Even if Trump fails to pass his SAVE Act, the GOP has figured out how to use an administrative tactic to wipe out voters. The Department of Homeland Security maintains the SAVE database of deported aliens. Just this month, Georgia's Secretary of State officially requested that Trump's new Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem open the SAVE data base to hunt for aliens on Georgia's voter rolls.
We've seen the SAVE database in action before. In 2012, the state of Florida began to remove 172,000 voters, allegedly aliens, found on the SAVE files. In the end, they could only find one single alien voter to charge, an Austrian Republican, but thousands of Hispanics were barred from voting because their names matched with aliens deported. A lot of Jose Garcia's were at risk.
Suli Anselmi had to prove his citizenship in court to get his vote back in Florida. He was targeted by the SAVE database which proved itself 99.999% inaccurate for identifying alien voters. Photo: David Ambrose for MoveON.
Trump Goes Postal and A.I. Vigilantes
In the next weeks, I'll be reporting on other new and expanded vote suppression weapons of mass voter roll destruction.
Preview: In the last presidential elections, based on EAC data, I could calculate that 1.2 million absentee ballots were disqualified, overweighted against voters of color. In 2026 and 2028, we can expect the pile of disqualified ballots to increase while the total number of mail-in ballots will plummet because ten Red states passed laws shuttering ballot drop boxes and limiting the right to a mail-in ballot. I cannot yet measure the ill effects on mail-in balloting because of Trump's moves to sell the Post Office. (Will all forever stamps now have Donald's and Elon's portraits?).
Preview: And there are also the vigilante challenges, the mass challenges of voters, not by government, but by self-proclaimed voter fraud hunters. As mentioned, Trump's lawyer Cleta Mitchell wants to force states to use her EagleAI purge program to cull voters. But if she and Trump can't bully the states into adopting their voter-roll cleansing lists, then Mitchell promises to field her MAGA posse to individually challenge voters in those states, including Georgia and Pennsylvania, that still allow these Jim Crow challenges.
Hope: Don't despair. To paraphrase Lincoln, they can't steal all the votes all of the time. Therefore, my final report in this series will be, How to Steal Back Your Vote.
Palast is a forensic economist and recipient of the Global Editors award for data journalism. Watch Palast's latest film, Vigilantes Inc: America's New Vote Suppression Hitmen, produced by George DiCaprio and Martin Sheen.
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