Hispanic Voter Registration: Why It’s on the Decline

Enlarge Image Image Gallery Based on investigative reporting for “Rolling Stone” and BBC television, “Billionaires & Ballot Bandits” is a story of the billionaires who want to buy elections and how they can steal them in nine ways. Cover Courtesy Seven Stories Press

In 2000, Greg Palast exposed how Katherine Harris removed thousands of innocent Black citizens from voter rolls as “felons.” It was Palast for Rolling Stone, with co-author Bobby Kennedy, who uncovered more ballot-bending trickery—from inane ID laws to “caging” of absentee ballots that earned the thanks of the US Civil Rights Commission. Now, in Billionaires & Ballot Bandits (Seven Stories Press, 2012), Palast tells two stories: First, the 9 ways over 5.9 million votes can be stolen in November 2012—unless the ballot bandits are stopped. And, second, how billionaire PAC-men purchase Congress and the White House through a mudslide of money. Discover the dirty strategies that discourage Hispanic voter registration in this excerpt taken from Chapter 26, “Block the Vote.” 

It’s lookin’ bad for the old white guys. Eleven million Hispanic citizens remain unregistered, Americans all, and 15 million kids between the ages of 18 and 24 who can’t be pried away from Facebook long enough to register—at least so the tally of vote registries say.

Now, add to that 16 million ex-cons who can vote but think they can’t. (It’s only in three states in Old Dixie where those who’ve served felony sentences are barred from voting.)

All these un-voters, if they suddenly registered, could rock the planet.

You think the Old World Order hasn’t thought of that?

So, then, how do they stop Americans from taking over America? Easy: first, make registering voters a crime. 

In a swing state like Florida with its huge new Hispanic population (no, not Cubans, Puerto Ricans), you make it illegal to register citizens at welfare offices, churches, or voter-registration drive meetings. (Suggestion: sneak voter registration forms into handgun barrels. Guns are allowed at all these locations.)

Second, make registering voters as risky as a derivative from JPMorgan. In Florida (I love using Florida for vote suppression examples, don’t you?), Governor Jeb Bush made it a crime, with vicious fines, to turn in voter forms more than forty-eight hours after they were gathered, or with itty-bitty errors in them. He successfully put the League of Women Voters out of the registration business until June 2012 when a judge enjoined Florida from sentencing registrars to hard time. But with ACORN’s corpse still fresh, the League and others remain fearful of going into the streets of Miami with clipboards.