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ELECTION 2024 - Trump has shot himself in the head, politically. While pundits are fixated on how Trump offended Black voters by saying Kamala Harris identified as Indian-American, not Black, they have missed The Big One: The Donald offended Asian-American voters.
Talk about political suicide! Trump posted a photo of Vice-President Harris wearing a traditional Indian sari. He’s reminding Asian-Americans—that’s 15 million eligible voters—that Kamala celebrates her South Indian heritage. And Kamala didn’t even have to pay him to do it.
While there’s tons of media about Trump’s Hispanic vote and Trump’s dinky inroads into the African-American vote, the massive block of Asian-American voters is strangely ignored, though they hold the keys in swing states, especially Georgia, where Asian-Americans account for 788,500 eligible voters in a state Biden carried by a minuscule 12,000 votes.
The Asian-American vote has leaped in just four years by two million eligible voters. The total of eligible Asian-American voters now equals half the African-American voting population. Yet, they are a much-ignored community. The organization Asian & Pacific Islander Vote reports that 50% of AAPI voters have not been contacted by the Democratic Party—57% have not heard from the GOP.
Problem: Asian-American voters don’t turn out to vote at nearly the rate of whites or African-Americans. Trump is giving them a reason to hit the polls.
Kim Crow
What is behind the long-term reluctance of Asian-Americans to vote? In Georgia, I can tell you, the reason is vote suppression, pure and simple; what I call, “Kim Crow.”
Beginning in 2014, Georgia joined several states in purging voter rolls using a system called, “Interstate Crosscheck” aimed at terminating anyone registering in more than one state. The Palast Investigative Fund obtained a copy of Georgia’s Crosscheck list—after a successful lawsuit against then-Secretary of State Brian Kemp. We found Crosscheck targeted one in eight Asian-Americans for removal from the voter rolls. How? Crosscheck simply matched names of registrants in different states and assumes they were the same voter. That wiped out the voting rights of hundreds of “David Kim’s.” 
Why the attack on the Asian American voters? Until 2000, Asian-Americans voted Republican, big time. But then, as the GOP turned scary about non-white immigrants (those who come from what Trump calls “sh*thole" countries), Asian-Americans started voting as if they’d turned Black: In 2012, 73% of Asian-Americans voted for Barack Obama.
And that’s why Asian-Americans have become a key target of suppression tactics.
In November 2012, Republican Kemp ordered the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, armed and ready for combat, to raid the offices of “10,000 Koreans Vote,” seizing computer files and preparing to arrest and charge the elderly voter registration volunteers for felony vote tampering.
Their crime? The group had registered 4,000 Korean-Americans on their way to their goal of 10,000. But the group’s founder, attorney Helen Ho, was alarmed that the registrants had not appeared on the voter rolls. She called Kemp’s office to ask about the missing registrations. Kemp’s office simply denied they had received the forms. But Helen told them she had photocopies of the registrations.
Kemp’s response was a robocop raid and felony charges. He claimed that making copies of registration forms was a crime. That is, it’s a crime to keep Kemp honest. After two years of terrorizing the Korean-Americans, the threat of charges were dropped. But the raid did its job: The 10,000 Koreans Voteoffice was permanently shuttered.
Helen told me that folks in her community had warned her against the registration drive—that it would only draw unwanted attention and repression. Asian-Americans are unusual in that they are the only demographic composed mostly of naturalized immigrants (54%). Many fled dictatorial regimes. From their experience, involvement in politics just means trouble.
Kemp’s successful suppression of the Asian-American vote, including a massive purge of voter rolls before the 2018 elections, was the edge that allowed him to squeak out a victory over Stacey Abrams for Georgia’s governorship.
Who Counts?
One of the nasty little secrets of American democracy is that we don’t count every ballot. This is not some conspiracy fantasy: the pile of millions of rejected ballots is reported every two years by the federal Elections Assistance Commission.
In the 2016 Presidential race, the federal government reported that over 2.5 million voters were shunted to “provisional” ballots, the result of voters showing up to vote and finding their registrations had been purged. Of those, nearly half (43%) of their ballots were rejected – more than a million votes officially tossed in the dumpster. Yet, strangely, not one of these supposedly illegitimate voters was charged with the crime of attempting to cast an illegal vote.
If the rejections were random, it wouldn’t matter. But an Asian-American voter is 284% more likely than a white voter to be forced to a provisional ballot. (Similarly, Black voters are 282% more likely to get a provisional ballot than a white voter, Hispanics 300% more likely.)
What other ballots don’t we count? In 2016, the EAC reported that 400,000 mail-in ballots were rejected for picayune crap such as postage due and “mis-matched signature” – though not one voter was charged with the crime of forging a signature.
Whose vote gets rejected? One study in Florida put the non-white ballot rejection rate at 700% of the white rejection rate. That statistic includes a third pile of uncounted votes: “spoiled” ballots. Political Research Quarterly published a study, using Georgia data, that Asian-Americans suffer the highest mail-in ballot rejection rate of any ethnic group. One study of rejections in Washington State found that voters of color are four times as likely as whites to have their ballots rejected.
(Take note: If you do the math, it’s an undeniable, if unreported, fact that Hillary Clinton’s 2016 victory over Trump went into that rejected ballot dumpster.)
Who’s Sari Now?
The Asian-American vote is not monolithic. South Asians vote Democratic; Vietnamese lean Republican. Not every Asian-American is automatically won over by Kamala Harris’ ethnicity.
But when Trump posted the photo of Kamala in a sari, every Asian-American got his message loud and clear: There is something not-quite-American about you.
Trump, to Harris’ happy astonishment, is waking a voting dragon.
(Greg Palast is known for his investigative reports for The Guardian, BBC Television, Rolling Stone and his string of New York Times bestsellers including The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and Billionaires & Ballot Bandits. His latest film, “Vigilante: Georgia’s Vote Suppression Hitman” is narrated by Rosario Dawson and produced by Martin Sheen.)
