Inside Job Read online

  But now, in December 2016, Thomas was on Michigan TV stating nearly 60 percent of Detroit’s ballots could not be recounted. The reason given was because poll workers had mislabeled the boxes the paper ballots were put in while cleaning up on Election night. Or the numbers of ballots listed outside the boxes didn’t match the ballots inside. Most were off by a few, often less than ten. Or seals on storage boxes did not look perfectly tight. Or the boxes were banged up. To the GOP, this apparent sloppiness was turned into accusations of ballot tampering by Democrats. Imaginary threats to the integrity of the process are what Republicans love to cite and hype—especially if it helps them win. They never put voters first and abide by the results. More than half of Detroit’s presidential ballots were deemed ineligible for the recount. Votes that might have tipped the state were taken off the table.

  That conclusion was just what Thomas’ political bosses wanted. Michigan Republicans, led by the state Attorney General Bill Schuette, joined Trump’s campaign to block a recount. They ignored Trump’s rants that the voting was error prone and not-to-be-trusted until he won. They declared there was no reason to recount the state. Such double standards are predictable in this fold. They shrugged at the fact that Michigan had Trump’s closest margin nationwide: just eleven thousand votes out of 4.8 million ballots cast. Some seventy-five thousand ballots did not show a vote for president, Michigan’s secretary of state office reported on its website.

  That last omission is always suspicious. That’s because people tend to vote for the high-profile races if they vote at all. Maybe some of these seventy-five thousand ballots had presidential votes, but they were not properly scanned. If a good number were from around Detroit, which went two-to-one for Clinton, maybe Trump did not win Michigan after all. Local election activists pointed to a 1950s state law that gave discretion to election officials to examine and recount every paper ballot. But Thomas went on TV saying it would not be done. Detroit’s election director followed his cue, apologizing for the sorry state of voting in his city.

  Knowing someone who could have quickly solved one of 2016’s answerable questions rattled me. Thomas and Detroit officials could have sided with that black majority city’s voters. Instead, this incident was a brazen reminder of the GOP ethic that one can never over-police the process or do too much to twist the rules in pursuit of victory. Michigan’s GOP didn’t care if a display of apparent institutional racism and voter suppression were a means to that end. Not surprisingly, they stopped the recount in court days later—much as the Supreme Court had infamously shut down Florida’s recount in 2000, making George W. Bush president.

  Following the recount was mesmerizing and jarring. It wasn’t doing what a democratic process is supposed to do—provide assurances that the result is accurate. Instead, it was exposing a starker and more cynical side of elections. The answer to Michigan’s seventy-five thousand under-votes was not computer science. It was examining the vote: looking at individual ballots to see if a vote was there or not. That is straightforward. That was not the same as bringing in cyber detectives to hunt for code-altering fingerprints in voting software to see if the count is being tweaked to one side’s benefit. That’s what the Greens wanted to do in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. But that wasn’t to be, either.

  I’d also forgotten how rickety the country’s voting machines are. Most are run on operating systems from the early 2000s—before the first iPhones. The software is proprietary, i.e. trade secrets. That is a consequence of Congress’ dumb decision to support a privatized voting machine industry after Florida’s mess. The election transparency watchdogs I knew were more worried about overly eager Republicans or libertarians with hacking skills than the Russians, despite intelligence agencies saying Russia infiltrated the Democratic Party and several statewide voter registration databases. Officials from Obama to FBI Director James Comey said the vote-counting process was secure. They said the machinery was so old-tech, so decentralized, and not even connected to the Internet that it couldn’t be gamed to flip statewide results, or, in turn, seize the presidency.

  Those reassurances buckled near Milwaukee. John Brakey, an Arizona voting transparency activist who knows more about the electronic vulnerabilities of voting machines than most local election officials, had gone to Wisconsin to observe the Greens’ recount. He spotted a hacking pathway into the vote count tabulators. I am not by nature a conspiracy theorist—especially the possibility that no matter how people vote, that Karl Rove’s latest minions or Russians are prefiguring results. Yet in 2016, when almost everyone has been hacked, from the Pentagon to personal emails, and Volkswagen has preprogrammed emission systems to turn themselves off at smog tests, we can’t pretend voting machines are magically immune.

  Brakey—and a team including Silicon Valley coders and a retired National Security Agency analyst—discovered precincts near Milwaukee used cell-phone modems to send their results to county tabulators. Why was the modem there? Because polls did not always have landline phones, officials said. The NSA analyst sent me links to commercial spyware used by police to intercept this data stream. Their point was Wisconsin’s voting machines, like much of the nation, can easily be hacked. These vulnerabilities were identified more than a decade ago.

  The Greens presented testimony from a half-dozen nationally known computer scientists saying these concerns were not a shrill conspiracy theory. Yet Wisconsin officials, echoing a stance taken in Pennsylvania—the third state where the Greens were told they would have to spend millions for a recount—ignored it. This wasn’t just Republicans defending Trump. In Pennsylvania, Democrats oversee its elections. Helped by judges, they, too, shut the door on the Greens and blocked its recount. So more questions about the vote went unanswered. State and local officials thwarted inquires and evidence that could have assured the public.

  The more I looked at various phases and features of the 2016 election, the more I saw a spectrum of antidemocratic features. That was also true at the process’s start. It looked to me (and also to the Des Moines Register editorial page) like Sanders beat Clinton in Iowa’s first-in-the-nation contest. I saw other tactics in Nevada, such as deciding where its caucuses were held and where they weren’t, that made it easier for Clinton’s supporters to participate. But beyond the anti-Sanders biases from top aides of DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, beyond scheduling televised candidate debates on weekends where audiences were smaller, and beyond shutting access to its national voter database as Sanders’s grassroots donations soared, was the Democrats’ antidemocratic super-delegate system.

  These were 712 federal and state elected officials, party leaders, and lobbyists whose votes count toward the 2,384 needed for the presidential nomination. They preempt millions of citizens voting in caucuses and primaries. Most were with Clinton before Sanders entered the race and 570 stayed with her. Superdelegates are another example of a system filled with rules that privilege the few at the expense of many. This template keeps governing classes in place. But so, too, is who gets to vote, and whether those votes count.

  What Democrats did to Sanders was nasty. But it pales next to what Republicans have done to Democrats and the vast majority of Americans. That is what was different about 2016 as well as every congressional and state election cycle since President Obama’s election in 2008. It is what sets this decade apart, as a party representing a minority has seized power and steadily imposed a regime of oligarchy, plutocracy, and theocracy on its fellow citizens. It is one thing when Democrats run presidential nomination contests like private clubs with varying membership rules. But it is another when Republican strategists plot to win dozens of state legislatures and House seats, and then sabotage their critic’s ability to compete in elections. The country is clearly living with the results of a subverted democracy.

  Politics has always had hardball tactics, but as this introduction is being written in late 2017, Trump’s national approval ratings were 35 percent. “Every party, gender, education, age,
and racial group disapproves except Republicans,” an August 23 Quinnipiac University poll reported. A week later, a poll by pro-Republican Fox News said 56 percent of voters “say Trump [is] tearing the country apart.”3

  Think about it, how can 2016’s presidential election come down to less than eighty thousand votes in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan, yet two-thirds of the US House seats in those states—and even more seats in their legislatures—end up as red super-majorities? All things are not being equal. This same pattern is also found, with slight variations, in Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, Ohio, Virginia—all states where, if demographics were destiny, the political complexion should be purple turning blue or blue.

  What’s different now is the mechanisms of the Republican’s advantage can be quantified. But you have to look carefully. Beyond all of 2016’s headline-grabbing features—Trump’s ugliness, Clinton’s foibles, Sanders’s populism, Russian meddling—what unfolded was the Democrats did not know what they were up against. They did not appreciate how rigged the process was—structurally stacked against them. Republicans had built in a starting-line lead of ten points or more. This isn’t in every race. But it is enough of the ones that determine statewide rule in otherwise purple states and determines control of Congress. It also is seen in anti-voting laws and barriers in the presidential swing states.

  There is no such thing as 50-percent-plus-one in high-stakes elections. To win in November, the party representing a majority of citizens needs very big margins that cannot be whittled away—as they will be whittled away. There is a wide and deeper dynamic operating here. But to see its entirety, we have to parse the details that comprise the voting process.

  When I was drawn into the vortex of America’s dysfunctional 2016 election via recounts, I did not think I’d emerge with an updated catalog of how the voting process preempts the citizenry and betrays democracy. It’s so easy to be diverted into parallel concerns. That’s especially true of the hope-deflating swamp of voting machine hacking, which, if it were widespread, renders all other efforts to improve the process futile. There are other big issues in the voting sphere, such as ex-felon disenfranchisement. That is why Florida is politically red, not blue. Florida’s lifetime voting ban for its 1.6 million residents with a felony record, most nonviolent drug offenses, is a Jim Crow–era holdover.

  Nonetheless, I keep coming back to a big picture where Democrats, progressives, and independents do not understand the fundamentals they are up against. In far too many states, Republicans have restructured the voting process in antidemocratic ways. The stakes are bigger for the country than the fate of which party or factions win and lose. The GOP has undermined the process that is the basis for representative government. Unless stakeholders, meaning citizens who put democracy before party, work to restore the voting process, the legitimacy of its outcomes will remain dubious and our political system will unravel.

  This book is divided into four sections. It starts with the Democrats’ nominating contests. The goal is not to rehash the Sanders-Clinton split within the party in 2016 and since. What Democratic national and state leadership threw at Sanders is a useful way to start looking at a landscape where insiders game the rules of voting. But even as these features undermine the Democrats’ moral authority as the party that defends voting rights, their flaws are of a different and lesser caliber than the Republicans’ attacks on voting in America.

  The second section focuses on Republican efforts to disenfranchise opponents and preempt representative government. This section, the book’s core, shows readers a range of strategies with their impact. As the nation looks ahead to elections in 2018 and 2020, what’s new now is that the most pernicious tactics can be quantified. It’s no longer a guessing game about which anti-voter laws and rules are the most harmful to citizens and voting.

  The third section continues with the recount, where both major parties frustrated efforts to verify the vote count, and where the prospect of hacking was raised, insufficiently answered, and dismissed. (By mid-summer 2017 hacking resurfaced, although it appeared the Russian interventions were more impactful with hurting Democrats on social media than with the voting machinery.) The book concludes with an afterword focusing on 2017 and the Trump administration, where a rogues’ gallery of Republicans have resurfaced in powerful posts and are poised to recycle their anti-voter playbook.

  There is a way forward for Americans who seek a government that represents the nation’s multiracial, multi-class, increasingly diverse citizenry. It starts with seeing what has happened to voting, how the process has been hijacked to subvert democracy, and acting to surmount it. Come take a look.

  SECTION I

  THE DEMOCRATS

  1

  BERNIE SANDERS

  BERNIE SANDERS HAS ALWAYS BEEN A very able, savvy, and visceral politician. When I briefly had a front-row seat to Sanders, as press secretary on the campaign that first elected him to the House of Representatives in 1990, he was championing many of the same stances that resonated with millions in 2016. By the time he launched his presidential campaign in mid-2015, he was more of a political pro than anything I’d seen in Vermont decades before.

  But neither Bernie nor his earliest supporters—practitioners of a “now I’m inside, now I’m outside” Democratic Party—nor his legions of youthful volunteers quite knew what they were getting into. They were taking on the Democratic Party’s national establishment, state party leaders, a rickety election system, stone-faced administrators, political rituals manned by bungling locals, and, of course, the Clintons, now in their fourth presidential campaign. Bernie had never run for anything outside of Vermont. He had not faced real competition or dirty electioneering tactics in years. Nor had he interacted with the party insiders and others running caucuses and primaries, nor the vagaries of voting rules and administration.

  Top campaign officials I spoke to in spring 2017 agreed that Bernie didn’t know what he was getting into. But they said the Democratic Party didn’t see him coming either, and as an institution it didn’t respect the man, what he stood for, or his strengths as a candidate. The party’s establishment had lost touch with its energized grassroots and younger base, which propelled a candidate who came out of nowhere to win 45 percent of the elected delegates to the Democratic National Convention.4 But it was not the party’s blindness, nor its insider-favoring rules alone that prevented Sanders from breaking through. There also were party traditions whose intent wasn’t nefarious, but whose effects were antidemocratic.

  Starting in 2015, Bernie had spoken at events set up by Progressive Democrats of America and others. Growing crowds clung to his words and embraced a refreshing and more blunt champion than Hillary Clinton. Bernie had a message that people wanted to hear and one he wanted to spread. Iowa’s Caucuses, 2016’s first testing ground, were in a state that was not that different from Vermont. It was mostly rural, white, and had progressive streaks.

  But just because you want to run as a Democrat for president doesn’t make it happen. You have to get on the ballot. The Democratic National Committee (DNC) didn’t know what to make of his decision to seek their nomination. They knew of his old speeches condemning them and the GOP in one fell swoop. They also knew he had been a reliable Democratic vote for twenty-five years in the House and then the Senate. Mostly, they didn’t take him seriously, just as they misread the loose energy on the land that is a feature of presidential elections. These are people who ditch their day jobs, throw caution to the wind, and join a political road show they deeply believe would change the nation and world.

  Long after the party realized that Bernie was in it to win, and not just to hound members about their progressive populist past, I asked Debra Kozikowski, the Massachusetts Party vice-chair and a grassroots activist for three decades, what had her peers been thinking? They backed putting Bernie on the ballot after he promised he would publicly support the 2016 nominee, she said. Their thinking was a calculated afterthought. They knew Bernie would
bring along voters not drawn to Hillary. They thought he would boost her by a few points in key states. They never thought he would run neck and neck with the anointed nominee.

  The first sign that Bernie was a very serious contender came in late 2015 when campaign finance reports were filed. Bernie was hardly the first progressive to reject donations from corporate PACs (political action committees) or newer deeper-pocket front groups, Super PACs. In 1992, ex-California Gov. Jerry Brown was mocked for announcing his 1-800 number for donations, but it worked. In 2016, Bernie used the Internet to raise nearly a quarter-billion dollars in funds averaging $27 per donation.5 As late 2015’s fund-raising reports were filed, the Clintons, and party insiders with signed photos of the Clintons on their desks, faced an intra-party split that was only deepening. The pro-Clinton party establishment would have to turn to hard(er) ball tactics to impede his candidacy.

  The tension broke into public view in bizarre but telling ways. It’s an example of barriers facing progressives, who wonder why there aren’t more candidates like them in the party. The answer is because national leaders and pro-establishment liberals don’t want them and haven’t for years. This is the Clinton side of the party. These more traditional Democrats can be found in northeastern Virginia, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and even in California. By mid-fall 2015, the disputes between Bernie’s surging grassroots campaign and Clinton allies inside the DNC began to break into the open.