By Greg Palast
Watch Palast’s special report for The Thom Hartmann Program
No joke. On Tuesday, President Donald J. Trump issued an extraordinary Executive Order that would give “the DOGE Administrator,” that is, Elon Musk, access to the voter files of every state for the purpose of purging millions of Americans from voter rolls as suspected “non-citizens.”
The Executive Order, with its Orwellian title, “Preserving and Protecting the Integrity of American Elections,” will require every American to prove their citizenship when they register or re-register to vote. 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 prior Justice Department, Trump’s alien-voter hunters haven’t charged even three.
The Brennan Center for Justice of New York University's Law School warned, when Trump first suggested this plan, “the lie of non-citizen voting…could lead to the purging of hundreds of thousands of voters from the rolls.” But Brennan wildly underestimated Trump’s and Musk’s ambitions. “Hundreds of thousands” could be purged in a single state.
Take Georgia. In a pre-dawn call today, 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. Trump’s new Executive Order specifically authorizes Musk, state and local officials to use the Homeland Security database for this voter roll purge. 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. This Executive Order is a direct violation of the Voting Rights Act.” Not that I expect Trump to lose much sleep over that.
The Brennan Center reports that 21 million Americans, otherwise legal voters, don’t have access to citizenship ID. All would lose their vote if they attempt to register or RE-register (as 31 million Americans do each year).
Most Americans can only prove citizenship with either a passport or an ORIGINAL birth certificate (no copies).
The real issue is, WHO will be excluded from voting under this new edict?
Only 34% of Black Americans have passports to prove citizenship. Indeed, only 42% of whites have a passport.
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. But thank you for your service.
A driver’s license is NOT proof of citizenship (except in 5 states that permit you to add citizenship to the “Real” ID).
These facts suggest that 21 million may be the low end of the estimate of voters at risk.
Crosscheck Climbs out of its Crypt
According to Barbara Arnwine, who taught voting rights law at Columbia University, Trump and Musk are trying to get around the 10th Amendment to the Constitution. Arnwine, founder of the Transformative Justice Coalition, notes that the Tenth Amendment requires an act of Congress to change federal election law. The Trump-Musk Order tries to end-run the Constitution by pretending this is only a change in a federal form, the national mail-in registration form that almost all Americans use.
We’ve been there before: In the 2016 election, Kansas launched a registration form that required proof of citizenship. Kris Kobach, Trump’s “Voter Fraud Tsar” and then Secretary of State of Kansas, admitted in court that there was not one non-citizen among the 36,000 Kansans who lost their vote because of this prove-you’re-a-citizen registration form.
Not coincidentally, most of the voters blocked by Kansas were students, i.e. Democrats.
The Trump-Musk 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.
In imitation of the Crosscheck program, Trump’s order authorizes Musk’s DOGE-hounds to go into voter files and cross-check names between the states to tag potential double voters. They won’t find any, because, according to Professor 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 lightning. Despite the facts, Interstate Crosscheck cost several hundred thousand voters their rights in 2016. (Now you know how Trump won that one.) Trump-Musk wants to do it again.
Not incidentally, the three million voters targeted by Interstate Crosscheck (and now, the new Executive Order) were overwhelmingly Americans of color. (Fun fact: 90 of the 100 most common surnames in the US, according to the Census, are “minority” names – Garcia, Jackson, Ho, etc.—so any name-matching purge algorithm will wrongly capture non-white voters by a factor of several hundred percent.)
And who came up with the Interstate Crosscheck program, clearly the model for the new Order? Once again, Kris Kobach, now Kansas Attorney General, who was the vote-fraud “expert” at the Heritage Foundation, the chaps who gave us Project 2025.
Trump Goes Postal
And there’s more tucked into this omnibus of Jim Crow tactics. The Order would also block the counting of mailed-in ballots that arrive after Election Day, no matter when they are mailed or postmarked. The GOP is more than aware that Democrats are 51% more likely than Republicans to vote by mail. Whether your vote will count will now be up to the Postal Service… which Trump intends to privatize.
While the President may be trouncing the 10th Amendment and the Voting Rights Act, don’t count on the courts, newly Trump’d, to defend your right to vote.
For now, the Palast Investigations Team will be on the case, providing expert vote suppression data to our partners at the RainbowPUSH Coalition, NAACP of Georgia, Black Voters Matter Fund, and the Transformative Justice Coalition.
Now is not the time to despair and hide under the sofa.
We SHALL overcome — but only if our investigation can continue.
Help us rescue 2026 from the vote suppressors.
Want to know more? Watch the movie: https://www.watchvigilantesinc.com/
Vigilantes Inc., America’s New Vote Suppression Hitmen, narrated by Rosario Dawson, Produced by Martin Sheen and George DiCaprio. Stream it at no charge.