In a blistering investigation, journalist Greg Palast has painted a damning picture of the 2024 U.S. presidential election, claiming that the outcome would have been entirely different if every legal vote had been counted and every eligible voter allowed to cast their ballot.
According to Palast, Donald Trump would have lost the presidency, and Vice President Kamala Harris would have clinched victory with 286 electoral votes, a result that turns the official narrative on its head.
Palast doesn’t mince words about what he says robbed Harris of the presidency: voter suppression. Not the old, hidden kind people whisper about, but a sprawling, open operation that ranged from purging voter rolls to tossing ballots and intimidating people at polling stations.
The author has got numbers to back it up—millions of ballots, he says, never made it to the count. Some were purged with the stroke of a bureaucrat’s pen, others tossed aside over typos or missing postage and still more were buried in a wave of challenges from self-proclaimed voter fraud watchdogs.
The scene Palast paints is most vivid in the swing states that decided the election: Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin where, the numbers tell a story of disenfranchisement.
He describes how voters—disproportionately Black and living in urban areas—found themselves purged from rolls or their ballots tossed aside on technicalities.
He points to Georgia, where Republican lawmakers slashed the number of drop boxes in predominantly Black counties, making it nearly impossible for many to vote early or absentee.
When drop boxes were used in 2020, they were lifelines for voters who couldn’t risk relying on an underfunded postal system. By 2024, those boxes were locked up and carted away.
Palast keeps returning to what he calls the “vigilante” problem, a tactic straight out of the Jim Crow playbook, but now dressed in modern clothes.
He recounts the rise of organizations like True the Vote, where volunteers lined up to challenge voters’ rights en masse. These people—ordinary citizens deputized by no one—filed hundreds of thousands of challenges, a move that struck terror into voters in swing states. In Georgia, the challenges numbered well into the hundreds of thousands by Election Day.
The story gets personal in cases like that of U.S. Army Major Gamaliel Turner, a retired Pentagon advisor. Four years ago, two days before that November’s election, Turner received a letter from his county elections board in rural Southern Georgia, telling him his right to vote had been challenged.
“You’re telling me, that if I want to vote, all I have to do is show up, and prove, as an American citizen, that I have the right to vote—again,” an emotional Turner, now retired, related his reaction to that board’s summons. So, Turner told Palast, he did.
He flew 2,600 miles each way from his post then, which was in Germany, to Fort Benning, Ga., to prove his right to vote by walking into his polling place with ID and casting his ballot in person. He succeeded.
Turner had to make that trip because 88 vigilantes, acting under Republican-passed Georgian voting laws, challenged the voter qualifications of 4,000 soldiers registered at Fort Benning. All, like Turner, who’s the son of a civil rights crusader, were Black.
This, Palast says, is America’s nasty little secret: we don’t count all the votes. And 2024 was no exception. He points to the laws passed in red states after the 2020 election—dozens of them—designed, he claims, to make voting harder, especially for people of color.
The laws cut voting hours, tightened restrictions on mail-in ballots, and gave rise to a wave of disqualifications. In places like Texas, mail-in ballots were rejected at alarming rates, jumping from 1% to 12% because of new rules requiring ID numbers.
Palast spares no one in his critique. He calls out the media for refusing to connect the dots, for writing about voter suppression as an unfortunate side effect of politics but never acknowledging its impact on election results. If these laws and tactics didn’t change outcomes, Palast asks, why were they so fiercely pursued by Republican lawmakers?
The answer, he suggests, lies in the margins. In swing states, Trump’s victories were razor-thin, and Palast believes it’s impossible to ignore the role that these tactics played in tipping the scales. He compares it to a rigged game of cards, where one player keeps stacking the deck, all while claiming victory as fair play.
The Placebo Ballots and the Poison Postcard
There’s an unsettling phenomenon in American elections that investigative reporter Greg Palast has dubbed “placebo ballots.” These are provisional ballots, the so-called safety net for voters whose eligibility has been challenged or whose names have mysteriously disappeared from registration rolls.
The promise is that these ballots will be verified and counted later, but Palast doesn’t buy it. “Bullshit,” he says bluntly.
Provisional ballots, he argues, are little more than a cruel illusion. Unless voters jump through extraordinary hoops—such as visiting their county clerk’s office with proof of ID and address—their ballots end up in the trash.
The data is damning: In 2016, the U.S. Elections Assistance Commission reported that out of 2.5 million provisional ballots cast, over 42% were never counted. Palast emphasizes how this disproportionately affects minority communities. Black, Hispanic, and Asian-American voters are three times more likely than white voters to end up casting these “placebo” ballots.
But the provisional ballot problem is just one tentacle of a much larger beast. Palast zeroes in on what he calls the Great Purge and its most devious weapon: the Poison Postcard. It works like this—state election officials send postcards to registered voters, asking them to confirm their addresses. These postcards, designed to resemble junk mail, often go ignored. Failure to respond leads to voters being purged from the rolls, their registration erased without their knowledge.
The numbers are staggering. Palast recounts that before the 2022 election, North Carolina purged nearly 393,000 voters from its rolls. The reasoning? Officials claimed these voters had moved, despite the fact that many hadn’t budged an inch. In Georgia, Palast’s team discovered that 198,351 voters had been wrongfully purged for allegedly relocating—when they hadn’t. The state’s sole evidence? Failure to return the Poison Postcard.
The impact of this tactic on the 2024 election is devastating. Wisconsin, where Kamala Harris lost by just 29,397 votes, had purged over 166,000 voters using a faulty list of alleged movers. Pennsylvania erased 360,132 voters from its rolls, three times Donald Trump’s margin of victory. Georgia, the crown jewel of voter suppression, purged a staggering 875,000 voters, earning the dubious honor of being ranked first in “election integrity” by far-right organizations.
Palast’s investigation doesn’t stop at the purges. He lays bare the role of partisan voter challenges, rejected absentee ballots, and spoiled in-person votes—all disproportionately impacting young, urban, and minority voters. Each of these tactics chips away at the integrity of the election, leaving millions of would-be votes uncounted.
Perhaps the most jarring statistic is the 4.8 million voters nationwide purged simply for not returning a postcard. Palast argues that these tactics are not about election security—they’re about disenfranchisement. And while he acknowledges that both political parties have played this game, the 2024 election saw these strategies deployed with ruthless precision to suppress the Democratic vote.
In the face of this bleak reality, Palast doesn’t lose hope. He points to the 2020 election, where grassroots efforts by voting rights groups helped re-register purged voters and challenge wrongful ballot disqualifications. Democracy, he insists, can overcome the 2.3% suppression factor he calculates as the true margin stolen from Kamala Harris.
The fight, Palast says, is not over. “They can’t suppress all the votes all the time,” he declares, invoking the spirit of Martin Luther King Jr.
The battle for voting rights is ongoing, but Palast believes victory is possible. America just needs to answer the call.