The purge — and how the next election may already be decided

With virtually no mention or reporting in the corporate press, Republican-run states are again running the voter purge of millions that gave Donald Trump the White House in 2024.

Yesterday morning, Reuters published a special report on the ways the Trump administration could “interfere” with the midterms, noting that a lawyer in Idaho’s Republican attorney general’s office bragged that his state had “taken a leading role in ensuring its voter registration list is purged….”

Yep, they used the word “purged.” They’re not even bothering with the polite terms anymore.

And it’s not like the Republicans really believe the mythology they’re trying to sell the rest of us. The GOP-aligned, billionaire-funded Heritage Foundation spent over a decade doing a deep dive into every state looking for voter fraud and noncitizen voters, examining every American vote since 2000 — more than a billion ballots cast nationwide — and found just 89 cases of non-citizen voters. In more than twenty years!

The libertarian Cato Institute did a similar analysis specifically on the 2020 election looking for any evidence that Trump’s claims were right that the election was “stolen” from him by “Mexicans” voting in the US election. They concluded the same thing:

“There are likely many problems with America’s voting system and there is no doubt that a non-zero number of non-citizens illegally voted, but there is no good evidence that noncitizens voted illegally in large enough numbers to actually shift the outcome of elections or even change the number of electoral votes.”

Nonetheless, Republicans keep promoting their lie that “illegals are voting” to justify massive purges of legal voters whose only crime is being Black, Hispanic, living in a college town, or being a big city dweller in a Red state. A likely Democratic voter, in other words.

And let’s not forget that hypocrite Trump himself is all in on encouraging voter fraud; at his “midterm convention” in Dallas a few weeks ago he had thousands of people raise their hands and repeat an oath after him:

“I don’t care if I’m registered or not, I’m going to try and cheat like hell...”

And the Reuters story comes three weeks after six corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court let Trump’s DHS, run by former plumber Markwayne Mullin, turn an ICE immigration database called SAVE into a bulk voter-purging machine right in the middle of an election.

When Texas ran its registered voters through SAVE they purged thousands of people wrongly flagged as noncitizens; LULAC is suing to try to get these actual citizens voting rights restored.

Which all raises a question that I’ve been asking on the air (and in my book The Hidden History of the War on Voting) for years:

“Why is it that if a Republican governor wants to take away your gun he has to go to court, but if he wants to take away your vote he doesn’t even have to notify you?”

You’ll recall that back in 2008 five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court declared that we all have an absolute constitutional “right” to own a gun, and if any state or city wants to violate that right they have to go before a judge and present evidence that you can contest and even appeal all the way to the Supreme Court itself.

When we have a “right” in America and our government wants to take it away, they have to provide notice, irrefutable evidence, a courtroom and neutral judge, a finding, and a right to appeal. It’s called “due process” and is established by the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments.

And in 1993, Congress passed and Bill Clinton signed a law establishing — without any ambiguity — that your vote is also a “right.” The National Voter Registration Act lays it out clearly:

“[T]he right of citizens of the United States to vote is a fundamental right,” and that “it is the duty of the Federal, State, and local governments to promote the exercise of that right.”

And the phrase “right to vote” also appears five times in the Constitution itself, more than any other right that document names (guns get a single mention).

So, why is it that Republican secretaries of state are bragging about the millions of Americans whose right to vote they’re “purging” from the voting rolls this year? And how are they getting away with using junk-mail-appearing postcards to justify those purges?

In 1981, the RNC sent letters to Black and Hispanic voters in New Jersey to “verify” their voting status; they built a challenge list of 45,000 people and posted off-duty cops at polling places in predominantly Black and Democratic Newark and Trenton to check names to challenge those voters.

The Democratic Party sued against this practice, called “caging” in the direct mail industry, and won a court order blocking the Republicans from doing it. That consent decree expired in 2018, though, the same year that five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court told Ohio Secretary of State John Husted that he could resume the practice, but this time instead of the GOP paying for it the cost of mailing the postcards could be covered by Ohio taxpayers.

Justice Breyer’s dissent pointed out the obvious fraud of it, noting that on average around 4 percent of Americans move their residence every year but:

“The record shows that in 2012 Ohio identified about 1.5 million registered voters—nearly 20% of its 8 million registered voters—as likely ineligible to remain on the federal voter roll because they [allegedly] changed their residences.”

Now the practice has spread to virtually every Republican-controlled state. They send out millions of postcards that look like junk mail and if you don’t return one and skip an election, you’re officially purged. They don’t even have to notify you; you find out when you show up on election day and they either turn you away or give you a “provisional” ballot.

During and after the 2024 election, my radio/TV show’s phone lines were jammed with people — many from big cities in Ohio and Georgia — complaining that this had happened to them and they’d just discovered it when they tried to vote. None had been notified.

And, sure enough, the provisional ballots were the tell that exposes this GOP scam. The Election Assistance Commission’s own survey of the 2024 election found that 1,736,209 Americans were shunted onto provisional ballots that year, and that the single most common reason was that the voter “did not appear on the list of eligible voters.”

Provisional ballots are often not counted at all, unless the voter shows up at the Secretary of State’s office before the final count to certify that they are, in fact, a legal citizen and voter.

Since the Husted decision by the Supreme Court allowing this bizarre practice, Republicans have put their corrupt system into hyperdrive. That same EAC federal survey found that GOP-controlled states sent out nearly 40 million “confirmation postcards” in just the two years between the 2022 and 2024 elections.

As a result, more than 21 million registered voters were stripped from the voting rolls in the months leading up to the 2024 election, and the most common justification was that they failed to return that junk-mail postcard.

Reporter and former statistics professor Greg Palast testified about this in federal court for the NAACP and, here on Hartmann Report, detailed how his team went through Georgia’s purge list person-by-person.

They found 198,351 Georgians who’d been cancelled even though they hadn’t moved and were still (mostly Black) citizens. In Wisconsin, where Harris lost by 29,397 votes, Republicans had purged 166,433 voters from the lists. Pennsylvania had purged 360,132 people, about three times Trump’s margin of victory in that state.

His conclusion was straightforward:

“Trump lost. That is, if all legal voters were allowed to vote, if all legal ballots were counted, Trump would have lost the states of Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Georgia. Vice-President Kamala Harris would have won the Presidency with 286 electoral votes.
“And, if not for the mass purge of voters of color, if not for the mass disqualification of provisional and mail-in ballots, if not for the new mass “vigilante” challenges in swing states, Harris would have gained at least another 3,565,000 votes, topping Trump’s official popular vote tally by 1.2 million.”

In other words, your “right to a gun” is real but your “right to vote” is not, at least as long as corrupt Republicans control the Court and Congress.

Imagine, for example, what would happen if your county sheriff started confiscating guns from people who failed to mail back a postcard. The rightwing press would be hysterical and the Court would strike it down in a New York minute.

So here’s where we are today. Georgia’s Brad Raffensperger (pronounced “Raff - ens - purger”) cancelled nearly 471,000 registrations last August, 6 percent of the entire state, the majority Democrats according to a Fair Fight analysis.

When Black Voters Matter asked for the records behind the purge, Raffensperger’s office handed over a stripped-down spreadsheet, and they had to sue him to try to get the names. Ohio’s Frank LaRose published a list of 352,389 names for cancellation just this past year, following a 2024 purge in which Ohio Democrats documented more than a thousand wrongly removed voters in Cuyahoga County alone.

Meanwhile Trump’s Justice Department has filed 31 lawsuits against states and the District of Columbia to seize their full voter files, including driver’s license and partial Social Security numbers, so the whole country can be run through his flawed SAVE purging database.

Republicans can’t win elections on their track record of taking away healthcare, gutting the Social Security administration, and handing massive tax cuts to billionaires, so they send postcards into Black and Hispanic neighborhoods and college towns. The only thing that’s changed since Jim Crow, in other words, is the technology.

Democrats in Congress tried to fix this situation in 2022 with the Freedom to Vote: John R. Lewis Act. It passed the House and had a majority in the Senate, but every Republican in the Senate joined in a filibuster. If Kirstin Sinema and Joe Manchin hadn’t stabbed us all in the back by voting with Republicans to sustain the filibuster, these crimes against our democracy would be explicitly illegal, as they already are in every other advanced nation in the world.

Fixing this — codifying our “right to vote” per the NVRA from 1993 and with new legislation — has to be right up there with overturning the other most-corrupt action to come from Republicans on the Court aka Citizens United.

But none of that will ever happen if Republicans continue to control the House and the Senate so Trump can further disintegrate our republic and turn us into his beloved Russia before the 2028 election.

So, vote!