inflation-adjusted minimum and median wages by more, over a couple of decades, than anybody had seen since the Republican Great Depression of the 1920s and ’30s.
The billionaire’s investment in taking the middle-class down a peg was paying off by orders of magnitude.
Had Reagan not destroyed the nation’s unions, the median American income today would be well over $100,000 a year, minimum-wage households would have a family income of $86,000, and a single wage-earner would still be able to buy a house, a car, send the kids to college, and have a decent retirement (as my dad did, working a union job for 35 years in a tool-and-die shop).
Instead, CEOs today keep all that money for themselves and their investors.
And Reagan’s War on Colleges jacked up the cost of education so high that an entire generation is today saddled with more than $1.5 trillion in student debt: as predicted, many aren’t willing to jeopardize it all by “acting up” on campuses.
The key to selling this campaign of impoverishment to the American people to help out the billionaire class was the idea that the US shouldn’t protect the rights of workers, subsidize education, grant women equal rights, or enforce Civil Rights laws because, conservatives said, all of those things were aspects of “socialism.” And if America embraced socialism, we may as well be ruled by the Soviet Union.
As Reagan told us in his first inaugural, government “socialist” programs were not the solution to our problems, but instead were the problem itself.
He ridiculed the formerly-noble idea of service to one’s country and joked that there were really no good people left in government because if they were smart or competent they’d be working in the private sector for a lot more money.
He even told us that the nine most frightening words in the English language were, “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.”
Following Lewis Powell’s 1971 memo, throughout the 1970s and 1980s Republican billionaires built a massive infrastructure of think tanks and media outlets to promote and amplify Reagan’s message that government supports of any sort for poor or working-class people were simply gateway drugs to socialism and, inevitably, communism.
It so completely swept America that by the 1990s even President Bill Clinton was saying things like, “The era of big government is over,” and “This is the end of welfare as we know it.” Limbaugh, Hannity and other right-wing radio talkers were getting millions a year in subsidies from billionaire-funded groups like the Heritage Foundation. Billionaire-owned Fox “News” today carries on the tradition.
It had been a pretty good scam for the billionaires who owned the GOP and wanted, back in the 1950s, to stop the union movement that was forcing them to share their profits with their workers.
First, they terrified Americans about communism and socialism, then convinced about half of us that those things came straight out of “liberal” social and economic movements.
Unions, feminism, acceptance of the queer community, civil rights, minimum wage increases, and even regulation of corporate behavior would, they told us, all lead to Soviet-style tyranny.
So, to save America from herself, Reagan gutted the American middle class, transferring over $50 trillion in wealth from working class people into the money bins of the morbidly rich.
By 2016, Americans were starting to figure out that they’d been screwed — and that Hillary Clinton’s husband had been in on it by continuing Reagan’s policies and doubling-down on free trade — and were loudly demanding change.
Into this maelstrom walked Donald Trump, proclaiming himself the savior of the country. In the GOP primary he pointed out how corrupt his opponents were, particularly Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio, and destroyed them, one after the other.
For the general election in 2016, he changed his tune and ran on what was traditionally a Democratic platform, saying he was going to bring jobs home, end so-called “free trade” policies, raise taxes on the rich so much that “my friends won’t talk to me anymore,” and make sure every American had free or low-cost healthcare and access to an affordable college education.
They were all lies — something Trump had become adept at during his business career — but they worked and sucked in disaffected workers who knew they’d been screwed but weren’t sure who did it to them or why.
So here we are.
We have an open fascist and apparent friend of authoritarian Russia as president after being convicted by a jury of his peers on 34 felony charges, having previously been adjudicated as responsible for sexual abuse (the judge called it “rape”) and fraud.
He’s putting into place people and policies that could turn America into an authoritarian nation like Russia or Hungary, and apparently wants to re-align the United States away from NATO and the EU and toward Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea.
We are literally facing the authoritarian future that John Stormer was warning us about back in 1964. Only instead of “communists” in the State Department, it’s a billionaire president with the avowed goal of ending union rights and locking up or using the Army with live ammunition against those who protest his policies.
And it all tracks back to wealthy conservatives funding a project in the 1960s to scare Americans about socialism and communism so they could stop the union-fueled growth of wages that were cutting into their profits.
A guest post by Greg Palast for the Hartmann Report
Trump lost. That is, if all legal voters were allowed to vote, if all legal ballots were counted, Trump would have lost the states ofWisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Georgia. Vice-President Kamala Harris would have won the Presidency with 286 electoral votes.
And, if not for the mass purge of voters of color, if not for the mass disqualification of provisional and mail-in ballots, if not for the new mass “vigilante” challenges in swing states, Harris would have gained at least another 3,565,000 votes, topping Trump’s official popular vote tally by 1.2 million.
Stay with me and I’ll give you the means, methods and, most important, the key calculations.
But if you’re expecting a sexy story about Elon Musk messing with vote-counting software from outer space, sorry, you won’t get that here.
As in Bush v. Gore in 2000 and in too many other miscarriages of Democracy, this election was determined by good old “vote suppression,” the polite term we use for shafting people of color out of their ballot. We used to call it Jim Crow.
Here are key numbers:
— 4,776,706 voters were wrongly purged from voter rolls according to US Elections Assistance Commission data. — By August of 2024, for the first time since 1946, self-proclaimed “vigilante” voter-fraud hunters challenged the rights of 317,886 voters. The NAACP of Georgia estimates that by Election Day, the challenges exceeded 200,000 in Georgia alone. — No fewer than 2,121,000 mail–in ballots were disqualified for minor clerical errors (e.g. postage due). — At least 585,000 ballots cast in-precinct were also disqualified. —1,216,000 “provisional” ballots were rejected, not counted. — 3.24 million new registrations were rejected or not entered on the rolls in time to vote.
If the purges, challenges and ballot rejections were random, it wouldn’t matter. It’s anything but random. For example, an audit by the State of Washington found that a Black voter was 400% more likely than a white voter to have their mail-in ballot rejected. Rejection of Black in-person votes, according to a US Civil Rights Commission study in Florida, ran 14.3% or one in seven ballots cast.
There are also the uncountable effects of the explosive growth of voter intimidation tactics including the bomb threats that closed 31 polling stations in Atlanta on Election Day.
America’s Nasty Little Secret
The nasty little secret of American democracy is that we don’t count all the votes. Nor let every citizen vote.
In 2024, especially, after an avalanche of new not-going-to-let-you-vote laws passed in almost every red state, the number of citizens Jim Crow’d out of their vote soared into the millions. According to the Brennan Center for Justice, since the 2020 election, “At least 30 states enacted 78 restrictive laws” to blockade voting. The race-targeted laws ran the gamut from shuttering drop boxes in Black-majority cities to, for the first time, allowing non-government self-appointed “vote fraud vigilantes” to challenge voters by the hundreds of thousands.
Throughout election seasons, The New York Times and NPR and establishment media write stories and editorials decrying vote suppression tactics, from new ID requirements to new restrictions on mail-in voting. But, notably, the mainstream press never, ever, not once, will say that these ugly racist attacks on voters changed the outcome of an election.
Question: If these vote suppression laws—notorious example: Georgia’s SB 202—had no effect on election outcomes, then why did GOP legislators fight so hard to pass these laws? The answer is clear on the Brennan Center’s map of states that passed restrictive laws. It’s pretty much Trump’s victory map.
America Goes Postal
Let’s look at just one vote suppression operation in action.
In 2020, during the pandemic, America went postal. More than 43% of us voted by mail.
But it wasn’t easy. Harris County, Texas, home of Houston, tried to mail out ballots during the Covid epidemic on the grounds that voters shouldn’t die waiting in lines at polling stations. But then, the state’s Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton stopped this life-saving measure.
Why wouldn’t this GOP official let Houstonians vote safely? Maybe it’s because Houston has the largest number of Black voters of any city in America. Indeed, on Steve Bannon’s podcast, Paxton proudly stated, “Had we not done that [stopped Houston from sending out ballots], Donald Trump would’ve lost the election” inTexas. Texas!
Before the 2024 election, prompted by Trump’s evidence-free attack on mail-in ballots as inherently fraudulent, 22 states, according to the Brennan Center, imposed “38 new restrictions on the ability to vote absentee that were not in place in 2020…likely to most affect or already have disproportionately affected voters of color.” You’re shocked, right?
Texas’ requirement to add ID numbers to an absentee ballot caused the rejection rate to jump from 1% to 12%.
So, here’s the question we need to ask. If restrictions on mail-in balloting swung Texas to Trump, how did all these new restrictions affect the outcome of the vote in other states?
In 2020, an NPR study found the mail-in ballot rejection rate hit 13.8% during the Democratic primaries—a loss of one in seven ballots.
Here are photos of a Georgia voter, career military officer and Pentagon advisor Major Gamaliel Turner (Ret), demonstrating for young voters how to fill out an absentee ballot, emphasizing that it must be mailed in promptly. He did, seven days before the deadline. But we only recently learned that Georgia officials disqualified his ballot as received too late.
Major Gamaliel Turner (now retired) about to mail in his absentee ballot. The state of Georgia rejected it. (Photo: Palast Investigative Fund 2024.)
In 2008, even before the majority of Democrats began voting by mail, when absentee balloting was much rarer, the federal government reported 488,136 mail-in ballots were rejected, almost all on picayune grounds (i.e. middle initial on signature missing etc.). An MIT study put the number of rejected mail-in ballots at 2.9%.
That’s the low-end of MIT’s estimate of mail-in ballots tossed out. Charles Stewart, Distinguished Professor of Political Science, author of the report, notes mail-in ballots requested and never received nor returned could raise the total mail-in ballot loss rate to 21%.
For 2024, that would total 14.1 million ballots that, effectively, vanished from the count.
The “failure to return” ballot was exacerbated in this election by the steep cut in ballot drop boxes, a method favored by urban (read, “Democratic”) voters. Black voters in Atlanta used ballot drop boxes extensively because they feared, with good reason, relying on the Post Office [see Major Turner’s story above].
In response, the Republican Governor of Georgia, Brian Kemp, signed SB 202 which slashed the number of drop boxes by 75% only in Black-majority counties and locked them away at night. These moves slashed mail-in and drop box balloting, used by the majority of Democrats in 2020, by nearly 90% in the 2024 race.
Even if deemed “on time,” ballots still face rejection. Marietta, Georgia, first-time voter Andrian Consonery Jr. told me his mail-in ballot was rejected because his signature supposedly didn’t match that on his registration. (I needn’t add, Consonery is Black.) In effect, Consonery was accused of forgery—a federal crime–not by the FBI but by self-appointed amateur sleuths. This challenge to mail-in ballots, part of a right-wing campaign, has gone viral.
Georgian Adrian Consonery Jr.’s mail-in ballot was challenged because of a false claim that his signature was forged. Photo: Zach D. Roberts for the Palast Investigative Fund (2024)
In 2020, the federal government reported that 157,477 ballots were rejected for supposedly “mis-matched” signatures. That’s quite a crime wave—but without criminals.
And that’s before we get to the dozens of other attacks on voting that were freshly minted for the 2024 election, attacks aimed at voters of color.
The crucial statistic is that not everyone’s ballot gets disqualified. One study done for the United States Civil Rights Commission found that a Black person, such as Maj. Turner, will be 900% more likely to have their mail-in or in-person ballot disqualified than a white voter.
Now, let’s do some arithmetic. If we take the lowest end of the MIT ballot rejection rate, and only a tenth of the “lost” ballot rate, and then apply it to the number of mail-in and drop-box ballots, we can conservatively estimate that 2,121,000 mail-in votes went into the electoral dumpster.
Whose ballots? Democrats are 51% more likely than Republicans to vote by mail;and, given the racial disparity in ballot rejections, Trump’s swing-state margins begin to look shaky.
The KKK Plan and the New Vigilantes
In 2020, the Palast Investigative Fund uncovered a whole new way to bring Jim Crow back to life: challenges to a citizen’s right to vote by a posse of self-proclaimed vote-fraud hunters.
Four years ago, the GOP took this new suppression method out for a test ride in Georgia when 88 Republican operatives—remember, these are not government officials — challenged the rights of over180,000 Georgians to have their ballots counted. These vigilantes based their scheme on the program originally used by the Ku Klux Klan in 1946.
One challenged voter: Major Turner, the same voter whose mail-in ballot was disqualified in a later election.
In 2020, the Major’s ballot was challenged by the county Chairman of the Republican Party in Southern Georgia, Alton Russell. (Russell likes to dress up as infamous vigilante Doc Holliday, with a loaded six-gun in a holster.) In a (polite) confrontation we filmed between the Major and Russell, the GOP honcho admitted he had no evidence that Maj. Turner, nor any of the 4,000 others he challenged, should be denied the right to have their ballots counted.
Note: The Palast Fund contacted a sample of 800 of these challenged voters and found that, overwhelmingly, they were Americans of color.
In 2020, this KKK plan, adopted by the Trump organization, proved its value. In that election, Trump almost won Georgia, falling short by just 11,779 votes—only because local elections officials rejected most of the challenges. But for 2024, the Georgia’s Republican-controlled legislature changed the law to make it very difficult for officials to deny the challenges.
That emboldened the Trump-supported organization True the Vote to roll out the challenge to every swing state. In 2024, True the Vote signed up over 40,000 volunteer vigilantes. The organization crowed proudly that, by August of 2024, they’d already challenged a mind-blowing 317,886 voters in dozens of states. By Election Day this November, True the Vote projected it would have challenged over two million voters. In addition, Trump’s lawyer, Cleta Mitchell, founded Eagle AI to challenge hundreds of thousands more including in swing state Pennsylvania.
How many voters ultimately lost their ballots? Almost all voting officials we’ve contacted have refused to answer.
Placebo Ballots
Those voters who’d been challenged but mailed in their ballot would be unlikely to know their vote had been lost. Others who showed up in person at a poll would be told they could not vote on a regular ballot. These voters were sent away or forced to vote on a “provisional” ballot.
If you’ve been challenged or find you’ve been purged off the registration rolls, you’ll be offered one of these provisional ballots, paper ballots you place in a special envelope. Typically, you’ll be promised your registration will be checked and then your ballot will be counted. Bullshit. If you’re challenged, unless you personally contact or go into your county clerk’s office with ID and proof of address, your ballot goes into the electoral dumpster.
A better name for a “provisional” ballot would be “placebo” ballot. You think you’ve voted, but chances are, you did not, that is, your ballot wasn’t counted.
Here’s an ugly number: According to the US Elections Assistance Commission (EAC), in 2016, when 2.5 million provisional ballots were cast, a breathtaking 42.3% were never counted.
Think about that. Over a million Americans lost their vote — though, notably, not one was charged with attempting to vote illegally. And that was in 2016, before the vigilante challenges and before millions more had been purged from the rolls leading up to the 2024 election.
And here’s the statistic that matters most. Black, Hispanic or Asian-America voters are 300% more likely than white voters to be shunted to a “placebo” provisional ballot.
The Great Purge and the Poison Postcard
The polite term in government agencies is, “List Maintenance.” It’s best known as The Purge—when voters’ registrations are wiped off the rolls. The EAC keeps track of The Purge. It’s a big business. For example, before the 2022 election, when the data was last available, swing state North Carolina wiped 392,851 voters off the rolls.
The majority of removals were based on questionable, indeed, shockingly faulty information that a voter had moved their residence. I’m not talking about the 4.9 million voters purged because they’re dead, or eight million others whose residential move could be verified, nor those serving time in prison nor those ruled too crazy to vote.
I’m talking about a trick that has been perfected by politicians of both parties to eliminate voters of the wrong persuasion: the Poison Postcard. Here’s how it works: Targeted voters are mailed postcards by state elections officials. (Let’s remember, state voting chiefs, “Secretaries of State,” are almost to a one partisan hacks.) Voters who don’t sign and return the cards, which look like junk mail, will be purged.
The Poison Postcard response rate is close to nothing. In Arizona, according to the EAC, just one in ten postcards are returned. And in Georgia, the vote-saving response is barely above 1%. And that’s the way our partisan voting officials like it.
Were the millions of Americans purged before the 2024 election all fraudsters who should lose their right to vote? Direct marketing expert Mark Swedlund told us, “This only means that most people, especially young people, the poor and voters of color, simply ignore junk mail.”
With the help of Swedlund and the same experts used by Amazon—and believe me, Amazon knows exactly where you live–we took a deep dive into two states’ purge operations for the ACLU.
The state of Georgia had purged hundreds of thousands from the voter rolls on grounds they’d moved from their voting addresses. Our experts, going name by name through Georgia’s purge list, working from special data provided us by the US Postal Service, identified 198,351 Georgians who had been purged for moving had, in fact, not moved an inch from their legal voting address. The state’s only evidence these 198,351 voters had moved? They failed to return the Poison Postcard.
In 2020, I testified in federal court for the NAACP and RainbowPUSH, presenting our expert findings to get those voters, overweighted with minorities and young Georgians, back on the rolls. Unfortunately, the Trump’d-up court system now gives huge deference to a state’s voting operations, a trend which first took off in 2013 when the US Supreme Court defenestrated the Voting Rights Act.
The results have been devastating. According to the EAC data, before the 2024 election,4,776,706 registrants were removed nationwide simply because they failed to return the postcard.
Also in 2020, the Palast Investigative Fund produced a technical report for Black Voters Matter Fund on a proposed purge of 153,779 voters in Wisconsin, a plan pushed by Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, a group financed by right-wing billionaires. For Black Voters Matter, we brought back our team of location experts who proved, name by name, that the proposed purge was wildly riddled with errors.
Notably, we found that the purged was aimed almost exclusively at African-Americans in Milwaukee and at students in Madison. The non-partisan Elections Board agreed with us, allowing those voters to cast ballots, with the result that Biden squeaked by Trump in Wisconsin by 20,682 votes. (Note: It was not our intention to elect Biden, but to allow the voters, not some Purge’n General, to pick our President.)
Unfortunately, before the 2024 election, the Poison Postcard Purge accelerated. This time, a new Elections Board in Wisconsin (10 electoral votes) decided to use the same discredited purge list to knock off 166,433 voters which, this time, we could not stop. Kamala Harris lost that state by just 29,397 votes. In Pennsylvania (19 electoral votes), the Poison Postcards wiped out 360,132 voters, three times Trump’s victory margin.
And before the vote this year, Georgia ramped up the purge, targeting an astonishing 875,000 voters, earning it the #1 ranking for “election integrity” by the ultra-right-wing Heritage Foundation.
I saw the purge in action in Savannah, Georgia, this October, where 900 Savannah voters, most of them Black, were challenged by one single “vigilante,” according to voting expert Carry Smith. Smith, who wrote her doctoral thesis on wrongful purges in Georgia, was herself on the hit list.
And more
We haven’t even touched on other ways that voters of color, college students and urban voters have come under attack. These include the rejection of new registrations and rejection of in-person votes as “spoiled” (i.e. rejected as unreadable), costing, according to the EAC, more than a million votes—rejections which our 25 years of investigations have found are way overweighted against the Democratic demographic.
After the 2012 election, I was able to calculate, with cold certainty, that 2,383,587 new voters had their registrations rejected; 488,136 legitimate absentee ballots were disqualified, and so on. In that election, a total of 5,901,814 citizens were blocked from voting or had their ballots disqualified. These stats were based on the hard data from the EAC which gathers detailed reports from the states.
Today, with new, sophisticated, and well-financed vote suppression operations, the number of voters purged and ballots disqualified are clearly far higher than the suppression count of 2012. Unfortunately, the EAC won’t release data, if it does at all, for at least a year. We’ve put in Open Records requests to the states, but today’s officials are stonewalling and slow-walking our requests for the data.
In no other democracy are the vote totals—or, to be clear, the uncounted ballot totals—a state secret.
America deserves an answer to this question: Excluding a boost from Jim Crow vote suppression games, did Donald Trump win?
From the shockingly huge numbers we’ve discussed here of provisional and mail-in ballots disqualified, the postcard purge operation, the vigilante challenges and so on, we can say, with reasonable certainty, Trump lost—that is, would have lost both the Electoral College and popular vote totals absent suppression.
By how much?
For those who can’t sleep without my best estimate, let me apply the most conservative methodology possible, as I would do in a government investigation.
I’ve updated the 2012 suppression numbers with the newest available data. Not surprisingly, the suppression number has soared, in part because the number of voters has increased by 41.3 million since 2012. But principally, the votes “lost” also zoomed upward because of the massive increase in mail-in balloting by Democrats since 2012, and crucially, the effect of new Jim Crow voting restrictions. Given a minimum two-to-one racial and partisan disparity in voters purged and ballots disqualified, the 2024 “suppression factor” is no less than 4.596% of the total vote.
Those familiar with data mining will note that there is some double-counting in the 9 million voters and their ballots disqualified that I cited at the top of the article. In addition, we must recognize that many voters caught up in the purges and challenges would have cast their ballot for Trump. Therefore, I’ve conservatively cut in half the low end of the range of the calculation of votes suppressed to 2.3% to isolate the effect on Trump’s official victory margin.
In other words, vote suppression cost Kamala Harris no fewer than 3,565,000 votes. Harris would have topped Trump’s official total by 1.2 million. Most important, this 2.3% suppression factor undoubtedly cost Harris the states of Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Georgia. If not for the wholesale attack on votes and voters, Harris would have won the election with 286 Electoral votes.
Tech note from a numbers guy—and Martin Luther King
Until the Elections Assistance Commission gets updated figures from the states next year (and, under Trump, I doubt we will ever get those numbers), 3,565,000 votes lost to Harris is the estimate I would present in my role as a forensic expert in a courtroom as the lowest conceivable suppression factor.
I rarely make a big deal about my own credentials but, since the election, the Web has been flooded by amateur, arithmetic-defying speculation about computer hacking and otherunsupported twaddle. Best to stick to hard, verifiable data. And that’s what I do.
For two decades, I was a forensic economist for government agencies including the US Justice Department; taught statistics at Indiana University; provided expert calculations of vote suppression for the ACLU, NAACP, and RainbowPUSH, and won the Global Editors Award for my data journalism on vote suppression measurements for reports done for Al Jazeera, BBC, Rolling Stone and The Guardian. The numbers you get here are exactly what I’d present to a Federal court. In other words, kids, don’t do this at home…calculating the “un-count” requires expertise.
I make this point for another reason: The theory that “Elon Musk messed with the voting machines” is, unconsciously, unintentionally racist. With few exceptions, these silly speculations come from those who simply ignore not just the millions of votes officially reported as suppressed, their theories also ignore the horrifically painful experience of Black people turned away from the polls.
Here is a photo of Jessica Lawrence in tears, moments after her 92-year-old grandmother was tossed out of an Atlanta polling station, into a storm, because she’d been wrongfully purged. Any speculation about the nefarious cause of Trump’s win must not leave out Jessica’s grandma nor the millions of other citizens of color who were wrongly barred from their ballot.
We saw that in 2020 when, despite extreme, even felonious actions by Trump supporters to block, challenge and disqualify voters and ballots, the theft by suppression was defeated.
That was the work of voting rights groups challenging these attacks. The work was done in the courts and, more important, in the precincts, re-registering the purged, challenging the challenges, “curing” disqualified ballots.
The road is long but victory is certain. After the 2016 election, the Palast team uncovered a cruel, racist purge program called, “Interstate Crosscheck” that cost nearly a million voters, overwhelmingly minorities, their rights. This motivated the Rev. Jesse Jackson to launch a campaign that successfully shut down Crosscheck. Unquestionably, Joe Biden could not have won in 2020 without the Reverend saving literally hundreds of thousands of votes. The point is, they can’t suppress all the votes all the time.
In other words, Democracy can win, despite the 2.3% suppression headwind.
And that’s our job as Americans: to end the purges, the vigilante challenges, the ballot rejections and the attitude that this is all somehow OK.
Martin Luther King gave us our marching orders in 1965, in words just as important today.
“Let us march on ballot boxes, march on ballot boxes until race-baiters disappear from the political arena. I want to say to the people of America and the nations of the world, that we are not about to turn around. We are on the move now.”
Forensic economist and data journalist Palast covered vote suppression for The Guardian, BBC Television and Rolling Stone. He is the author of New York Times bestsellers on the topic including The Best Democracy Money Can Buy.
“Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.”
–John Adams, 1814
Barack Obama knew what was coming.
During his first State of the Union Address in 2010, President Obama alerted the joint session of Congress of a Supreme Court decision a few days earlier that would in effect destroy democracy in our country.
That ruling, on January 21, Citizens United vs. the FCC,effectively gave America’s wealthiest citizens the right to own American elections.
The Supreme Court had just “reversed a century of law,” Obaba said, “that I believe will open the floodgates for special interests — including foreign corporations — to spend without limit in our elections.”
It was then that conservative Justice Samuel Alito noticeably shook his head and muttered what appeared to be “not true.”
But President Obama was correct. What limited influence the average voter had disappeared in favor of the needs and desires of billionaires and big corporations.
Most Americans would be surprised to learn there is no limit on how much any one person can spend to support a presidential candidate. The Supreme Court decided that anyone can, in effect, spend unlimited amounts of money to help their favorite candidates. It’s actually worse, as we will see shortly.
There is a nominal spending limit for giving to presidential candidates–the Federal Election Commission in 2024 set the individual limit at $3,300 per person. Most Americans would consider that amount to be fair and reasonable. The Supreme Court thought otherwise.
The Court, in its ultra-conservative wisdom, ruled that there shouldn’t be any spending limit at all, as long as the money goes through Political Action Committees (PACs) and is not directly coordinated with candidates.
America’s powerful right-wing plutocracy was now able to use their enormous monetary advantage to blast out enough misinformation, confusion, and conspiracy theories to help enable a mentally unstable, sex-abusing felon and career grifter to become president of the United States—twice.
The Democratic Party tried to take advantage of these new rules, of course, but couldn’t compete with the Republicans. Democrats are a fair-minded, polite political party, hesitant to make major changes and upset political norms. The GOP has no such qualms. They are less interested in policies and compromise, and more concerned with ideology and greed. The key to attaining their goals was a Super PAC.
A variation of a political action committee, a Super PAC may raise and spend unlimited amounts of money from corporations, unions, individuals, and associations to influence the outcome of elections.
Most disturbing of all, supporters can easily avoid disclosure of their identity by reporting a non-disclosing nonprofit or shell company as the donor, what some call money laundering. Illegal foreign donations can also be covered up this way.It is now obvious that unlimited and anonymous money has replaced American democracy in the 21st century. It is why Donald Trump is serving another term as the president.
Voters are inundated with pleas from candidates for $10 and $25 during election season, and feel good helping their office-seeker, while the world’s richest person, Elon Musk, is probably laughing. He was able to give his preferred presidential choice more than $250 million, and he could have donated much more.
All this combined with an archaic Constitutional voting system with an electoral college that allows candidates with lesser popular votes to win the presidency. By any definition, this is not democracy.
The Democrats had the same opportunities as the GOP, but started from a position far behind their rival party. Starting in the 1970s, conservative, wealthy Republicans put in place strategies enabling them to drastically change the American political landscape to favor the right wing.
Tobacco lawyer and soon-to-be Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell was instrumental in planning this pro-business strategy with his 1971 “Powell Memo.” In 1978 Justice Powell, writing the majority opinion in Bellotti, wrote that corporations had the same free speech rights as “people,” i.e. no restrictions on campaign donations.
There began a concerted effort to solidify a pro-business, right-wing ideology in multiple institutions. Large amounts of wealth jump-started conservative think tanks like the Heritage Foundation and American Enterprise Institute. Even though it took years to see profits, wealthy idealogues gladly sponsored conservative media, from television (Fox News) and right wing hate radio talk shows (Rush Limbaugh) to right-wing internet and social media sites. Powerful organizations and lobbies, especially the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) were instrumental in pushing this pro-big business point of view in Congress.
Liberals watched helplessly, lacking wealthy patrons willing to spend money on unprofitable progressive causes. Air America talk radio folded when it couldn’t make money, and left-leaning think tanks and social media didn’t have the resources to compete with these powerful and motivated plutocrats.
Ronald Reagan became president in 1981 and conservatism became more fashionable. Between 1980 and 1986 the U.S. had 13 billionaires, That number surged to 99 by 1990, thanks to favorable laws and tax rates. Today the number of billionaires exceeds 800. The entire GOP and some Democratic lawmakers have been essentially bought off by billionaires and big corporations, and make sure their wealthy donors get exactly what they pay for.
Total spending on federal elections skyrocketed from millions to billions, much of it in “dark (untraceable) money.” State elections helped put more Republicans in office, and the courts turned further to the right.
American democracy in the 21st century? For all practical purposes, it’s gone.
Will democracy ever return? It would be possible only if Americans were smart enough to allow public financing of elections. Private money corrupts elections, so public financing would be the best hope to restart democracy. Money should not affect elections. Public financing would be the last and only hope of ever regaining America’s lost democracy.
JANUARY 20, 2025: A DAY THAT WILL LIVE IN INFAMY!!
A. big news day: Ceasefire in Gaza, football playoff games, etc, but the most important was the inauguration of our 47th president.After a few weeks traveling abroad, I re-join Hal on his Haiitics videocast to talk about what I think will be a four-year nightmare. Hal doesn’t much like Trump, but is less worried than I am. I fear the worst.
It’s hard to say who is the worst attorney general in American history. The candidates are many and comprise a veritable rogue’s gallery of sadists, reactionaries and incompetents. They range from A. Mitchell Palmer, mastermind of the original Red Scare that decimated the left in the wake of the First World War, to Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III and William Pelham Barr, who sacrificed the rule of law in service to Donald Trump.
Merrick Garland may not share the malignancies of his fellow train wrecks, but he deserves to be in the discussion. Decades from now, historians will memorialize Garland not as a dedicated public servant and fair-minded federal judge whose nomination to the Supreme Court was torpedoed by Mitch McConnell and Senate Republicans, but as the head of the Justice Department who brought a butter knife to an existential gunfight with Trump, quickening our collective descent into neo-fascism.
After his appointment to helm the DOJ, Garland had one overarching mission: to swiftly convene a grand jury to investigate Trump for his role in inciting the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the Capitol. This was a task a third-year law student could easily have accomplished. Garland failed, abjectly.
This was a task a third-year law student could easily have accomplished.
Probable cause for an early indictment was abundant and obvious. On Jan. 6, millions of Americans watched Trump stand on the Ellipse at the south end of the White House and urge his supporters to march on the Capitol and “fight like hell.” Millions watched the actual assault that followed, blow by medieval blow. Even the corrupt McConnell, who voted to acquit Trump in his second impeachment trial in February 2021, declared on the Senate floor, “There’s no question, none, that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of the day [Jan. 6].”
Although Smith secured an indictment of Trump in Washington, D.C., for conspiracy, obstruction and election subversion on Aug. 1, 2023, the indictment was gutted by the Supreme Court (Trump v.United States) the following July in a decision that granted Trump sweeping and unprecedented immunity from criminal prosecution.
Written by Chief Justice John Roberts, a lifelong conservative activist with an undeserved reputation as a judicial institutionalist, the ruling is arguably the worst edict handed down by the high court since the Dred Scott case of 1857. “Trump v. United States is distinct as a deliberate attack on the core institutions and principles of the republic, preparing the way for a MAGA authoritarian regime much as Dred Scott tried to do for the slavocracy,” wrote Sean Wilenz in a scathing article for the New York Review of Books.
Smith also indicted Trump in Florida in the documents case, but that prosecution was subsequently scuttled by District Court Judge Aileen Mercedes Cannon, an inexperienced MAGA sycophant whom Trump installed on the federal bench in the runup to the 2020 election.
Garland will forever bear the principal stain of wimping out.
In addition to Garland, the Supreme Court and Cannon, Joe Biden also shares responsibility for letting Trump off the hook. From Day 1, Biden should have used the bully pulpit to attack, isolate and destroy Trump and his MAGA base. Instead, he pursued a politics of accommodation, preaching a return to the false neoliberal normalcy of bipartisanship. Most critically of all, Biden decided to seek a second term, when it was apparent to everyone with two eyes and ears that he was no longer fit, either physically or mentally, for another stint behind the Resolute Desk. With Biden’s approval rating plunging to 40%, Kamala Harris had little to no chance of defeating Trump at the polls.
But standing atop the heap, Garland will forever bear the principal stain of wimping out when courage and — to put it in the vernacular — balls were needed to stop Trump before the forces of reaction had time to regroup and reorganize. They are now in control.
The 5-4 Court that granted personhood to corporations in the 2010 Citizens United vs FEC decision. Images supplied by Gary Kohls
In Case Anybody Hasn’t Noticed, Corporations Rule the World, They Fit Mussolini’s Definition of Fascist Entities and They Aren’t Our Friends (click link below)
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