***Serious topic and tripper warning for sexual abuse and rape of minors***
Recently the Anti-Defamation League, the Israeli government, and main stream media especially CNN has been pushing hard the narrative that Hamas sexual abused / raped some women they captured. When several people condemned Hamas and then also condemned Israel for doing it to Palestinian prisoners, the show’s hosts tried to quickly shut down the criticism of Israel and again tried to focus on only the events done by Hamas. I have been posting for years the abuse and mistreatment of the Palestinian prisoners who are often held without charges for long periods of time, especially minors who are not allowed to contact parents or family. Often the family are not told their children or other members have even been detained. Remember for Palestinians there is no due process, no civilian courts. They are under military rule. I did a search for Israel prisoner abuse, and these are some of the first things that the search displayed. Notice they are about sexual abuse and rape, and the majority of the victims are boys. In one UN article I read, sexual torture and rape of men as old as 40 has been reported and verified as credible, and as young as 15. We don’t know if there are younger victims who have not come forward. Hugs. Scottie
Since the Second Intifada, in 2000, when DCIP began tracking Palestinian children detained by the Israeli military, Israeli forces have detained, interrogated, prosecuted and imprisoned approximately 13,000 Palestinian children.
NGO Defense for Children International’s offices were raided after they reported the sexual assault of a 15-year-old by an interrogator while in Israeli custody
Former US State Department official Josh Paul resigned over sales of arms to Israel in October (Social media)
Published date: 5 December 2023 15:08 GMT | Last update:2 days 21 hours ago
Israeli authorities banned a Palestinian NGO after it reported the rape of a Palestinian child by Israeli forces to the US State Department in 2021, former official Josh Paul said in a CNN interview on Monday.
That followed a complaint made by the US State Department about the rape of a 15-year-old Palestinian boy in Al-Mascobiyya detention centre in West Jerusalem.
“[They] removed their computers and declared them a terrorist entity,” Paul said.
The DCIP is the only Palestinian human rights organisation specifically focused on children’s rights.
In February 2021, the DCIP published a report documenting the physical and sexual assault against a 15-year-old Palestinian boy by an Israeli interrogator at Al-Mascobiyya interrogation and detention facility in January that year.
The DCIP reported that the detainee had been raped with an object by his interrogator and that he was made to stand against a wall where his interrogator inflicted severe pain on his genitals.
“There are no words to describe that moment,” the detainee said in the report.
A campaign of repression
According to Ayed Abu Eqtaish, accountability programme director at DCIP, the NGO reported the assault to US officials following hundreds of unresolved complaints filed with the Israeli authorities.
“We used to submit complaints [to the Israeli authorities],” Eqtaish told MEE. “but they would not open investigations…or they would open investigations and close them under the pretext that there was no cooperation from the child or lawyer.”
According to Eqtaish, the DCIP stopped filing complaints with the Israeli authorities as they would not allow a child giving witness statements to be accompanied by a lawyer.
“So we passed the information to US officials and asked for clarification from the Israeli authorities,” Eqtaish told MEE.
“[Israel wanted to] paralyse the organisation and prevent us from revealing Israeli human rights violations against Palestinian children’
– Ayed Abu Eqtaish, DCIP
Following the complaint, DCIP offices were raided twice by Israeli forces, on 19 July 2021, and again on 18 August 2022, when their offices were raided and “sealed off” along with the offices of seven other Palestinian NGOs, in what Amnesty International condemned as a “campaign of repression against Palestinian civil society”.
But according to Eqtaish, the DCIP had not made the connection between the complaint they had filed with the State Department and the subsequent raids until Paul’s comments on Monday, although Eqtaish added that Paul’s interpretation was “logical”.
“The organisation had already been under attack [by the Israeli authorities] for several years before the raids,” Eqtaish told MEE, adding: “[They wanted to] paralyse the organisation and prevent us from revealing Israeli human rights violations against Palestinian children.”
An atmosphere of uncertainty
In October 2021, the DCIP was designated a terrorist organisation by Israeli authorities along with five other Palestinian NGOs.
The move was condemned by the UN human rights commissioner as a “frontal attack on the Palestinian human rights movement and on human rights everywhere”.
In the immediate aftermath of the designation, Eqtaish said that, among the DCIP staff, the “whole atmosphere was surrounded with uncertainty…we didn’t know exactly when they would attack us again and what the type of attack would be,” he said.
Why Israel can torture detained Palestinian children with impunity
Following the designation, NGO staff were inundated with queries from anxious donors.
“Instead of concentrating on our work, we had to respond to these questions,” Eqtaish told MEE. “The designation was threatening our existence as an organisation.”
Despite this, DCIP retained all but one of its donors.
“The main purpose of the designation was to dismantle our organisation, but we continue our work,” Eqtaish said.
Since the Second Intifada, in 2000, when DCIP began tracking Palestinian children detained by the Israeli military, Israeli forces have detained, interrogated, prosecuted and imprisoned approximately 13,000 Palestinian children.
Between 2016 and 2022, DCIP collected sworn affidavits from 766 Palestinian childrendetained by the Israeli military and prosecuted in Israeli military courts to track their experiences of ill-treatment and torture at the hands of Israeli forces.
Middle East Eye delivers independent and unrivalled coverage and analysis of the Middle East, North Africa and beyond. To learn more about republishing this content and the associated fees, please fill out this form. More about MEE can be found here.
Modesty is very in some cultures, including among Arabs and Muslims. So this was totally another way to degrade and dehumanize the Palestinian people. Hugs. Scottie
Hanan Ashrawi, a Palestinian politician, said on X the incident was a “blatant attempt at the humiliation & degradation of Palestinian men … stripped & displayed like war trophies”.
Israeli media claimed images show Hamas fighters but several civilians have been identified including a journalist
00:00:56
Footage shows Palestinian men stripped to underwear after detention in Gaza – video
The International Committee of the Red Cross has said it is concerned by images of semi-naked Palestinian men being paraded by the Israeli military in Gaza, adding that all of those detained must be treated in keeping with international humanitarian law.
“We strongly emphasise the importance of treating all those detained with humanity and dignity, in accordance with international humanitarian law,” Jessica Moussan, a spokesperson for the ICRC, said in a statement.
The video and photographs, which were shared on social media on Thursday evening, showed dozens of men, some bound and blindfolded, stripped to their underwear in several public locations.
While Israeli media initially suggested that the images, apparently filmed by at least one Israeli soldier, showed the surrender of Hamas fighters, several of the men pictured were identified as civilians, including a journalist.
Hani Almadhoun, who works at a US charity which raises funds for the UN’s Palestine relief agency, UNRWA, said he recognised his brother, Mahmoud, a shopkeeper, in one video.
“I recognised him immediately … and recognised the area as the same area they had been sheltering.”
Almadhoun, who lives in Virginia, said his sister identified his 27-year-old nephew Abood packed in with a bunch of men in the back of a military truck. Almadhoun’s father and 13-year-old nephew, Omar, were also detained.
All four were later released, said Hani, who added that none of them had links to militant groups.
Al-Araby Al-Jadeed (the New Arab) said its correspondent Diaa al-Kahlout was among them. In a statement, the news organisation said Kahlout had been rounded up along with his brothers, relatives and other civilians at the market street in Beit Lahiya, northern Gaza, and then “were forced to strip off their clothes and searched and humiliated before they were taken to an unknown location”.
The Committee to Protect Journalists called for his release as Husam Zomlot, head of the Palestinian Mission in London, said on X the images evoked “some of humanity’s darkest passages of history”.
Hanan Ashrawi, a Palestinian politician, said on X the incident was a “blatant attempt at the humiliation & degradation of Palestinian men … stripped & displayed like war trophies”.
US risks ‘complicity in war crimes’, says Human Rights Watch – as it happened
The images and video show the men kneeling in the street or in a sandy location and were said to have been taken in several different places in Gaza. They emerged on Thursday evening not long after reports in Israeli media describing the surrender of dozens of members of Hamas around the northern Gaza town of Jabaliya.
There have also been conflicting reports about where the images were filmed. An Israeli government spokesperson claimed it was in the vicinity of Jabaliya and Shuja’iya, Hamas strongholds where there has been heavy street fighting since Israel resumed its ground offensive last week, while Palestinians – including a Hamas spokesperson – said the images were from Beit Lahiya, claiming the men had been rounded up at two UN schools being used as shelters, pointing to an identifying shop sign in one picture.
In one widely shared picture, dozens of men wearing only their underwear can be seen kneeling, many of them blindfolded, near a sandy berm with their hands apparently tied behind their backs while a group of Israeli soldiers stand over them.
It is not clear how and why the images came to be leaked. While the source of the images was not made explicit, one video – showing rows of men kneeling in a street, also stripped – appears to have been recorded by an Israeli soldier walking alongside the prisoners.
In another piece of footage, stripped men can be seen being transported in a military vehicle.
While the Israel Defense Forces – which were contacted by the Guardian about the source of the pictures and if they were officially distributed – have yet to comment, a spokesperson appeared to suggest that the Israeli military was arresting and interrogating all men it came across in areas where there was fighting.
An Israeli government spokesperson, Eylon Levy, insisted the men had been apprehended in areas he described as Hamas strongholds.
“We are talking about individuals who are apprehended in Jabaliya and Shuja’iya […] Hamas strongholds and centres of gravity,” he told a briefing.
“We are talking about military-age men who were discovered in areas that civilians were supposed to have evacuated weeks ago.”
Despite Israel’s warnings for civilians to evacuate, they are under no obligation to leave and tens of thousands of Palestinians still remain in combat areas, including Gaza’s north.
The Israeli military has been telling civilians to leave areas where it plans to operate after launching its campaign to eliminate Hamas in Gaza in response to the group’s murderous terror attacks in Israel on 7 October.
“[Hamas] are hiding underground and come out and we fight them,” said R Adm Daniel Hagari in response to a question at a press conference. “Whoever is left in those areas, they come out from tunnel shafts, and some from buildings, and we investigate who is linked to Hamas, and who isn’t. We arrest them all and interrogate them.”
Under international humanitarian law, combatants in armed forces captured in uniform are entitled to protection under the third Geneva convention, which requires that PoWs be treated humanely and with respect for their honour in all circumstances. They are protected against any act of violence, as well as against intimidation, insults and “exposure to public curiosity”.
While it is not clear that Hamas members would be covered by the convention, the apparent presence of civilians among those being paraded raises questions about their treatment.
The images came as further details were disclosed on how Israel is planning to prosecute detained Hamas members accused of involvement in the 7 October massacre in Israel.
The attorney general, Gali Baharav-Miara, and state attorney Amit Aisman issued a joint statement suggesting that special legal mechanisms would be required to prosecute those involved.
Describing 7 October as “an incident that was extraordinary and unprecedented in scope”, they said: “The law enforcement establishment needs to address the challenges of the complex investigation into the criminal acts of terrorism, as well as the complex legal issues that stem from those acts.”
Among possibilities that have been apparently discussed is a special tribunal, while some politicians have called for the imposition of the death penalty.
Florida Education Commissioner Manny Diaz, Jr. (left) likes to troll journalists on Twitter and stage feisty debates over preferred pronouns. Meanwhile, Florida’s SAT scores have dropped once again. The state ranks 45th in America. (Stephen M. Dowell/Orlando Sentinel)
New rankings show Florida students are posting some of the lowest SAT scores in America.
We’re talking 46th place. Down another 17 points overall to 966, according to the combined reading and math scores shared by the College Board.
Florida trails other Southern states like South Carolina and Georgia. We trail states where more students take the test, like Illinois and Indiana.
We somehow now even slightly trail Washington, D.C. — a district long maligned as one of the supposedly worst in America, where all students take the test.
This should be an all-hands-on-deck crisis. Yet what are Florida education officials obsessing over?
Pronouns. And censoring books.
While other states focus on algebra and reading comprehension, Florida’s top education officials are waging wars with teachers about what kind of pronouns they can use and defending policies that have led to books by Ernest Hemingway and Zora Neale Hurston being removed from library shelves. We are reaping what they sow.
But perhaps the most disturbing thing about Florida’s current crop of top education officials isn’t just the misguided policies they’re pushing, it’s the way they behave. Like it’s all a joke. Like Twitter trolls.
They’re calling names, mocking those trying to have serious conversations about education and generally reveling in owning the libs.
A few months ago, Orlando Sentinel education reporter Leslie Postal spent weeks trying to get public records about a newly hired state education employee. Postal just wanted to explain to taxpayers how their money was being spent. But state officials refused to answer questions.
So Postal wrote up the piece, and Florida Education Commissioner Manny Diaz shared the piece on Twitter (now X) with a two-word comment: “Cry more!”
For those of you who don’t speak troll, “Cry more” is a response used by some social-media users — usually those juvenile in age or intellect — to mock someone who is unhappy. The folks at Urban Dictionary, who revel in all things trolly, define “Cry More” as a “phrase used in online games when someone is getting owned, and they b*tch about it.”
The game in question here, mind you, was the Sentinel’s two-month quest to get answers about how the state was spending tax dollars. And the response from the state’s top education official was: “Cry more!” What a role model for students.
That’s just one example. Last week, after I wrote a column about rampant book-censorship in the state — with one district shelving 300 titles — State Board of Education Member Ryan Petty responded (at quarter ’til 1 in the morning): “Just dumb. This passes as journalism.” Followed by a clown emoji.
OK, for argument’s sake, let’s say I’m the dumbest clod to ever set foot in the Sunshine State. Petty still wouldn’t answer any of the direct questions posed in both the column and on Twitter. Specifically, if the goal isn’t widespread book-banning, why won’t his education department provide a definitive list of what books it believes students shouldn’t have access to in school?
Petty opted for emojis over answers, because that’s what trolls do.
A member of the state board of education offers his insightful take on book censorship in Florida schools
If this is all "dumb" – and the goal isn't just to sow chaos – why won't DOE provide a definitive list of what books it believes students shouldn't have access to in school? https://t.co/QDGSYLFukm
The responses on Twitter to Diaz and Petty — both appointees of Gov. Ron DeSantis — were about what you’d expect. One user told Petty: “My ninth grader could have crafted a more articulate response.” Several users responded similarly to Diaz’s “Cry More!” post, questioning his ability to maturely discuss policy and referring back to a Miami Herald investigation into student claims of “inappropriate behavior” by Diaz back when he was a teacher; claims Diaz said were bogus smears.
None of this did a thing to address this state’s education issues. Yet that’s where we are in Florida these days, mired in culture wars and trolling each other.
We also saw something similar last week when Diaz refused to directly answer questions from Orange County Public Schools about whether teachers were allowed to honor the requests of transgender students who wanted to be addressed with different pronouns — if the teachers wanted to and if those students also had their parents’ written permission. (Think about how bizarre it is that schools must even ask that question … in the so-called “parental rights” state.)
In his response to the district, Diaz offered a theatrical and condescending response that referred to “false” pronouns but which school officials concluded didn’t actually answer the question in a straightforward manner. Just more troll games … involving a population of teens more prone to self-harm and suicide, no less.
As far as the SAT goes, the test certainly has its share of legitimate critics. But it’s still one of the best apples-to-apples metrics we have for student learning.
Yet hardly any Florida media organizations even covered the October release of the new SAT scores that showed Florida’s poor showing. Why? Because we’ve been trained to follow the bouncing-ball, culture-war debate of the day.
So we see plenty of coverage about Florida supposedly ranking No. 1 in “educational freedom” by partisan political groups and scant addition to real education issues.
Call me old-fashioned, but I like hard numbers more than political posturing or magazine rankings. So do others who actually care about and study education.
Paul Cottle, a physics professor who authors a blog that focuses on STEM education, noted Florida’s increasingly cruddy SAT scores back in October when they were released — when everyone else was focused on the debate-of-the-day.
Cottle noted that Florida’s math scores for 4th graders were solid but that the SAT scores for graduating seniors were so bad, they suggested something was going awry for students before Florida schools sent them into the real world.
Cottle called the showing “a sad state of affairs.”
He’s right. Yet we’re getting precisely the educational environment and results that our culture-warring politicians are cultivating — an environment where trolls thrive, even if students don’t.
I am not sure how many people who visit here have seen the republican debate? But during it DeathSantis was bragging about how since he banned woke and passed the “don’t say gay laws” for Florida schools and the state was forcing kids away from higher education and into trade schools, how improved and better Florida schools / education was. Yet here is proof that bigotry and hate plus regressive policies on tolerance, acceptance, and enjoyment of higher learning can harm the students of Florida! And as the article notes, knowing this result was coming DeathSantis is desperately trying to do away with the tests entirely, preferring to use a home school / religious based test that is not recognized as valid by any schools except religious based ones. Hugs. Scottie
New rankings show Florida students are posting some of the lowest SAT scores in America. We’re talking 46th place. Down another 17 points overall to 966, according to the combined reading and math scores shared by the College Board.
Florida trails other Southern states like South Carolina and Georgia. We trail states where more students take the test, like Illinois and Indiana. We somehow now even slightly trail Washington, D.C. — a district long maligned as one of the supposedly worst in America, where all students take the test.
This should be an all-hands-on-deck crisis. Yet what are Florida education officials obsessing over? While other states focus on algebra and reading comprehension, Florida’s top education officials are waging wars with teachers about what kind of pronouns they can use.
DeSantis, you will recall, wants to do away with the SAT and replace it with a so-called “Classic Learning Test.”
Florida SAT scores have plummeted again. We’re now 46th in America. And all the state’s top education officials have to offer are culture wars – and tweets like “Cry more!” and “Just dumb.”
SAT scores on reading and math continue dropping for Florida students.
But don’t worry— the DeSantis administration made sure to expand ‘Don’t Say LGBTQ’ to 12th grade and to remove trans students from school sports, so everything will be fine. pic.twitter.com/VeDgoqnOZe
The damage he’s done will manifest in the years to come. When there’s no employment, no education, no insurance, no tax payers, they’ll realize what a mess he made.
It’s more than an oddity that uber Red states are the lowest in ranking in health care teen pregnancies education and economics well being. Using it as over lay to GOP MAGA types it sort of encompasses all
Yup. I never imagined we could have a worse governor than Jeb….then along came Rick the 5th, who was & is awful. Then along came this piece of human excrement, nodding to Jeb & Rick….”hold my beer”.
In the 50’s, my father was a VP at a Florida college. Before I came along, he moved his family out. He predicted in the 70’s to me Florida would be last in education. He had no idea that it would be this type of republican education that would cause it. He felt it was government not supporting public education, so I guess he was right about Republicans too. He was a new deal democrat. . Maybe George Soros will spend to push a mass mailing to all Republican run states on how their education sucks.
I was an elementary student for almost five years in the late 50’s early 60’s. When we moved to Ohio I was behind in almost all subjects but, luckily, I caught up quickly. Florida education has never been outstanding as far as I know…but it seems it was better then than now!
DeSantis wants to rig it so that mis-educated Florida students can’t get accepted to any out of state colleges and universities. Keep ‘m stupid and they’ll vote for republicans.
“When the homosexual comes out of the closet and he is bragging about his activities, demanding not only acceptance, but endorsement, that is a nation that God is taking his hand off of. And that’s exactly who we are.
“Here’s a principle that I want you to never forget: Sin often begins manifesting itself even by the transformation of your characteristics. About 80 percent of the time before a homosexual opens his mouth, you can see by the look on his face that he’s—I won’t say the word ‘gay’; it almost slipped out—a sodomite will always reflect it in his countenance. And if he doesn’t naturally, he’ll learn it by those he hangs around with.
“We are spending billions of dollars to keep these sodomites alive, and we should out of compassion. But it can be cured overnight by repentance, by a change of lifestyle.
“There will be certain death among those who’ve been practicing, but I believe God would so reveal himself that we’d find the cure and instead of just keeping them alive with drugs, they’d find a genuine cure if they hadn’t already aborted the one that had the cure.” – Prominent evangelical Rick Scarborough.
Scarborough has a long history of launching virulent attacks against LGBTQ people, calling them “sodomites” and declaring that AIDS is God’s “judgment as a result of an immoral act,” while insisting in 2015 that “God would probably give us the cure for AIDS today” if the U.S. stopped supporting gay rights. Kirk’s Turning Point USA and several other right-wing organizations—including Liberty Counsel, Patriot Academy, ACT for America, and Liberty Pastors—have partnered with Scarborough and his Recover America organization.
Scarborough last appeared here in October 2015 when he produced a copy of the Obergefell ruling during a sermon, threw it to the floor, and proceeded to walk on it. The screenshot above is from his recent appearance on Mike Huckabee’s TBN show.
Rick Scarborough complains that "we are spending billions of dollars to keep these sodomites alive," claiming that "they’d find a genuine cure" for AIDS if gay people would simply repent and "if they hadn’t already aborted the one that had the cure.” https://t.co/BD5M8citpGhttps://t.co/3cye58kVWJpic.twitter.com/NSemf5p3HZ
PREVIOUSLY ON JMG: Rick Scarborough says he’s willing to burn to death to stop gay marriage. Rick Scarborough leads Christian coalition which declares willingness to go to prison over same-sex marriage. Rick Scarborough says God would be “perfectly justified” in nuking America because we have gay ambassadors. Rick Scarborough suggests filing a class action lawsuit against homosexuality itself.
”We are spending billions of dollars to keep these sodomites alive…”
Just as WE are spending billions to keep heteros alive, and children educated, and for the military, and roads & bridges through our taxes and insurance. It’s what our society does.
You know who doesn’t pay for most of those? CHURCHES
Rick Scarborough is equating homosexuality with sodomy. Scientific research has shown that many str8 men enjoy butt sex with their wives and girlfriends while having little to no interest in doing it with other men.
We know that the majority of sodomitical buttfucking is heterosexual. While a much smaller percentage of them do it, there are lots more of them than us, so the actual numbers are greater.
His harangue is not only crazy and immoral, he’s condemning a big number of het sodomites in his own congregation, without (seemingly) knowing it.
Remember, being a “virgin” is very important in church culture, but buttfucking doesn’t affect a young woman’s virgin-ness, since Jesus only counts vaginal sex. So for centuries, lots of the opposite sex couples in christian congregations have had buttsex before they got married, to preserve the woman’s virginity and to not get pregnant. And some of them like it a lot and continue after they get married.
One straight woman friend told me that getting buttfucked gave her multiple long, rolling, crazy fine orgasms that were very different from her vagina-fucked orgasms. And her boyfriend liked fucking her ass as much as her vagina.
Don’t ever let these hemorrhoid-ridden assholes claim that there’s such a thing as “gay sex”. There’s not – every possible sexual activity same sex couples do is also done by opposite sex couples. Except maybe mutual docking.
Fuck you and your horrific god. I am 76 and had HIV 37 years. It is a disease, not a punishment, asshole. If there were punishment for mindless meanness, you would be in hell today.
its only really punishing in developing parts of the world with little access to healthcare and grown men who have HIV think the only way to get rid of it is to give it to a virgin girl. The children suffer the most.
Meanwhile these Christocreeps think they’re being horribly oppressed if someone ‘offends’ them. They’re the ones that terrified of death they’ll torture children to appease their idea of a homophobic God dumping them into their Hell over not obeying their own ‘rules’ they can’t even keep it in their own pants about.
Since the Oct. 7 attacks in Israel, extremist settlers in the West Bank have been emboldened, displacing more than 1,000 Palestinians, according to the United Nations.
Republicans know they are unpopular with the majority, they know their policies they push for are not wanted by the majority. They are a minority that wants to rule, to force everyone to live as they dictate. So since they can not get the majority of votes, they try to stop others from voting. Yes how much love do they have for democracy if they only want their side to be able to vote? Also again it is fundmentlist Christians driving this, saying it is what god wants them to do blocking other people from their right o vote. One lady brag she alone filed over 500 challenges. And who pays for the time that state officals have to spend checking, the mail to the people regestered to vote, and all the rest? You and I , the tax payers. Hugs. Scottie
BY MICHAEL KAPLAN, SHEENA SAMU, MAJOR GARRETT
/ CBS NEWS
Voters eligible to cast ballots are already being swept up in a grassroots effort to purge the nation’s registration rolls ahead of the 2024 presidential election, a CBS News investigation has found.
Fueled by doubts about the 2020 election, an army of conservative activists is poring over state voter lists, looking for registration errors that can be used to file what are known as voter challenges — questioning the registrations of thousands of Americans.
The undertaking, which includes the involvement of a lawyer tied to former President Trump’s alleged efforts to overturn the 2020 election, tends to affect minority or younger voters who may be statistically more likely to vote Democrat, according to local election officials.
“It’s young voters, it’s people of color, and it’s people that are unhoused,” said Karli Swift, chair of the election board in DeKalb County, Georgia. “Those are generally the types of people that end up in voter challenges.”
One of those hit with challenges was James McWhorter, who received a letter at the barbershop he manages in the middle of October from DeKalb County informing him that someone had challenged his voter status. The challenger, a woman named Gail Lee, argued McWhorter improperly registered to vote at a commercial address and snapped photos of his barbershop, which is located inside an Atlanta-area Kroger supermarket, as evidence.
“I didn’t know Gail Lee from a can of paint,” McWhorter told CBS News chief Washington correspondent Major Garrett.
De Kalb County voter and barbershop owner James McWhorter talks with Major Garrett.CBS NEWS
Since the two had never met, there was no way for Lee to know that McWhorter had registered to vote at the shop’s address in 2008 because he was homeless at the time. A veteran of the Gulf War, he was still trying to get back on his feet after years of struggling with PTSD and alcoholism.
“My friends, my family never knew I was displaced, never knew I was homeless,” McWhorter said, adding he would return to the barbershop after it closed and sleep in his chair and wash his clothes at a24-hour laundromat nearby.
Nevertheless, the letter made it clear that McWhorter’s voter registration could be canceled if he didn’t take action.
“I had to put on my glasses just to make sure it said what it was saying,” said McWhorter, who is no longer homeless but has kept a mailing address for two decades at the shop he now manages. “I was taken aback. I really was. Why would someone challenge my vote?”
McWhorter, 55, is among the latest group of Georgia citizens targeted by an effort to purge the nation’s voter rolls ahead of the 2024 presidential election.
Georgia became ground zero for the movement after Republicans in the state pushed through a law in 2021 allowing citizens to file an unlimited number of challenges against fellow voters within their own county. In the two years since the law passed, a CBS News investigation found more than 80,000 challenges have been filed against Georgia voters — many of them by a loose network of about a dozen conservative activists.
The movement is not limited to Georgia. CBS News obtained video and transcripts from 11 separate sessions this year in which activists are seen strategizing how best to deploy voter challenges across the country.
For example, public records reveal a local Republican Party activist in Virginia who attended a March strategy session, then filed a slate of 43 voter challenges in August, ahead of the November election. Activists have also recently filed challenges in Washington state and Michigan, where a public records request revealed a GOP official conducted a “field investigation,” going to dozens of homes to check if voters were registered to the correct address.
Conservative activist Gail Lee is interviewed by Major Garrett.CBS NEWS
In an interview, Lee said she’s filed about 500 challenges and says her work is a non-partisan effort to highlight and correct errors in the voter roll. She said she believes those inaccuracies may present an opportunity for fraud, enabling someone to cast a ballot who isn’t legally able to vote.
CBS News’ analysis found across Georgia at least 12,000 challenges – about 15%– have been upheld and resulted in the removal of voters from the rolls, but local election officials say the challenges identify administrative errors and technical violations, not evidence of fraud.
“I think that unfortunately many members of our community have taken misinformation to heart and they truly believe there is fraud in the system, which is just not true,” Swift said, adding the issues the challenges are identifying shouldn’t deprive someone of their right to vote.
Swift said her staff has spent hundreds of hours dealing with challenges she says are meritless. In Georgia, counties are required to attempt to contact challenged voters in advance of an administration hearing that will determine whether they are removed from the rolls.
File: Karli Swift, chair of the election board in DeKalb County, Georgia.
Despite the tens of thousands of challenges across Georgia, it’s rare for someone who is challenged to actually appear at the hearing to defend his or her registration. CBS News attended a recent hearing in Forsyth County where none of the 236 voters who had their registrations challenged showed up.
The Republican-leaning election board voted to uphold 135 of the challenges, canceling the registrations of individuals who are likely unaware they’re being struck from the rolls. On Election Day, removed voters may still cast a provisional ballot, and these votes would only count if the removed voters prove their eligibility to the county within three days.
“Trying to put your foot on someone else’s neck”
McWhorter said he did not realize the letter gave him the option of resolving his voter status over email, and believed he needed to attend his hearing. Last month, he arrived at the county election office ready to defend his right to vote and found himself face to face with Lee.
“For you to challenge me, you have that right as a citizen of DeKalb County, but I served [in the military] to give you that right,” McWhorter told Lee. “I paid taxes here for 20 years, even though I was homeless.”
After the hearing, McWhorter updated his address, but said he believed Lee had been trying to disenfranchise him.
“It was hurtful that she would do something like that,” McWhorter said. “You’re trying to put your foot on someone else’s neck.”
Responding to that claim, Lee said the challenge to McWhorter’s registration was “not exactly a heavy foot,” since all he had to do was contact the election office to update his address.
Asked whether she could see how Black voters like McWhorter might feel threatened by her work, Lee, who is white, denied race played a role.
“I would think they would want their vote protected too, because someone who doesn’t belong on the rolls would take away their vote,” she said.
While McWhorter acknowledged Lee is exercising her right under the law, he believes her motives were malicious.
“What God wants me to do”
Lee said she decided to become more politically active after former President Donald Trump lost the 2020 election to Joe Biden, a race she still believes Trump won. Convinced that rigged voting machines and bloated voter rolls helped deliver Mr. Biden the presidency — though officials found no such evidence — she attended an election integrity conference in Atlanta last year.
According to Lee, a nonprofit called the Conservative Partnership Institute participated in the conference. The group’s staffers include former Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows, who spoke at the conference’s luncheon, and GOP lawyer Cleta Mitchell, who aided Trump’s effort to overturn the election in Georgia. (Trump, Meadows and more than a dozen others are now facing criminal charges for their efforts.The former president, his White House chief of staff and most of the other co-defendants have pleaded not guilty, though four have reached plea deals.)
Eager to find a way to volunteer, Lee says she began filing challenges after a chance encounter during a bathroom break at the conference with a woman who was doing similar work in another Atlanta-area county.
“The woman who spoke from Gwinnett was there …and I said, ‘I’m interested in the voter rolls,'” Lee said. “She emailed me back a list of people in DeKalb County, and I began investigating the addresses.”
Now Lee is one of scores of volunteers who scours the rolls, looking for voters registered at P.O. boxes, those who appear in the rolls multiple times, or those who list birthdays so old that the voter may be deceased. She then compiles a dossier on each challenged voter and sends it to the county election board.
“I believe it’s what God wants me to do,” Lee said. “He knows what’s right and what’s wrong and there’s things that need to be fixed in the voter rolls.”
These are all tasks that are already handled by Georgia election officials, said Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican whose office is charged with maintaining the state’s voter rolls.
Raffensperger told CBS News the assumption that the system is riddled with fraud is not valid. He said his office, unlike citizen challengers, typically has access to driver’s license and Social Security data that is more up to date.
“We have objective voter rolls,” said Raffensperger. “They’re clean, they’re accurate. We’re doing voter list maintenance every month.”
“They’re registering homeless folks there”
One of the people driving the push for grassroots activists to scrub voter rolls is a medical entrepreneur named John “Rick” Richards, who promotes a new software product that he described as a “Betty Crocker cookbook approach” that would expedite the challenge process.
Richards helped organize online video demonstrations throughout the spring and summer to train activists, including Lee, who attended one in June. In all, hundreds of volunteers nationwide have listened to how they could soon use the software, called EagleAI NETwork, to scan publicly available databases to identify “irregularities” with voter registrations and flag them to county officials.
The existence of EagleAI was first reported by the Atlanta Journal Constitution. In company pitch documents CBS News obtained through a public records request, Richards billed the product as “Voter Integrity Software” that will “enable citizens to audit, validate and offer suggestions to improve the integrity of their state’s voter roster.”
Richards declined an interview, but in a statement said EagleAI “only presents data” to county officials who ultimately decide whether to remove voters, and that its users are “volunteering to provide assistance to county election officials.” On Friday, Columbia County, outside of Augusta, Georgia, which is heavily Republican, became the first local government in the country to adopt the software to help maintain its voter rolls.
Some of the Eagle AI video sessions, including the one Lee attended, were hosted by Mitchell, who, since the 2020 election has been leading a growing network of conservative activists that claims to be investigating theories and uncovering what they believe is proof of fraud in the administration of U.S. elections. Dozens of investigations into the 2020 election have failed to turn up any evidence of fraud, including in Georgia where three recounts confirmed Trump’s loss.
Mitchell also declined an interview, but in a series of emails refuted the characterization that those in her organization are “election deniers,” She described them as “patriots … who woke up after 2020 and realized what had happened to their election systems and are doing their best to work hard to remedy various aspects of the problems.”
The video sessions obtained by CBS News raise questions about who exactly the software and its users are targeting. In one session in March, Richards demonstrated how the software can accelerate a mass challenge against homeless voters registering at a church.
“It’s a Presbyterian church,” Richards explained in the video, which was provided to CBS News by the progressive watchdog group Documented and independently verified. “They have an outreach mission. They’re registering homeless folks there. Of course, nobody knows whether they’re actually voting or not. So that’s an issue.”
Richards told the audience of volunteers that it might normally take a long time to file a challenge report on 2,224 people. But not with his software, he said.
“All I gotta do is hit that button right there and it brings them all up,” he said. “And I hit this button right here, and it creates all those challenge forms at one time.”
Challenged over typos
CBS News found other instances of challenges that led eligible voters to have their right to vote questioned. Two days after he left the hospital following surgery for colon cancer, Christopher Ramsey received a letter from Fulton County alerting him his voter registration had been challenged due to a typo in his address, which Ramsey had previously tried to correct. Despite a compromised immune system and a warning from his doctor, Ramsey drove 30 miles to the county’s election board office and waited hours to defend his right to vote.
“I felt firmly that I have my right to vote, and I was going to defend it,” Ramsey, a former kindergarten teacher, told CBS News.
Ramsey said he was one of 4,000 voters challenged that day, but only a few dozen showed up to defend themselves.
“This made me lose confidence in their system,” said Ramsey, who first shared his story with ProPublica. “What about all the people who couldn’t show up for themselves?”
Lakendra Graham was also challenged for registering at an invalid address. Graham’s address changed in 2019, after Atlanta renamed a number of streets that previously honored the Confederacy. Ms. Graham had lived on Confederate Court, before the city changed it to Trestletree Court.
“It was on the news that the street names changed, so that’s something small you could have looked at to see I’m still there,” said Graham at a Fulton County hearing last March. “Nothing’s changed, my information hasn’t changed.”
This past June, Courtney Scott had to wait more than four hours to testify before the board of elections after she was challenged over a clerical error in her street name. Scott lives on Azalee Hester Wharton Way NW, but the voter roll her challenger found was missing “Hester” in the address.
“I couldn’t believe I could lose my voting rights that easily,” Scott told CBS News. “If I was charged with anything, the burden of proof should be on them, but the burden was on me, by a letter, to be able to vote.”
A federal court in Georgia is currently hearing a lawsuit over the legality of mass voter challenges and whether the practice amounts to voter intimidation, and Raffenperger said he’s looking to the outcome for guidance.
“I think that we’ll have to take a look at what the remedy will be from the court system,” said Raffensperger, adding that he did not believe the practice disenfranchises voters in Georgia. “It’s never been easier to vote. We are, we believe, the model for what election integrity and election accessibility should look like throughout the entire country.”
Since having his vote challenged, McWhorter said he has decided to be more politically active. The master barber said that will start with a simple message for his customers: “Go vote.”
