How’d he get away with it? Pull off the caper?
How did Mr. “I-got-a-big-truck” remove way over half a million voters, a nuclear hit on the registration rolls that somehow targeted Black, Hispanic and young voters with a laser-like precision? And how did he do it and stay on this side of prison bars?
And how, with this giant voter eraser, did Kemp snatch the Governorship of Georgia—and re-elect Donald Trump?
His excuse was so benign, so innocent, so simple.
The excuse the Purge’n General used to eliminate the registrations? Kemp kept the info locked up—but a federal judge unlocked them for me. Some Georgia voters had died (64,446 of them), some were imprisoned for felonies (14,021) and there were a few other smatterings of legit removals.
But that left 534,510—over half a million purged—for a reason identified only as “System Cancels.” They were cancelled by the system because they had failed to vote in two elections and hadn’t returned a postcard mailed to their registration address. On the basis of the missed elections and a missed postcard, Kemp concluded that every one of these half million voters had moved away: they had moved out of their county, or out of state or out of the country.
Who can argue with that? Only a fool would say that someone who’s left Georgia for Ohio should stay on Georgia’s voter rolls.
But something was missing.
U-Haul trucks.
I’d traveled to Georgia a number of times during The Big Purge. With half a million voters leaving—and that means hundreds of thousands of families moving in two years—Interstate Highway 85 out of Atlanta should have been filled with U-Haul trucks, mini-vans, rickshaws, anything that could carry the households of this mass exodus.
The press wrung their hands over this terrible mass purge but wrote it was legit.
But no one asked, “Where are the U-Hauls?”
Riddle me this:
The US Census says less than 3% of Southerners move out of their county in any year, or 200,000 of Georgia’s 6.8 million voters.
You don’t have to be a math whiz to see the numbers don’t add up.
I’m not Sherlock Holmes. I didn’t figure out the con in a flash of inductive reasoning after injecting a 7% solution of cocaine. I started with Kemp’s office, with a formal Freedom of Information request. However, in Georgia, information has not yet been emancipated. “Please, sir, could you give me the names of the voters you purged and their former addresses?” just didn’t cut it. Kemp’s office told me to fly.
Now, as an investigative reporter, I have a few (legal) tricks and a team of experienced tricksters. The best, Zach D. Roberts, who, conveniently, has other legal names, had gotten a purge list from Kemp four years earlier. ZD told one of Kemp’s flunkies, a leader of the Young Republicans, that he was gathering info for a Fox radio show to run a glowing story about Kemp’s worthy purge operation. ZD did in fact do some work for Fox, but the lists would go first to a Rolling Stone reporter: me.
You can’t pull that off twice. So, I wheeled out big guns: the New York law firm of Mirer, Mazzocchi and Julien. They filed an unprecedented lawsuit in federal court based on rarely used powers in the National Voter Registration Act.
Kemp’s crew came out with their hands up and files open: turning over the names and addresses of half a million Georgians who had supposedly moved. The Purged.
What could we do with half a million names? Start calling. We wanted to know, had they really left the state? There was Gladys Bonner, in an assisted living home, who had indeed moved—but from one room in her building to another. Under the law, she should never have lost her vote. And there were a whole lot of people like ML King’s cousin, who hadn’t moved at all.
And almost every one we reached was . . . well, not white. Hmmm.
But this was anecdotal—a sample. I didn’t like the smell of Kemp’s purge, but a few cases do not an indictment make.
So my investigations team created a computer program at GregPalast.com which allowed Georgians to see whether they were on Kemp’s purge list. We added a request at the site: contact us. Within days 1,900 did, angry, upset that they lost their right to vote without so much as a posting on their Facebook page. Dawan Mitchell, returned from a tour of duty in Iraq, wrote us, telling us he did move . . . but into the state.
The smell of mendacity rose, but this still was not the scientific gotcha evidence I needed.
How could I find out exactly how many on the list had actually moved—versus how many were simply re-moved by Kemp?
☐ ☐ ☐
Ask yourself, “Who knows exactly where every American lives, with 100% accuracy?” And you know the answer: Amazon. eBay. Amazon never sends John Jackson another John Jackson’s pimple remover. Who else knows where you live, with certainty? American Express. Your friendly credit card company will find you in the far corners of North Korea if you try to skip out on your bill.
So I turned to Mark Swedlund, a legend in the “direct marketing” business—do not call it “junk mail.” Swedlund had helped me out over the years, including setting up an elaborate false front for The Guardian. (We pretended to be fixers for a company called Enron and set out to buy the British government. It was surprisingly cheap. We were invited into Prime Minister Tony Blair’s residence at 10 Downing Street before we splashed the headline in The Guardian about the government’s flea market for favors.)
Swedlund’s clients included Amazon, eBay and American Express and he confirmed that “they know exactly where you were last Thursday, and if you ordered Chinese food and then downloaded a Kevin Costner movie.”
He added, “I think that’s creepy”—but suggested we could use their tracking systems to go through Kemp’s purge list.
For that, he said, you need to retain the services of someone called an “advanced address list hygiene expert.” I’d never heard of “advanced address list hygiene.” But Swedlund hooked me up with the best in the field, John Lenser, the CEO of the advanced address list hygiene company CohereOne, used by the industry big boys.
Lenser and Swedlund put together a hell of a team, including a “de-concatenation” specialist who picked apart the pile of computer mush Kemp’s flunkies had given us.
What the Lenser/Swedlund team found was eye-popping. They went through Kemp’s purge list of half a million voters name by name, and the registration addresses of every person Kemp said had moved their residence. Lenser looked at tax bills, where someone last had pizza delivered, phone bills, your alimony checks . . . accessing two hundred and forty databases that can confirm where you reside with stone-cold accuracy.
Notably, Mr. Kemp hadn’t bothered to ask why thousands of people had supposedly moved out of Georgia but were still paying Georgia income taxes.
I lost the office pool. I expected about 15% inaccuracy in Kemp’s purge. I was wrong, big wrong.
☐ ☐ ☐
Lenser’s first report blew me away: 340,134 Georgians that had been purged for moving were, in fact, still living in the home in which they’d registered.
Lenser told me,
340,000 of those voters remained at their original address. They should have never been removed from the voter registration rolls.
More than a third of a million wrongly purged—in this one state. The list was more than 74% wrong. Three out of four. (The report is so astonishing, I’ve included Lenser’s three-page summary in the Appendix.)
This was not a statistical sample, not an algorithm nor an estimate. This was a name-by-name investigation of those disappeared in plain sight. We were using Amazon’s method and Amazon, unlike the Pope, is infallible. (Actually, 96% accurate, according to Lenser. He told me his figures had a 4% error rate because, between gathering data and reporting it, people do pass on to another county or further: the Lenser team found that the state purged 19,118 folks who “moved,” but had, in fact, died.)
After two decades on this beat, I knew what would come next. The Georgia vote purge game, spread to a dozen key states, would stealthily bleach the voter rolls whiter than white.