Russian dictator Joseph Stalin is often quoted (perhaps apocryphally) as saying:
“It’s not the people who vote that count, it’s the people who count the votes.”
Today’s GOP version of that could be:
“It’s not the people who vote that count, it’s how many people we can remove from the voting rolls that will decide the election.”
In this year’s iteration, the Trump Department of Justice has demanded that all states turn over their voting rolls, complete with names, addresses, driver’s license and social security numbers, voting history, and date of birth.
They’re also requiring states to sign a “Memorandum of Understanding” that says the states will then purge from their voting rolls anybody who Republican partisans within the Trump administration — once they’ve dug into the state’s voter data — find to be a “concern”:
“You agree therefore that within forty-five (45) days of receiving that notice from the Justice Department of any issues, insufficiencies, inadequacies, deficiencies, anomalies, or concerns, your state will clean its VRL/Data by removing ineligible voters…”
We’ve seen this movie before, but always in the past on the state level.
In the 2000 election, for example, Florida Governor Jeb Bush’s Secretary of State Katherine Harris requested a list of Texas felons from Texas Governor George W. Bush’s Department of Corrections. She then ran that list of Texas felons — more than 50% Hispanic and Black — against the Florida voter roll list.
The result, as BBC reporter Greg Palast told the world and our media largely ignored, was that in the months just before the 2000 election, around 80,000 mostly-Black and Hispanic fully-legally-eligible but also mostly Democratic-voting Floridians were purged from that state’s voting rolls. Thousands of Black and brown voters whose first and last names just happened to be the same as Texas felons; lots of Jose Garcias and James Browns.
When those Florida voters showed up on election day, they were turned away and George W. Bush “won” the election by 537 votes after his father’s corrupt SCOTUS appointee, Clarence Thomas, became the deciding vote in Bush v Gore that violated the 10th Amendment by stopping the state-supreme-court-ordered recount that would have revealed the scam and given the 2000 election to Al Gore.
Some GOP-run states are happily going along with Trump’s purge effort. So far, the Trump toadies have hoovered up the intimate details on tens of millions of voters living in Alaska, Arkansas, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Nebraska, Ohio, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, and Wyoming, and the feds have obtained simple voter identity and voting history information from Colorado, Florida, Pennsylvania, Utah, and West Virginia.
Sometime between now and the election, the DOJ will present to these states the lists of voters they must purge, per the Memorandum of Understanding. And the 30 or so mostly Democratic-run states which are refusing are all in the crosshairs of a massive federal lawsuit trying to force them to comply.
As Greg Palast and I have documented in the past, if around 4 million legal American citizen voters hadn’t been purged from the rolls in the months leading up to the 2024 election, Kamala Harris would be president today and Democrats would control the House and perhaps even the Senate. Using the phony rubric of voter fraud, purging voter rolls has been, since the 1960s, a go-to strategy the GOP borrowed from the old Confederacy.
What’s truly astonishing is how little attention is being paid to how Republicans are pre-rigging this fall’s election, both by the DNC and our mainstream media. As Dissent in Bloom documents, twelve states have already passed statewide versions of the SAVE America Act:
“New Voter ID laws in AL, AZ, FL, GA, KS, LA, MS, NH, OH, SD, UT and WY restrict voter access without a secondary form of ID or a passport. About 146 million Americans don’t have a passport. Millions more do not readily have access to their birth certificates.”
This is a large part of how Putin cemented single-party-rule in Russia, by carefully controlling who’s on and who’s purged from that country’s voting rolls. And Trump and Putin are talking on the phone frequently.
Trump and Republicans are doing this because they know that their policies are unpopular: most Americans aren’t fans of tax cuts for billionaires, more pollution, deregulation, high-priced drugs, war with Iran, privatizing Medicare, giving Social Security to Wall Street, criminalizing abortion and birth control, student debt, hating on Black and queer people, ICE killings and concentration camps, and the GOP’s war on unions and working people.
So, the GOP does everything they can to make voting difficult or even impossible, particularly for people in heavily Democratic areas (which are usually college towns, big cities, and Black neighborhoods).
When Republicans run elections in such areas (typically big Blue cities in Red states), they’ll close or change polling places at the last minute to sow confusion and cause people to give up when they show up at their normal polling place and find it closed.
For example, in Ohio the state changed polling places for voters in heavily Black Cuyahoga and Summit counties just five days before the 2023 special election, as Newsweek noted in an article titled “Ohio GOP Changing Polling Locations Days Before Election Raises Questions.”
Ohio voters were outraged, and that outrage spread across X (formerly Twitter) with comments like this:
“The Ohio GOP is playing ‘Your polling place has moved’ with 47,000 voters in the largest African American voting county in Ohio—just five days before the election. Making it harder to vote—in the crucial August 8th special election (deciding if a majority of voters still can amend Ohio’s state constitution)—is wrong.”
Another X user noted:
“Ohio Republicans are so damn shady! … This stinks to high heaven. At the last minute, before Ohio’s special election, polling locations were changed in Cuyahoga and Summit counties. More than 47,000 voters are affected by changes to 50 voting precincts.”
The fact that this little effort in Ohio got virtually no national press coverage guarantees Red states will be doing more of this kind of dirty trick in the upcoming elections.
But that’s just the beginning.
Knowing that working-class people are less likely to vote Republican than white upper-class suburbanites, Republicans also engineer polling situations so people paid by the hour will have to wait for hours in line to vote, losing out on income.
Every year, we’re treated to pictures and videos of hours-long lines to vote in Blue cities in Red states, while lines in white suburbs in those same states typically run fewer than 10 to 15 minutes.
Similarly, many Red states have imposed draconian penalties on people conducting voter registration drives for making even the smallest mistakes, or for failing to “properly register” themselves with the state. This has shut down many voter registration programs, including some from long-term organizations like the League of Women’s Voters.
As The Kansas Reflector newspaper noted, the penalty for even a minor, inadvertent error is now 17 months in the state prison and a $100,000 fine:
“The League of Women Voters of Kansas and other nonprofits are suspending voter registration drives for fear of criminal prosecution under a new state law.”
The League has sued Florida, Tennessee, and Texas for their criminalization of voter registration drives as well; so far they all stand.
But purging voters — by the tens of millions every election cycle — is where Republicans find their best result. As the Demos report notes:
“Between the close of registration for the 2020 general election and the close of registration for the 2022 general election, states reported removing 19,260,000 records from their voter registration rolls. This was equal to 8.5% of the total number of voters who were registered in the United States as of the close of registration for the 2022 general election.”
Additionally, as I lay out in The Hidden History of the War on Voting, 17 million voters were purged in the two years leading up to the 2018 election, fully ten percent of America’s voting population, according to the Brennan Center.
Given that the most radical purges took place among Black and youth voters in Republican-controlled Red states, those 8.5 percent and 10 percent “national averages” could well be two or three times that percentage in the states where these purges were concentrated.
Demos added, most of the purge activity was taking place in former Confederate Red states that — before five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act in their 2013 Shelby County decision — had to have purges pre-cleared by the federal government:
“The median purge rate over the 2016–2018 period in jurisdictions previously subject to preclearance [Red states] was 40 percent higher than the purge rate in jurisdictions that were not covered by Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act [Blue states].”
More than a quarter of those purged during this period from 2016-2022 were removed from the rolls either because they failed to vote in the previous election or because they failed to return a postcard mailed out by a Republican secretary of state (that is usually designed to look like junk mail).
This card-mailing strategy is called “caging” and used to be illegal, but Sam Alito broke the tie and wrote the 5-4 decision in the 2018 Husted v A Phillip Randolph Institute decision when the five Republicans then on the Court ruled that Ohio Republican Secretary of State (and now Senator) Husted could continue his practice of mailing the postcards into Ohio cities with the largest Black populations.
In his dissent, Justice Stephen Breyer pointed out that only around 4 percent of Americans move out of their county every year. Yet, he wrote:
“The record shows that in 2012 Ohio identified about 1.5 million registered voters—nearly 20% of its 8 million registered voters—as ineligible to remain on the federal voter roll because [Republican Secretary of State Husted said that] they changed their residences.”
The Brennan Center found that just between 2014 and 2016, in the two years leading up to the Hillary/Trump presidential election, over 14 million people were purged from voter rolls, largely in Blue cities within Republican-controlled states. Then-Secretary of State Brian Kemp purged over a million voters in Georgia alone in 2018, leading to his 50,000-vote win that year against fellow gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams.
Calling the findings “disturbing,” the Brennan Center noted:
“Almost 4 million more names were purged from the rolls between 2014 and 2016 [just after the Supreme Court legalized large-scale no-oversight voter purges in 2013] than between 2006 and 2008. This growth in the number of removed voters represented an increase of 33 percent—far outstripping growth in both total registered voters (18 percent) and total population (6 percent).”
Another strategy that the GOP has rolled out in a big way to suppress the vote in Blue areas of Red states is “strict signature matching.” They primarily use this against voters who’ve succeeded in obtaining vote-by-mail ballots, which are authenticated by comparing the signature on the envelope with the voter’s registration card.
Because signatures change over time and often vary a lot when people are in a hurry, this is low-hanging fruit for the GOP. Last year they started a program to field an “army” of 50,000 “poll watchers,” including interviewing candidates from among white supremacist militia groups, for the 2024 election. Those “watchers” probably invalidated millions of mail-in votes (nobody has kept track of the numbers).
This year, Trump promises an “army” of “election integrity” inspectors to double-check mail-in signatures in Blue states, while the Post Office will no longer automatically postmark ballots on the they’re dropped off.
While some of these poll watchers will also be on hand to try to intimidate or challenge Black and young voters (a practice that’s legal in most Red states), many will be overseeing the counting of mail-in ballots, which are generally more Democratic than Republican.
All they have to do is claim that, in their opinion, a signature doesn’t match and the ballot goes into the “provisional” pile and won’t be counted until or unless the voter shows up in person at the county elections office. Most people never even know their ballot was challenged and not counted.
Whether any of this is part of the “autopsy” the DNC did on the 2024 election that Chairman Ken Martin is refusing to release is unknown, but it certainly should be. And Democrats and all of us in the media need to start calling it all out loudly.
Share this story with everyone you know and tell your elected Democrats that it’s way past time to start shouting from the rooftops about Republicans pre-rigging the upcoming election these ways.
