On Thursday, the Truthdig team sat down with investigative journalist and filmmaker Greg Palast to discuss what was for many the unexpected outcome of last week’s presidential election.

Palast has spent years studying and reporting on election complications across the country. He contends on his website that the election was “stolen” by the “GOP and Trump operatives.”

This summer, Palast penned a piece for Rolling Stone that predicted voting problems in the general election. “What’s far more likely to undermine democracy in November is the culmination of a decade-long Republican effort to disenfranchise voters under the guise of battling voter fraud,” he wrote at the time. “Election officials in more than two dozen states have compiled lists of citizens whom they allege could be registered in more than one state—thus potentially able to cast multiple ballots—and eligible to be purged from the voter rolls.”

On Election Day, Palast reported on electronic difficulties with voting machines in Ohio. In fact, he uncovered three ways in which votes were allegedly “rigged” to benefit the GOP. Watch his interview below on Democracy Now!

You can also check out past editions of “Live at Truthdig” on our YouTube page. 

—Posted by Emma Niles

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Rushed transcript:

Sarah Wesley: Hello everyone, and welcome to another one of our Live at Truthdigs. I’m Sarah Wesley, your host, Communications Coordinator here at Truthdig. We’re also joined by a very special guest in this timely climate of the political election 2016. Greg Palast has joined us today. He’s an investigative journalist; he’s worked with the BBC, The Guardian, and has a new book out, actually, called The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. It’s accompanied by a nice little film also, and he’s done a bunch of research on elections, and especially this election, and in 2000 with that crazy election. And so he has a lot of research, maybe alluding to widespread election rigging. So we’re going to get into all of that. We’re also joined by Kasia Anderson, our Deputy Editor; and Emma Niles, Staff Writer, will be tuning in to all of your Facebook comments and questions.

Greg Palast: Unfortunately, I wasn’t a fool; America’s been made a fool of. This election was, as Donald Trump says, “this election is rigged”; this election was rigged, and it was his cronies who rigged it. And my investigation for Rolling Stone laid out in detail and quantified how they went through and basically ripped off these Republican-controlled swing states. There are five swing states, and Hillary won only one officially, because it’s the only one in which you had a democratic Secretary of State running the elections. Now, here’s the trick. So there were—and how big is the suspect list of people voting twice? Seven point two million, 7.2 million names of double voters. Now, no one questioned this system because no one got the lists. And as you said, I’m an investigative reporter; that’s why you see the hat, i’m an investigative reporter. So as an investigative reporter, I spent—with a whole team—five months; we got our hands on those lists.

Kasia Anderson: So can you just situate us in time, when you got your hands on those.

Palast: I first got the lists about two years ago; it took five months of work. Because you remember, Donald Trump, by the way, has been talking about this rigged election and multiple voters since before he announced. He was on the speaking circuit for a group called Citizens United. People don’t know this story; this is where he started, OK? And that’s one of their claims, is that people are voting many times. So they created a list, an official list of seven million suspects. No one could get the list, because—you know, criminals! You can’t get a criminal suspect list; I got the list. And I looked through it, and you look at these names—for example, in my film, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, I go and meet some of these terrible double voters. I go in Ohio and meet Donald Alexander Webster, Jr., Donald Webster. And they said, he’s the same voter as the Donald Webster in Virginia—except Donald Webster in Virginia is Donald Eugene Webster, Sr. There’s just no connection; it’s just a common name.

Emma Niles: You mentioned earlier that this rigging is racially charged. Can you expand on that?

Palast: Ah, yeah. You got it, you got it! See, race is the Achilles’ heel of the American electoral system. We’re still running Jim Crow elections, except now, instead of using white sheets to scare away black voters, they’re using spreadsheets. So one of the tricks here is that—it’s basically common names. James Brown. John Black. And by the way, David Lee—the Asian American community was really hit hard by this Crosscheck. Because for example, in the Korean community there’s four names: Park, Ho, Lee, and Kim—that’s it. And so they got really wiped out in Korean communities.

Anderson:  And also Hispanic voters, right?

Palast: Well, let’s put it this way. Ninety-six percent of people named Garcia are Hispanic. Now, I don’t know who the other four percent are [laughter], but [inaudible] 96 percent of Garcias are Hispanic. As our experts—we brought in experts from eBay and the people that handle eBay’s, and Amazon, and American Express, databases. And they never get it wrong; you never get a toaster meant for one James Brown that’s supposed to go to another.

Anderson: Funny how that works, yeah.

Palast: So they don’t mess it up; they don’t send the wrong bill out to the wrong people, right? So how did this happen? They deliberately used a deliberately poor system. And what happens in America—in America, the history of black slavery meant that African-Americans have common names, tend to share names, like James Brown. The history of the conquest of Latin America means that there’s eight hundred and—there are 836,000 people named Garcia. If your name is Joe Garcia, or Jose Garcia, as our experts say, you supposedly voted in 27 states. No, you’re just named Garcia! So, but if your name is Charles Koch, for example, that’s a unique name; there is no other Charles Koch, there’s one.

Anderson: [Laughs] You would know, right?

Palast: Kris Kobach—Kris Kobach who runs the system, there’s one. So white people tend to have these very unique names. The Census Bureau keeps track of the racial breakdown of every single surname in America. So we got the census documents, compared it to the list, and lo and behold, this [was] a complete Jim Crow purge operation.

Wesley: So what I’m understanding is that they’re targeting the African-American, Latino and Asian community because they’re most likely to vote democrat, and that’s why it’s the—

Palast: Exactly, exactly, exactly—and see, it used to be—this is the first attack on Asian-Americans. Because previously, Asian-Americans, a couple decades ago, voted Republican. And now they’re voting as if they’ve turned black. In fact, in my film, I have a segment called Voting Gangnam Style. I have a bunch of Korean kids who are breakdancing, dancing Gangnam style, to try to get their parents to vote, and so they call it Voting Gangnam Style; and then it goes pop, pop, pop—they turn Black. And suddenly there’s John Lewis dancing Gangnam style. So this is the only film in which you will ever see John Lewis dance Gangnam style, the great civil rights leader and congressman. And what’s happening is, is that—so they went after the Asian-American vote because it’s going solid, solid democrat, even more than Hispanics. So what’s happened is, this is a cheap way to get rid of these voters. And no one is going to defend people voting twice. It was done in stealth, so that no one knew about it. I tried to raise the alarm, that’s why I made a movie, I tried to do everything, meeting these people. In fact, actually, there are a few white people on there, including one Willie Nelson, a country singer, I’ve heard, who was accused of voting a second time as Willie May Nelson. So they didn’t even match the genitals, let alone the middle names. In fact, I go in to see Willie, I bang on his door—because it looks like he could, he could vote in multiple states; he lives on a bus, he’s got all these state stickers on it—

Anderson: And has some residence in Hawaii too, right? Yeah.