How Trump and the Republicans Are Already Fixing the 2026 Election

Republished with permission from Thom Hartmann, by Greg Palast for The Hartmann Report

Greg 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.

You can ignore Trump slyly hinting to the Lord’s chosen that he just might call off the next election.

“Four more years, you know what? It’ll be fixed, it’ll be fine, you won’t have to vote any more, my beautiful Christians.”

But don’t ignore this: Trump won’t be calling off the election because he doesn’t have to. The Fix for 26 is already in.

The Republican plan is to win next year’s election this year. Yes, the voting will be bent, jacked and hammered this year, 2025, one year before the official voting. Because this is the year of The Great Purge.

And if The Great Purge doesn’t do the trick, Republicans are ramping up other vote suppression tactics they rolled out to win 2024, including a private army of MAGA-nauts who challenged over a million voters’ ballots in 2024 and plan on way more by the 2026 midterm.

As I detailed in my analysis for The Hartmann Report, vote suppression cost Kamala Harris at least 3,565,000 votes. And now that Trump and his attack Doge have their sticky fingers in the electoral process, we could look back at the 2024 vote suppression spree as the good old days of democracy.

I’m a committed non-partisan data journalist who has gone after both parties. But for this past election and the one coming, it is the GOP which is cranking up these racially-poisonous purges and challenges to new pain levels. Here’s what to expect:

The Great Purge of 2025

What is a “purge”? In 2000, George W. Bush won the presidency by just 537 votes in Florida — after the state’s Republican Secretary of State Katherine Harris “purged,” i.e. removed from voter rolls, tens of thousands of African-Americans because they were, supposedly, ex-cons ineligible to vote. In fact, not one, our investigators at BBC Newsnight found, was an illegal voter.

What the Republican Party learned from the successful mass purge operation is that simply crossing voters off the rolls, especially Black voters, is a dandy way to win elections. And so, in 2002, President Bush signed the Orwellian-named Help America Vote Act which requires states to purge their voter rolls in the year before each federal election.

In its 2023 report, the United States Election Assistance reported that over 19 million voters were purged from the rolls before the latest presidential election. True, most purged were dead or had moved, but 4.47 million citizens were blocked from voting by what the EAC euphemistically calls “Failure to return confirmation notice,” or what voting rights lawyers call, “Caging.”

For the ACLU of Georgia, my team of experts analyzed every single voter purged by caging in one swing state, Georgia. We found the “error” rate was 63.3% — and shockingly racist. In federal court, the NAACP presented the names and addresses of the 198,000 voters we found who were wrongly removed—but it was too late to save them all.

In 2023, in the lead-up to presidential race, the Georgia Secretary of State more than doubled the number of voters “caged” compared to 2020. He proudly announced he’d targeted over 875,000 voters. For 2026, get ready for a similar rise in the number of voters purged in GOP-controlled states. This is more than likely as the voter protection police, the Justice Department Civil Rights Division, under Trump, has been turned into the Civil Wrongs Division.

Today, the caging system used to target voters in 30 states is known by its initials ERIC. A Yale University study found ERIC to be dangerously inaccurate. But the ERIC purge doesn’t go far enough for Trump’s crew. MAGA groups are pushing to move to a cage-and-purge program called EagleAI directed by Trump attorney Cleta Mitchell.

It is no coincidence that EagleAI (which Mitchell pronounces, “Eagle Eye”) is named after the GOP’s infamous Eagle Eye operation which, in 1964, mounted a mass challenge against Mexican-American voters, demanding proof of citizenship from them, a practice since made illegal.

Illegal until now…

Lord, Save Us from the SAVE Act

The Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, the SAVE Act, would turn the Eagle Eye José Crow operation into national law, requiring that every new voter prove US citizenship.

As Michael Waldman, President of the New York University Law School Brennan Center for Justice, notes:

“More than 21 million eligible voters just don’t have these documents readily available. Most Americans simply don’t have a passport. (How do they summer in France without it?) Millions have a birth certificate but don’t know where it is or have easy access to it. (In a box in my mother’s closet? I know I saw it somewhere.)”

Here’s the bad news for Americans who update their registrations, 31 million voters a year.

The SAVE Act would require them to provide their citizenship papers—in person.

But wait? How many of those 31 million Americans currently registered are illegal aliens?

This whack claim that there are millions of aliens swimming the Rio Grande to vote in our elections, comes from the Heritage Foundation, the folks who brought us Project 2025. Heritage claims that between 500,000 and 1,500,000 aliens vote in our elections. Wow!

The claim that literally millions of aliens voting in US elections comes from Heritage Fellow Kris Kobach, currently Kansas’ Attorney General. In his prior post as Secretary of State of Kansas, Kobach won the right to arrest illegal alien voters. He tried, but could not find a single one. But Heritage crows that they identified illegal alien voters in Texas: three in twelve years.

After Kobach won a proof-of-citizenship-to-vote law in Kansas, he admitted to a federal court that he did not capture a single alien voter. But the law did block 36,000 legal voters, including Air Force officers and thousands of students, from voting in the 2016 election. The Kansas law was thrown out by the court; but Trump’s new federal law, if passed, will likely stand up in his Trumpified courts.

And if you are a woman who’s taken on your husband’s name, good luck with registering to vote. The SAVE Act is a war on the 69 million women who don’t have their “voting” name on their birth certificate.

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 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 to plummet because 10 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.