Audio Transcript
Ken Jones 0:11
Our in depth guest today Thom Hartmann is a very familiar voice to regular listeners of community and commercial radio and podcasts, and an especially comforting voice to those who seek out progressive opinions and analysis. For his work hosting the internationally syndicated Thom Hartmann show, which has a cumulative audience of 7 million, Talkers magazine named him the 10th most important talk show host in America in 2019 and the number one most important progressive host, you can hear a show weekday mornings on our fellow community radio station X ray here in Portland. In addition to his radio show, Thom has spent many years working with the international Salem relief organization, and along with his wife, Louise, Louise, we hope you get better soon, founded a community for abused children in New Hampshire and a school for learning disabled and ADHD kids. And though I don't know how he finds the time, he's also a New York Times bestselling author with 26 books to his credit in 17 languages on five continents. Thom's newest book is titled, "The Hidden History of the War on Voting, who stole your vote, and how to get it back." And he's here now live in the KBOO studios to tell us more. Thom, welcome.
Thom Hartmann 1:24
Thank you, Ken. Thank you, Michele. It's really great being here with you.
Ken Jones 1:27
Now I wanted to start- there's so much to talk about and we have a little extra time for this in depth, which I'm happy about. But there was some breaking news yesterday, Thom, federal judge in Georgia, Eleanor Ross ruled against Georgia governor Brian Kemp, in a lawsuit brought by a person you know, well, Greg Palast, investigative journalist-
Thom Hartmann 1:45
He's an old friend.
Ken Jones 1:46
And you'll you'll actually be appearing with him in Southern California on Saturday.
Thom Hartmann 1:50
Yeah. And he's on the cover of my book.
Ken Jones 1:53
And mentioned in there in fact, this has meant- that's why I brought this up right away. You mentioned the lawsuits and Kemp will now have to open up all files relating to the mass purge of over half a million voters from the rolls in Georgia and other states. Kemp was the Republican candidate for governor in 2018, running against Stacey Abrams, and in what seemed to be an extreme conflict of interest, he was also the Secretary of State overseeing the election. Can you talk about the significance of this ruling Thom especially in light of your book?
Thom Hartmann 2:23
Yeah campaign was running a scam in Georgia that has become the go-to strategy for Republicans to win elections now in the United States. And- and, you know, basically it's use any e xcuse you can although they've got some very specific techniques to remove particularly people of color from the voting rolls. And- and then they combine this with a virus that was inserted into our law in 2002 in the Help America Vote Act. A new kind of ballot was invented with the Help America Vote Act called a provisional ballot. If you show up to vote in, in Georgia or in any state for that matter, and the person at the voting counter, you know, says, Well, I don't see your name in the book, you're- you're given a provisional ballot that you can't be turned away. So you have to be given a ballot what is typically not told to people and the vast majority of people don't know is that provisional ballots are never counted unless an election is contested in court. And if you're given a provisional ballot, depending on the state, the laws vary from state to state, but typically you have two to five days to present yourself physically at the Secretary of State's office with your birth certificate, your passport, your proof of residence, proof that you were registered and perhaps removed inappropriately. You know, all the kinds of ID that you would need to register to vote Plus, you know, proof of-proof of residence.
Ken Jones 3:50
You would have to know that your provisional ballot wasn't counted though.
Thom Hartmann 3:53
That's- Yeah, you would have to know what provisional ballot even means. And so, if you can knock a half a million people off the voting rolls. And, you know, let's say, you know, a hundred thousand of them show up and they're given provisional ballots. They think they voted. And you know, this- this- this whole strategy really, I mean, it's it goes back a long way the- there was a system called caging, that the Republicans for almost 30 years, were operating under a court order to prevent them doing, sending postcards in the poor neighborhoods that said, if you didn't send this back, you know, we're going to kick you off the list. But the Supreme Court legalized this last year, because John Kasich wanted to kick 200,000 people off the voting rolls in Ohio, because people hadn't returned cards. They went to the Supreme Court and five to four, you know, right wing majority said, Oh, that's cool. But it really in the modern era, as it were, really picked up in 2000. You know, in Florida, we saw this thing called redshift, which is where the exit polls say that one candidate won, but the official results, say another candidate won.
Ken Jones 4:53
And in the book, you mentioned that these polls, especially overseas are extremely accurate.
Thom Hartmann 4:58
Yes.
Ken Jones 4:58
So the redshift is is quite a-
Thom Hartmann 5:00
It's shocking
Ken Jones 5:01
-discrepancy, so yeah, shocking.
Thom Hartmann 5:02
Yeah. In fact I lived in Germany for a year the- the- in Germany when you vote, the elections are called that night but it typically takes two to three days to count the vote because they're all paper ballots. Yeah, you know, we just saw this with Boris Johnson and the UK it took three days to count the vote but they still pretty much called at the night of it was pretty tight, so they didn't say for sure, but the exit polls are almost never more than a half point off typically within 10- You know, point 1% one 10th of 1% off. And what we're seeing now is massive shifts between the exit polls, in fact I'll give you a couple quick example if I may-
Ken Jones 5:36
Thom's picking up the book-
Thom Hartmann 5:37
If I may borrow my own book here.
Michele Coppola 5:39
Which you have marked-
Thom Hartmann 5:41
I'm sorry if I- if I screwed you up here. But this is- this is, you know, from the election of 2016. I mean, just looking at 2016. Okay. And gee, it's not where I thought it was, well, here it is. Hillary Clinton carried Florida according exit polls she won Florida by two and a half points over Trump. According to the exit polls in North Carolina, she won by 5.9 points over Trump. By- according to the exit polls in Pennsylvania, she won by 5.6 percentage points over Trump. In Wisconsin, it was it was 5.1%. So, in each case, people walked out of the voting area and walked outside and told the exit pollster, 'Yeah, I voted for Hillary Clinton.' And when the official results for tabulated it showed that Donald Trump won. Why? Because they had been given provisional ballots, almost certainly. So this is- this is where we see this result. And that's why I said this has become the go-to strategy. This just those four states were given the election, to Hillary Clinton
Ken Jones 6:43
I should mention some of the numbers. In Michigan, Trump won by a little over 10,000 votes, I think was 10,700. In Wisconsin, he won by what? About 22,000 votes? Something like that?
Thom Hartmann 6:54
As I recall. Yeah.
Ken Jones 6:55
Yes. So-so kicking the hundred thousand people off the rolls are not counting 100,000 provisional votes. Really-
Thom Hartmann 7:00
Oh then and-
Ken Jones 7:01
They've shifted the election.
Thom Hartmann 7:02
And in Michigan, they kicked it was just a little short of 200,000 off the voting rolls.
Michele Coppola 7:06
So that's why we have all this energy going into purging voter rolls right now right before the election. Correct?
Thom Hartmann 7:11
That's exactly right. Yeah. And- and where we- where we saw this start was in the 2000 election down in Florida. The exit polls clearly showed that Al Gore won by 10s of thousands of votes. And yet George Bush won by 526 votes, according to the official tally on the first pallet. Turns out that that Katherine Harris and Jeb Bush, George's brother, had gotten a list of Texas felons from George and compare that list with Florida voters. Now interesting thing about names, the name pool for African Americans is relatively small, most are- were named after people who had essentially owned them back in the day, and those were almost all Irish, Scotch or English, English-speaking people. So there's a relatively small name pool for most African Americans. Similarly, for Hispanics, they all came out of one language, Spanish. But if you look generally at Caucasians, what you see is Czech and Russian and Slavic languages and Scandinavian languages. And I mean just this huge spectrum. So if you're taking a felon list in Texas that's well over 50% Hispanic and black, and you're comparing that list loosely, they didn't compare middle initials, or if they were different, that was no problem. And you're comparing those names with names of voters in Florida. What you're going to do is you're going to be- and I'm saying if anybody's name appears on both lists, obviously, it's a person who is, you know, traveling from Texas to Florida to vote and as a felon in- in- in Florida, you can't vote if you're a felon. So we're going to throw them off the voting rolls, which is what Jeb Bush did, somewhere between 30 thousand and 90 thousand African Americans were thrown off the voting rolls.
Michele Coppola 8:49
So since we're talking about historic, you know, scenarios here, your book is a history of the war on voting in the US going all the way back to the writing of the Constitution. This is nothing new. That it's happening here.
Thom Hartmann 9:01
It's just new techniques
Michele Coppola 9:02
Right, exactly. Due to time limitations, we're going to skip ahead just a little bit here. You write that Democrats controlled the house from 1933 to 1996. And that's mainly because, of course their policies resonated with the American people. What started to turn that tide in 1996?
Thom Hartmann 9:18
That's a good question. I think a chunk of it was that Bill Clinton in '92- did, you know, he- his- his campaign speech was called the New Covenant speech and you can Google it and read it. It reads like FDR. It's not how he governed. He took the trade deal that Ron Reagan and George Herbert Walker Bush had negotiated- NAFTA pushed that through it became part of his campaign. He consolidated media massively. So Clear Channel went from 100 stations to 1000 stations.
Michele Coppola 9:46
Yes, I lived that.
Thom Hartmann 9:48
Exactly. Yeah. And put Rush Limbaugh on half of 'em. He, he destroyed the Great Society, Lyndon Johnson's welfare programs. And I think by that point in time, people were very, very disillusioned. But there was, there was also a couple of Supreme Court decisions. This is my previous book, The Hidden History of the World er 'the Hidden History of the Supreme Court in the betrayal of America,' where, in 1976 and 1978, the Supreme Court in the Buckley and First National Bank vs. Belotti, decisions ruled that for in the first case, billionaires, in the second case, corporations to give enough money to a politician that they basically owned that politician was no longer considered corruption or bribery. It was now considered free speech and protected by the First Amendment. The Republican Party jumped on this in '78 and said, Okay, cool. We're open for business, billionaires, corporations come buy us. The Democratic Party at that point in time was still largely funded by the- by the organized labor. And about a third of Americans were members of unions in 1981, when Reagan came into office, by 96, you had union membership way, way down, it was down around 11 or 12%. Right now it's a 6% private, you know, workforce
Michele Coppola 11:01
Big-big active union busting? Right? That's yeah.
Thom Hartmann 11:03
Oh, yeah. There's this is how Reagan basically kicked off his presidency going after PATCO. And what the Republicans understood was, you know, they weren't- I mean, they're certainly they don't like unions, but they weren't interested in destroying unions just out of philosophy. They were trying to kill the funding for the Democratic Party. And they were successful. And which is why in '92, Bill Clinton had to sit down with Al Fromm and develop this thing called the DLC, the Democratic Leadership Council, and say, okay, we can't take, you know, there's not enough money in the unions to fund a campaign anymore. So we're going to pick clean industries. And if, you know, if you're old enough to remember in the '90s, that Clinton was particularly in the '96 election was pitching this idea of blue collar jobs are the jobs of the past the new collar- the new jobs, the white collar jobs, you don't need a union for those jobs. And it was because the Democratic Party has started taking massive amounts of money from tech and from banking and from insurance and from pharma, from the so-called clean industries. And I think again, that disillusioned people, they saw the Democratic Party no longer being the party of Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson and the Great Society and the New Deal, and instead turning basically into a- kind of a Richard Nixon version of the Republican Party, Republican Party-Lite by today's standards.
Ken Jones 12:16
Now you also go into the Koch brothers, they funded an effort called ALEC, we actually did an investigation here at KBOO on that, and that is the American Legislative Exchange Council. What was their role in voter suppression?
Thom Hartmann 12:32
They authored- they provide- In ALEC meetings twice a year, you get state legislators from all over the country who get together with lobbyists and the meetings are typically one-on-one one lobbyist for every state legislator. They're not stuck together all the time. But and- and the lobbyists present what's called model legislation that the state legislators very often take right back to the statehouse in their particular states and submit unaltered as, as bills. This became- they became most famous for this around this- the Stand Your Ground laws after Trayvon Martin was murdered. But- but the- but the thing that has affected this is they came up with model legislation for voter ID laws. And for you know, basically systems for purging voting.
Michele Coppola 13:22
So you write early in the book about the fact that, hey, the people who elected Donald Trump are basically the people who didn't vote, right? Or didn't get to vote or vote didn't count. You know, only 26% of the electorate elected Donald Trump, even though you know, he lost by over 3 million popular votes. A part of that victory was the result of the purging voters that we talked about just a little while ago. Mostly people of color, younger, poor voters. Is that coordinated centrally? Or is it something that is done state by state?
Thom Hartmann 13:49
Both. It started out state by state after Bush's success in 2000. In 2002, they brought along the provisional ballot scam into the Help America Vote Act and by 2004, it had become a thing, a big thing in Republican states. In Ohio, for example, the 2004 exit polls show John Kerry walking away with it yet John Kerry lost Ohio, John Edwards, Jonathan Edwards was, you know, on my show, when that happened, he was spitting mad he- at Kerry for not wanting to fight this thing, you know. So, I mean, he ended up having his own problems, but that's a whole nother story. But this, you know, so so that was when we really started seeing redshift move out of just Florida out of an obscure state here and there. And now we're seeing redshift in many of the Republican controlled states that might even be close to being swing states.
Ken Jones 14:40
Tom, is that due to Republican secretaries of state?
Thom Hartmann 14:42
Yes, purging voting lists.
Ken Jones 14:44
Yes. And including Brian Kemp in Georgia.
Thom Hartmann 14:47
Oh, he was a master of it. You know, he was a master.
Ken Jones 14:50
Now besides voters supression, you list voter suppression was one of the three elements you list in the book as a way of keeping mostly Republicans but very rich Americans, American oligarchs, in fact, in power, can you talk about the role of the others on the list? One of them is explicit and over- overt racism, white supremacy in other words, and the other is massive disinformation campaigns, which we saw quite a bit of in 2016. Yeah. And might see quite a bit of in 2020
Michele Coppola 15:17
Not might, we already are Yeah, yeah. I actually have seen several news reports that it's already begun.
Thom Hartmann 15:22
Oh, yeah. It began months ago. And, you know, I mean, the the Trump campaign is, I think 1400 different Facebook ads that all kind of look the same if you were to look at them, but you know, one's targeted for men who own motorcycles, and one is targeted for you know, women who have two children under the age of 12. Whatever, you know, I'd say there,
Michele Coppola 15:40
They get granular
Thom Hartmann 15:41
Yeah, oh, yeah. You know, Mark Zuckerberg is really helping these guys out. And they're, and they're filled with lies. This- so we've got this massive disinformation campaign coming out of the Republican Party in the Trump campaign. Then you've got what appear to be bots on the backside, you know, clearly in the in the campaign in 2016, coming out of Russia. And now,
Ken Jones 16:01
Saudi Arabia?
Thom Hartmann 16:02
Yeah. Well, Seth Abramson wrote a book called 'Proof of Conspiracy.' And he says that the four countries that funded bots and basically helped Trump steal the election through disinformation campaigns, were the Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Russia and Israel, so not- although the Israel part was not the country it was people within the country, but that those were the four major foci according to him. I haven't independently done that research, but his book is pretty impressive. So yeah, there's there's this massive disinformation campaign going on right now. I'm on the White House email list, and the Trump campaign list and it's shocking the stuff I get every day. It's like, you know, the world is upside down. Things are inside out.
Michele Coppola 16:41
Black is white. White is black. Yeah, I mean, it's really crazy. Yeah, I'm one of those people who kind of believes that the upcoming election is going to be the one that determines whether we're able to save our democracy.
Thom Hartmann 16:51
I think you're right
Michele Coppola 16:52
You know, I I really feel strongly about that. And you have a subtitle on your book, 'who stole your vote and how to get it back.' I'm always most concerned with what people can do to fight back, and to make sure their vote counts and maybe two, in my particular case, I come from a family who was a bunch of Trump supporters and- and how do you talk to folks and- and make them see the disinformation you know, especially when they're not- they're not reading regularly and not investigating, you know, what, what can we do?
Thom Hartmann 17:19
With regard to disinformation, I think, you know, the- probably the best thing you can do is introduce them to progressive media, you know, whether it's websites or you know, shows like yours, stations like KBOO, things like that. With regard to getting your vote back, I think the main thing, I am shocked by the number of people, Democrats, participating Democrats, elected democrats that I've talked to in the last couple of years particularly when I started researching for this book, who have no idea about provisional ballots, who didn't know that these are just placebo ballots, who didn't know that the- that these voting purges weren't just cleaning up the rolls from people who died or moved out of state but actually were part of a systematic, multi-decade program, that the Republican Party has in place and has- and is going to be continuing. It's- it's at the core of what they're doing. So we need to educate people, we need to wake them up. And- and you know, it's not a problem in Oregon, frankly, it's not a problem and-
Michele Coppola 18:12
Preaching to the choir.
Thom Hartmann 18:13
Virtually all of the Democratically controlled states, not a problem. You don't see redshift in these states. But in the states where you've got a Republican secretary of state or Republican governor and both houses controlled by Republicans, or even one house controlled by Republicans, if you've got a state that is on the verge of being purple, I mean, you know, Florida, for example, and went to Trump by one point be- the year before that I went to Obama by one point, these are these- and Texas is becoming like this, Arizona and-
Michele Coppola 18:39
Colorado
Thom Hartmann 18:40
Colorado, absolutely. In these states. We need to have people so sensitized to these issues that if somebody hands them a provisional ballot, they pull out a bullhorn and start absolutely raising hell and telling everybody they know- we've got to get the word out about this.
Ken Jones 18:57
Now Oregon has several- you recommend in the book actually, Thom, several solutions to the current problem-
Thom Hartmann 19:02
Mail-in voting.
Ken Jones 19:04
We have automatic voter registration, which you mentioned. Yeah. The mail-in voting and paper ballots. Yes. And there were several others on your list too. We had Secretary of State candidate here, Mark Hass, and he made a point about ranked choice voting. What do you see the benefits there?
Thom Hartmann 19:21
Ranked choice voting is generally opposed by the Republican and Democratic Parties institutionally because it helps broaden the range of candidates basically. For example, in the 2000 election, I lived in Vermont, so I felt safe to vote for Ralph Nader in the- in the- in the election You know, I've known Ralph for a lot of years
Ken Jones 19:39
I voted for him too and my wife won't let me forget it.
Thom Hartmann 19:41
That's right. And the same here, actually, as Louise- Louise voted for Al Gore, but we were in Vermont. So so if we had ranked choice voting in Vermont, in that election, I could have said, okay, Ralph Nader is my first choice, but Al Gore is my second choice. So if Ralph Nader had not remained viable in the election, and like with it, we all want are familiar with these terms now from the Iowa primary, you know, if you're not, if you don't have 15%, you're not viable, right? If he was no longer viable, then my first choice would have been scratched off, and my vote would have been registered for Al Gore. That's basically how ranked choice voting or instant runoff voting works. And what it does is it allows people to participate as third and fourth party candidates or independent candidates in elections or to have multiple parties so that we can have like a parliamentary system where you have, you know, a half a dozen or more parties like you have in France or Germany or Israel. And, and, and, and it functions. Right now, if you've got a third party, you know, Jill Stein is still getting attacked for making Donald Trump president, Ralph Nader still getting attacked for making George Bush president. I don't buy either of those. But there's a certain amount of reality to it in particularly in swing states, if you're voting for third candidate, third party candidate, you're typically voting for the Republican. And so, you know, ranked choice voting is a great idea and I'd love to see it take place here. It's in 300 communities around the United States, San Francisco's the largest, and it works really, really well.
Ken Jones 21:01
They have that in New Hampshire, Vermont, ranked choice?
Thom Hartmann 21:04
No, but they're starting it in Maine.
Ken Jones 21:06
And you also mentioned in the book that it also helps neutralize, which I think one of the biggest problems we have is the Citizens United decision where there's all these- this money coming in, dark money. And you said in the book, you said it neutralizes money because it's hard to run an attack ad when you have numerous opponents,
Thom Hartmann 21:25
It diffuses the field
Ken Jones 21:27
Diffuses, yeah.
Thom Hartmann 21:27
Somewhat, yeah.
Michele Coppola 21:29
And you're also very supportive of abolishing the electoral college as well. Yeah, it's kind of funny because as I understood it from civics class, remember civics class, you- does anybody take civics anymore? In civics class, you know, the electoral college was supposed to protect us from somebody like Donald Trump, right? But that's not how it's turned out.
Thom Hartmann 21:49
When you go back and you read the second and third week of July in 1787 in Philadelphia, the debates in the Constitutional Convention and there were basically two reasons for the Electoral College. The first was to prevent a scoundrel. And it was kind of a variation on the second, which was that not not everybody could get to Washington DC. And we were at that point in time, not if not the largest, one of the largest geographically, democracies, countries, Western countries in the world. I mean, you know, you could fit a lot of European countries just in Georgia. So, you know, the problem was, if you had, the word that was used by I think it was George Mason in the debate was a drunkard who was, you know, a candidate for president, the electors I mean, you- if you lived in Georgia, you would elect a local person they couldn't- the Constitution says the person cannot have ever held elective office. So no dog in the game, right or fight, whatever the tor- terrible anti animal cliche is but you get my point.
Ken Jones 22:46
No, dog in the fight.
Thom Hartmann 22:47
Right. Yeah. But- but, so that person would then go to Washington, DC and meet the candidates, and would bring with them the fact that their people back in Georgia said, Yeah, please vote for, you know, John Adams or Thomas Jefferson, but, but if he met them both and thought, you know, this guy's a drunkard, and the other one isn't. He could change his vote, that's built into it. It's kind of a door that swings both ways. It's- it's a safety valve, you know, and- and, you know, but that was a time when it took three days for the news to travel from one end of the country to the other. And when it was virtually impossible to meet the candidates. That has- and you could argue that the electoral college served us well during the first half century of this country. But it has had the opposite effect since then. I mean, you know, George W. Bush lost the popular vote by a half million votes, and should not have become president as a result of that and obviously, Donald Trump 3 million votes. There is a program it's called national popular vote, the website is nationalpopularvote.com where when enough states to equal 200 and I think it's 90 electoral votes that you have to have to become president or maybe 270 forgove my math challenge here. Then all these states that have signed this agree that all their electoral votes will go to whoever got the majority of the votes and they're at 170 right now, so they need to pick up some new states.
Ken Jones 24:04
Yeah, actually Virginia is on the verge.
Thom Hartmann 24:05
Yes-
Ken Jones 24:06
It's very close-
Thom Hartmann 24:07
Their parliament or their legislature just voted on it.
Ken Jones 24:09
Well, Tom, the book is just incredibly relevant. And like Michele said, you do go back to 1789 to the Constitution. Well, we're running out of time, so we can't even get to the way the Senate was originated.
Thom Hartmann 24:22
Oh, yeah.
Ken Jones 24:22
I had a friend today saying why should a few people in Kentucky, deciding what's happening in the whole country. You know, it just doesn't seem fair. But thanks so much for coming into KBOO.
Thom Hartmann 24:32
My- my pleasure, Ken and Michele, thank you so much for having me.
Michele Coppola 24:34
Thank you.
Ken Jones 24:35
We've been talking with Thom Hartmann, author of the new book, The Hidden History of the War on Voting, who stole your vote, and how to get it back. You can find out more about Thom his new book and all his work at ThomHartmann.com and you can meet Thom in person, at Powell's in downtown Portland on Friday, February 28th at 7:30p.m. This is Michele Coppola and Ken Jones for KBOO's News in Depth.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai