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How Trump Stole 2020: The Hunt for America's Vanished Voters

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El robo de votos es el asunto clave para la elección del 2020 y Palast es el experto que puede explicar el porqué.
Vote theft is the key issue to the 2020 Election and Palast is the expert to explain why.

¿Trump ya se habrá robado el 2020? El robo de votos se consideraba un asunto marginal del cual nadie quería hablar, pero los índices han subido y los hechos han salido a la luz--en gran parte gracias al autor--y ahora se reconoce como uno de los temas decisivos de nuestras elecciones presidenciales. El alcance es abrumador. En la elección de la mitad del mandato del 2018 en Georgia--el campo de pruebas--los funcionarios Republicanos calladamente eliminaron a medio millón de votantes registrados del padrón electoral--incluyendo a Christine Jordan, la prima de 92 años de Martin Luther King. Cómo Trump se robó el 2020 cuenta la historia de los planes racista para robarse la elección del 2020, los operativos políticos detrás del engaño--y los billonarios de ultraderecha que lo financian todo, escrito por el periodista investigativo que cubrió esta historia desde el principio.

Has Trump already stolen the 2020 election? Vote theft was once considered to be a marginal issue that no one wanted to talk about, but as the stakes have risen and the facts have become known--in large part thanks to this author--it is now recognized as one of the central issues deciding our presidential elections. The scope is staggering. In the Georgia 2018 midterm election alone--the testing ground--Republican voting officials quietly removed half a million voters from the voter rolls--including Martin Luther King's ninety-two-year-old cousin Christine Jordan. How Trump Stole 2020 is the story of the racially poisonous schemes to steal the 2020 election, the political operatives behind the trickery---and the hard right billionaires funding it all, written by the investigative reporter who has been covering this story from the outset.

352 pages, Paperback

Published July 14, 2020

56 people are currently reading
117 people want to read

About the author

Greg Palast

40 books141 followers
Greg Palast is the author of the New York Times bestsellers Billionaires and Ballot Bandits, Armed Madhouse and The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and the highly acclaimed Vultures' Picnic, named Book of the Year on BBC Newsnight Review.

Palast turned his skills to journalism after two decades as a top investigator of corporate fraud. Palast directed the U.S. government’s largest racketeering case in history – winning a $4.3 billion jury award. He also conducted the investigation of fraud charges in the Exxon Valdez grounding.

Following the Deepwater Horizon explosion, Palast set off on a five-continent undercover investigation of BP and the oil industry for British television’s top current affairs program, Dispatches.

Palast is best known in his native USA as the journalist who, for the Observer (UK), broke the story of how Jeb Bush purged thousands of Black Florida citizens from voter rolls before the 2000 election, thereby handing the White House to his brother George. His reports on the theft of the 2000 and 2004 US elections, the spike of the FBI investigations of the bin Ladens before September 11, the secret State Department documents planning the seizure of Iraq's oil fields have won him a record six Project Censored awards for reporting the news American media doesn't want you to hear. "The top investigative journalist in the United States is persona non grata in his own country's media." [Asia Times.] He returned to America to report for Harper's Magazine.

Palast's Sam Spade style television and print exposés about financial vultures, election manipulations, the War on Terror and globalization, are seen on BBC's Newsnight and Amy Goodman's Democracy Now!

Palast, who has led investigations for governments on three continents, has an academic side: the author of Democracy And Regulation How the Public can Govern Essential Services, a seminal treatise on energy corporations and government control was commissioned by the United Nations based on his lectures at Cambridge University and the University of São Paulo.

Beginning in the 1970s, having earned his degree in finance at the University of Chicago studying under Milton Friedman and free-trade luminaries, Palast went on to challenge their vision of a New Global Order, working for the United Steelworkers of America, the Enron workers' coalition in Latin America and consumer and environmental groups worldwide.

In 1998 Palast went undercover for Britain's Observer, worked his way inside the prime minister's inner circle and busted open Tony Blair's biggest scandal, "Lobbygate," chosen by Palast's press colleagues in the UK as "Story of the Year." As the Chicago Tribune said, Palast became a "fanatic about documents--especially those marked "secret and confidential" from the locked file cabinets of the FBI, the World Bank, the US State Department and other closed-door operations of government and industry--which regularly find their way into his hands. The inside information he obtained on Rev. Pat Robertson won him a nomination as Britain's top business journalist.

Palast is Patron of the Trinity College Philosophical Society, an honor previously held by Jonathan Swift and Oscar Wilde. His writings have won him the Financial Times David Thomas Prize--and inspired the Eminem video, Mosh. "An American hero," said Martin Luther King III. In the BBC documentary, Bush Family Fortunes, Palast exposed George Bush Jr.'s dodging the Vietnam War draft. Greg Palast, says Noam Chomsky, "Upsets all the right people."

Palast won the George Orwell Courage in Journalism Award for his BBC documentary, Bush Family Fortunes.

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Displaying 1 - 20 of 20 reviews
Profile Image for Kelly.
45 reviews1 follower
July 21, 2020
RED ALERT: This is a MUST READ for anyone in the US who values Democracy. Voter suppression is real and must be overcome. Read this book!!
Profile Image for Jerome Berglund.
556 reviews22 followers
August 13, 2020
Palast should teach more writers how to do this, then the system would really be in trouble! :3

If you read one book before November's contentious, horrifying election, I recommend you check out this seminal, groundbreaking one on democracy and voting by Rolling Stone and Guardian reporter Greg Palast!

In his inimitable, rousing, feisty fashion Palast within chronicles past and present weaknesses and vulnerabilities of voting in America, and provides crucial instruction on how you can assure yours gets actually counts and is not deterred or thrown out. (Real possibilities you might be unaware of!)

The short, highly readable, artfully illustrated work also contains an informative treasure trove of excellent research and information regarding deceptive practices and unnerving implications, from willful purging of blacks, seniors and college students from voter rolls to shocking indications regarding electronic voting machines' very plausible past and present compromise.

Palast is a positively delightful writer to read, the quintessential gumshoe doing an excellent job of reclaiming a conspicuous void of honesty and integrity discernible in today’s modern media landscape by the characteristic dearth of investigation and truth telling in print and televised media.

He steps up here and many places elsewhere to take an impressive stab at filling big shoes left behind by the likes of Woodward and Bernstein and Hunter S Thompson, as so many other reporters bury heads in the sand or full on collaborate with perpetrators of these heinous crimes and promote their continued successes.

Somewhere between Bob Hoskins in Who Framed Roger Rabbit and Humphrey Bogart in Maltese Falcon, as a narrator and colorful iconic character the author never disappoints or bores.

There are also a slew of delightful cameo appearances throughout by interesting and significant progressive figures, from Jill Stein to Stacey Abrams, and even Willie Nelson and MLK’s elderly cousin appear briefly.

I would never have thunk it possible to take all these concepts and data, complex delving into corruptive institutional mismanagement, and turn it into a riveting, intensely enjoyable and humorous read, but Greg Palast does so triumphantly despite all expectations to the contrary.

It's worth noting this book was also enthusiastically praised and recommended by Chris Hedges, Lee Camp, and Esquire.

It's rare something can be of great sociopolitical import, timely, and also intensely delightful!
Profile Image for Linda.
243 reviews156 followers
December 9, 2020
I read this just before the 2020 US presidential election, alternately fuming in outrage and kicking myself for not having read it sooner, as I would have just about forced the book on every thinking person of my acquaintance. What has been going with voter suppression in the US is unconscionable, but what makes it infinitely worse is that it has been going on in plain sight, while being utterly ignored as a story by the mainstream media. The money and power invested in preventing entire swathes of the American public from voting — those who are already at the bottom of the power structure to begin with: people of color, poor people, young people — is jaw-dropping, and I confess that reading this had me approaching Election Day with fast diminishing hopes that Trump would end up being removed from office. The system is rigged, just not in the way Trump claims. Because to an overwhelming degree, it's Republicans that are engaged in the manipulation of election rules and voter access in order to prevent Democratic voters from casting their votes. The fact that Biden managed to squeak out a victory, in light of all the obstacles thrown up by the other side, is practically miraculous.

Even though this book is pegged very clearly to the 2020 presidential election, it is very much still worth reading afterward, because the problem has not gone away — in fact, it will continue to get worse unless citizens become aware of what is happening and, more importantly, mobilize against it.
Profile Image for Regan.
2,060 reviews97 followers
August 11, 2020
Nicely detailed, easy to read, explanation of voter suppression in our country. His investigation into what has happened in prior years, especially in the south, is explained. I didn't find the comics in the book all that entertaining.
Profile Image for Mike.
127 reviews2 followers
September 25, 2020
Should be required reading

Greg Palast Is an investigative reporter who is actually willing and able to sift through mounds of data. He has been investigating the stealing of votes, and of course, the stealing of elections through the stealing of votes, for a few decades. It is important to understand that his book and investigations are not partisan attacks. They are actual, real investigations into anti-democratic actions.

The people, whose votes are stolen, are typically black, brown, and/or poor. The goal is to maintain political and economic control in the hands of "those to whom it belongs", that is white men with money. So, in Democrat-controlled states and districts are likely to attempt to limit black and brown voting to avoid the election victories off people like AOC.

However, today the principle perpetrators of voter suppression are GOP operatives and politicians. John Husted, Secretary of State in Ohio, had about 1/2 million eligible black voters removed from the election rolls before the 2016 election. Of course, the typical trick of having fewer voting booths, old voting machines, etc in predominately black areas was used, so that black Americans must wait to vote, while white Americans can vote in minutes. Similar things were fine in other states. The Republicans took the White House in 2016, and they plan to do it again.

This is not a conspiracy theory. This is reality. Why don't we hear about it? Because it would damage the myth of who we are.
13 reviews1 follower
November 1, 2020
This situation is awful (if he's right).

The praise for Hugo Chavez is a bit puzzling.
Profile Image for D.M..
727 reviews13 followers
September 21, 2020
Ever since Greg Palast broke the story of the Florida election finagling and the questionable placement of George W. Bush as President, I've followed his beleaguered investigations with great interest. It's come as no surprise that: a) he has continued to uncover all sorts of backdoor political trickery; b) his investigations get no recognition from major media; and c) most people don't seem to care anyway.
Now, with a the chance of a second Trump Presidency on the horizon, he is trying to get ahead of the game and inform the public of what's been being done with votes and how that could be used to put Trump back in the White House. Even Trump supporters should be aghast at the sort of tricks being used to divest American voters of their rights, especially if it suggests that Trump couldn't win without said tricks.
Since this book largely reprints Palast missives from various sources, there is a fairly concrete one-off structure to the 'chapters,' but not to a degree that makes it unreadable. If there is anything that makes Palast unreadable, it is his (necessary) dependence on numbers to explain things...and perhaps his tendency toward wanting to depict himself as a 1940s-style 'gumshoe' who just happens to write about politics. But he has woven an intriguing and compelling true tale here of big money, big politics and small ethical motivations. He supports his investigations with legitimate sources and always fully vets his resources to us. It is essential reading for anyone who values American democracy.
Unfortunately, the text here is a bit thin, and photos as well as a totally unnecessary 'plot' reiteration by cartoonist Ted Rall feel like a great deal of padding. Between those, some advertising and acknowledgements, the pointless reprinting of one of his resources' report, as well as fudging the font and book sizes, this 335-page book probably could have rolled in at under 200. A minor quibble, but just the sort of thing that makes this project look less important than it actually is.
Profile Image for Sparrow ..
Author 24 books28 followers
Read
May 4, 2022
More terrifying than “Nightmare on Elm Street Part 14,” this is the true story of Republican strategy since 2000 – clever, Machiavellian, absurd, pious, brazen, heartless, Stalinist, digital methods of throwing African-American, Latino, and even sometimes Korean voters off the rolls, so that savage White zombie-imperialists will continue to dictate our laws. (The slightly inaccurate title repels intelligent readers, I fear.)

Opening at random:

“Husted knew that impossibly long lines in Black precincts have been crucial to Bush’s victory in 2004. So, Husted worked hard to make them longer. He cut early voting hours, and only a Court order stopped him from shutting down Souls to the Polls Day altogether.”
Profile Image for Anna Rose McCarthy.
13 reviews
December 12, 2021
While Palast's prediction did not turn out to be true, I do think this gave good insight as to how elections can be stolen. He showed the reader how ballots can be changed or thrown away so that a certain candidate can win. I do think he is a great investigative journalist. With that said, whether you are on the right or the left, I don't think it was right of him to write so badly of Trump in his beginning chapters. I think you can disagree with someone without writing insulting things about what they look like or what they do.
Profile Image for Ken Frankel.
53 reviews1 follower
January 3, 2021
Starting with Georgia, the amount of voters who are a minority that were thrown out spread to Ohio and more! This book addressed an important unaddressed even now subject denigrating democracy but not the scary gerrymandering inequalities that skew the outcome of elections of both parties.
41 reviews3 followers
August 20, 2021
Greg Palast investigated voter Purges extensively and his book describes ongoing problems with Voter Suppression and how more states are pursuing voter purge, affecting people of color and most likely to vote Democratic.
THIS IS A "MUST READ" for all citizens to protect everyone's RIGHT TO VOTE!
Profile Image for Maureen.
332 reviews
August 5, 2020
If this is accurate reporting, it’s very scary.
1 review
August 12, 2020
Truth can be so refreshing/upsetting.

Love his books. With Best Democracy to this timely addition, my thinking has been profoundly changed for the better. Very grateful.


Profile Image for Deborah Vance.
Author 1 book77 followers
September 11, 2020
easy humorous read of very disturbing information. My main criticism is that the book is much smaller than I'd expected.
Profile Image for Kai Wolf.
15 reviews1 follower
February 28, 2021
Interesting insight on how Democrats/Republicans (in America) use Gerrymandering and other tricks for their own interest on targeted voters
17 reviews
October 21, 2021
The writing of Palast is unique. It is based on real information mixed with his personal point of view. Rall's drawings assist the reader to comprehend the most important information of this book
115 reviews1 follower
February 22, 2021
I am giving this book five stars because I want every American to read it.
Displaying 1 - 20 of 20 reviews

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