Greg Palast
Published on Nov 26, 2018
Mike Espy, US Senate candidate, reveals the return of an outlawed vote suppression tactic aimed at elderly voters.
In the vote-stealing biz it’s called “push polling” in which a fake pollster cons a voter out of their vote.
On Sunday, Democrat Mike Espy, who is in a run-off election today for the Senate against Republican incumbent Cindy Hyde-Smith, told Palast Investigations reporter Zach D. Roberts:
“We had a lot to deal with. There were evidently some calls made to Espy supporters, and most of them were older supporters. And for example, I was told that one of them said that he was from a survey company, and then he asked her, ‘Was she going to vote?’ She said, ‘Yes.’ They asked her who she was going to vote for and she said, ‘Mike Espy.’ And she was proud to vote for Mike Espy. And then, allegedly, they told her she did not have to go on Tuesday, because her very acknowledgment over the telephone for me was actually a registered vote for me. And she was smart enough to call our campaign. She was in Hattiesburg, so we sent one of our lawyers to Hattiesburg and we took her affidavit.”
Push-polling was infamously successful in elections in years past. For example, in 1996, supporters of Republican Sam Brownback, posing as pollsters, contacted Kansas voters to ask those expressing support for Democrat Jill Docking if they would change their vote if they knew that “Jill Docking is Jewish.”
Docking, who is indeed Jewish, lost. Funds for the “push polls” were traced back to Koch Industries. (See The Best Democracy Money Can Buy: The Case of the Stolen Election.)
In a related matter, Palast Investigative Fund attorneys, led by Jeanne Mirer of Mirer Mazzocchi & Julien of New York, have notified the State of Mississippi that The Palast Fund will file suit under the National Voter Registration Act unless we receive complete information about mass purges in the state prior to the mid-term elections.
Mississippi is part of the infamously biased Interstate Crosscheck program operated by GOP Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach.
The journalists of the Palast Fund are committed to uncovering racially poisonous vote suppression tactics.
Vote suppression is not a game. It’s a crime.
For more information on our investigations of voting crimes go to: https://gregpalast.com
