Georgia GOP has won 2026 already — with a truly evil scheme

It’s all over but the official count. Georgia Republicans can’t win the Senate seat now held by Democrat Jon Ossoff — the demographics will drown them: Georgia is now a “majority minority” state with non-whites predominant. EXCEPT. EXCEPT if the GOP can come up with a way to stop those un-white voters from voting.

And they have. This week, the violently partisan Republican Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger, announced that he is removing tens of thousands of voters who live in addresses that Republicans rarely haunt: office spaces used as housing [and] homes with 10 or more registrants.

That’s ON TOP OF the 480,000 voters the state is about to remove as “inactive voters.”

Hey, it all sounds reasonable. But consider this: in the entire history of Georgia, since the days of its treasonous attack on America, NOT ONE person has been convicted of voting while dead, while non-existent, while an illegal alien. Not one.

In other words, this is a punishment looking for a crime. And it’s severe punishment: losing your voting rights happens when you’re convicted of a felony crime.

But what you’re looking at is what we politely call, “institutional racism,” because, from what we learned from our in-depth study for the ACLU, is that the overwhelming number of Georgians purged are voters of color — the color ‘blue’ for Democratic. African-Americans, Asian-Americans, new young voters … you get it.

The Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, the premier voting rights organization, warned: “This would create new and unnecessary barriers to voting for Georgia’s unhoused and housing-insecure voters — a population estimated to include over 10,000 eligible Georgian voters. Among the segment of the homeless population that is residing in shelter facilities more than 50 percent of the time, 2022 data found 57 percent were Black and 31 percent were adult victims of domestic violence.“

And here’s one of the most evil schemes announced by Raffensperger. (I use “evil” most carefully). He’s announced Georgia will remove 87,027 voters because they’ve filed Change of Address forms with the post office.

If you’ve seen my film, Vigilantes Inc., you know the story of Maj. Gamaliel Turner of Columbus, Georgia, because he filed a change-of-address to get his absentee ballot while assigned by the Pentagon to California. He was one 4,000 who lost their vote to a challenge by the Georgia Republican Party on or near his military base.

Then there was Christine Jordan, MLK’s cousin, who put in a change of address form because, at 92, she wanted her daughter to review her mail.

Then there is the case of Dr. Carry Smith, expert on voter purges, who herself was removed for cockamamy reasons.

But I want you to see the faces of American apartheid’s victims. If these were rare cases, I wouldn’t waste your time. But removing hundreds of thousands of voters can, and has, changed the presidency and control of the Senate.

And let’s not pussyfoot around the purpose of this ethnic cleansing of Georgia’s voter rolls: Gov. Brian Kemp is termed out next year, so the only way he can climb up the greasy pole is to challenge the popular Sen. Ossoff. Kemp can’t, and never has, won fair and square.

Marc Elias’ Democracy Docket raised the alarm this week about the new mass purges in Georgia. Elias cited my study for the ACLU that showed that 63.3 perscent of voters, in 2020, were purged from the rolls even though the Postal Service and Amazon’s experts (they know where you live) verified that 198,351 of them still lived at their legal voting address.

We gave the names of the wrongly purged to Raffensperger — who defied a federal judge in refusing to review our list. Still, Ossoff and Biden won the state: evidence that they can’t steal all the votes all the time.

But they can try. This year, the state has doubled the number of voters facing the elimination of their citizenship rights. Gerald Griggs, President of the Georgia NAACP, is staring at that list of half a million Georgia voters about to get the heave-ho. He says, “This is Jim Crow 2.0. We’ve warned you, America: what they test in Georgia they will take to your state.”

What about those voters living at “commercial addresses.” That would be me: I lived in a building zoned for business which my friends and me turned into apartments. Who could have dreamed that my right to vote depended on my zoning.

By the way, Mr. Raffensperger: if you find illegal voters, arrest them. They’ll be in nursing homes … and, according to the Vera Institute, at least 10,000 are in Georgia’s jails awaiting trial. Mr. Raffensperger, a poor man who can’t make bail, sitting in the can awaiting trial for selling dime bags, should not lose their citizenship. We are not Russia. Yet.

Here’s what you can do:

• Spread this story. Like it, and share it.
• Subscribe to my new Substack.
• Catch my new column at RawStory
• Check if you’ve been purged by CHECKING YOUR REGISTRATION at Vote.org — NOW!

• Greg Palast is the author of investigative reports for outlets including the Guardian, the BBC, and Rolling Stone, and New York Times bestsellers including The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and Billionaires & Ballot Bandits. His latest film, Vigilantes Inc.: America’s New Vote Suppression Hitmen, is narrated by Rosario Dawson and produced by Martin Sheen and George DiCaprio. On Substack, he writes at Greg Palast Investigates