By Greg Palast/ GregPalast.com/ March 26, 2025

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Continued here……“Preserving and Protecting the Integrity of American Elections,” will require every American who registers or re-registers to vote to prove their citizenship. The justification: Trump claims that the Democratic Party has registered three to five million non-citizen voters. But after four years of intense hunting by his Justice Department, they haven’t found three.

The Brennan Center for Justice of the New York University School of Law warned, when Trump first suggested this plan, that “the lie of non-citizen voting…could lead to the purging of hundreds of thousands of voters from the rolls.” But that statement wildly underestimated Trump’s and Musk’s ambitions. “Hundreds of thousands” could be purged in a single state.

The GOP isn’t waiting. In a pre-dawn call, Gerald Griggs, the President of the NAACP of Georgia, told me that the Georgia Secretary of State is about to remove 466,000 voters from the rolls, notably, four times Trump’s “victory” margin last year.  

This follows Georgia’s request for access to the Department of Homeland Security’s immigration database — so Georgia can supposedly match its voter rolls to a list of non-citizens. Florida once used the DHS database to remove 172,000 “alien” voters. Only one (an Austrian Republican) was convicted of this crime — but thousands of “Luis Garcia’s” lost their vote.

“We tried to warn you, America,” said Griggs. “Jim Crow 2.0 has roared out of Georgia and is going national.”  

The Brennan Center reports that 21 million Americans, otherwise legal voters, don’t have access to citizenship ID, a very low estimate. All will lose their vote if they attempt to register or RE-register (as 31 million Americans do each year).  

Key facts:

• Only 42% of white Americans — and only 34% of Black Americans — have passports to prove citizenship.
• 69 million women who took their husband’s last name cannot use their birth certificate as proof of citizenship.
• Military ID is NOT proof of citizenship.
• A driver’s license is NOT proof of citizenship (except in 5 states that permit you to add citizenship to the “Real” ID card.

According to Barbara Arnwine, founder of the Transformative Justice Coalition, who taught voting rights law at Columbia University, Trump and Musk are trying to get around the 10^th Amendment to the Constitution which requires an act of Congress to make these changes to voting law by putting the citizenship proof requirement into the national mail-in federal registration form. This was tried in 2016 by Kris Kobach as Secretary of State of Kansas, who admitted in court that none of the 36,000 Kansans barred from voter rolls were non-citizens.

The Order also threatens the return of the infamous Interstate Crosscheck purge program. Courts had already struck down Crosscheck because it wildly tagged over three million Americans as potential “multiple” voters.  Trump’s order authorizes Musk’s DOGE hounds to go into the voter files and cross check names between the states to tag potential double voters.  But, according to Prof. Lorraine Minnite, author of The Myth of Voter Fraud, the chance of someone voting twice is far less than the chance of being killed by lightening. Nevertheless, a revived Crosscheck system would block the ballot to several hundred thousand voters.  

But don’t count on the courts, newly Trump’d, to defend your right to vote.