But if you’re expecting a sexy story about Elon Musk messing with vote-counting software from outer space, sorry, you won’t get that here.

As in Bush v. Gore in 2000, and in too many other miscarriages of Democracy, this election was determined by good old “vote suppression,” the polite term we use for shafting people of color out of their ballot. We used to call it Jim Crow.

Here are key numbers:

• 4,776,706 voters were wrongly purged from voter rolls according to US Elections Assistance Commission data.
• By August of 2024, for the first time since 1946, self-proclaimed “vigilante” voter-fraud hunters challenged the rights of 317,886 voters. The NAACP of Georgia estimates that by Election Day, the challenges exceeded 200,000 in Georgia alone.
• No less than 2,121,000 mail-in ballots were disqualified for minor clerical errors (e.g. postage due).
• At least 585,000 ballots cast in-precinct were also disqualified.
• 1,216,000 “provisional” ballots were rejected, not counted.
• 3.24 million new registrations were rejected or not entered on the rolls in time to vote.

If the purges, challenges and ballot rejections were random, it wouldn’t matter. It’s anything but random. For example, an audit by the State of Washington found that a Black voter was 400% more likely than a white voter to have their mail-in ballot rejected. Rejection of Black in-person votes, according to a US Civil Rights Commission study in Florida, ran 14.3% or one in seven ballots cast.

There are also the uncountable effects of the explosive growth of voter intimidation tactics including the bomb threats that closed 31 polling stations in Atlanta on Election Day.

Tech note from a numbers guy — and Martin Luther King

Until the Elections Assistance Commission gets updated figures from the states next year (and, under Trump, I doubt we will ever get those numbers), 3,565,000 votes lost to Harris is the estimate I would present in my role as a forensic expert in a courtroom as the lowest conceivable suppression factor.

I rarely make a big deal about my own credentials but, since the election, the Web has been flooded by amateur, arithmetic-defying speculation about computer hacking and other unsupported twaddle. Best to stick to hard, verifiable data. And that’s what I do.

For two decades, I was a forensic economist for government agencies including the US Justice Department; taught statistics at Indiana University; provided expert calculations of vote suppression for the ACLU, NAACP, and RainbowPUSH and won the Global Editors Award for my data journalism on vote suppression measurements for reports done for Al Jazeera, BBC, Rolling Stone and The Guardian. The numbers you get here are exactly what I’d present to a Federal court. In other words, kids, don’t do this at home…calculating the “un-count” requires expertise.

I make this point for another reason: The theory that “Elon Musk messed with the voting machines” is, unconsciously, unintentionally racist. With few exceptions, these silly speculations come from those who simply ignore not just the millions of votes officially reported as suppressed, their theories also ignore the horrifically painful experience of Black people turned away from the polls.

Here is a photo of Jessica Lawrence in tears, moments after her 92-year-old grandmother was tossed out of an Atlanta polling station, into a storm, because she’d been wrongfully purged. Any speculation about the nefarious cause of Trump’s must not leave out Jessica’s grandma nor the millions of other citizens of color who were wrongly barred from their ballot.

Now here’s the good news

We saw that in 2020 when, despite extreme, even felonious actions by Trump supporters to block, challenge and disqualify voters and ballots, the theft by suppression was defeated.

That was the work of voting rights groups challenging these attacks. The work was done in the courts and, more important, in the precincts, re-registering the purged, challenging the challenges, “curing” disqualified ballots.

The road is long but victory is certain. After the 2016 election, the Palast team uncovered a cruel, racist purge program called, “Interstate Crosscheck” that cost nearly a million voters, overwhelmingly minorities, their rights. This motivated the Rev. Jesse Jackson to launch a campaign that successfully shut down Crosscheck. Unquestionably, Joe Biden could not have won in 2020 without the Reverend saving literally hundreds of thousands of votes. The point is, they can’t suppress all the votes all the time.

In other words, Democracy can win, despite the 2.3% suppression headwind.

And that’s our job as Americans: to end the purges, the vigilante challenges, the ballot rejections and the attitude that this is all somehow OK.

Martin Luther King gave us our marching orders in 1965, in words just as important today.

“Let us march on ballot boxes, march on ballot boxes until race-baiters disappear from the political arena. I want to say to the people of America and the nations of the world, that we are not about to turn around. We are on the move now.”