The Purge is real: Inside the GOP's 2024 playbook to disenfranchise voters

WASHINGTON — Some Republican-led states are being sued over last ditch efforts to “purge” their state’s voter rolls, but it may be too little, way too late.

On Monday, a new lawsuit was dropped on Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin from the League of Women Voters in Virginia and immigrant-rights groups who accuse him and his attorney general, Jason Miyares, of running an illegal “Purge Program” ahead of November's elections.

“Defendants’ Purge Program is far from ... a well-designed, well-intended list maintenance effort,” the lawsuit reads. “It is an illegal, discriminatory, and error-ridden program that has directed the cancelation of voter registrations of naturalized U.S. citizens and jeopardizes the rights of countless others.”

That new Virginia lawsuit comes just a couple of weeks after the Department of Justice sued Alabama and its Republican secretary of state, Wes Allen after more than 3,250 people were booted from the state’s voter rolls within the 90-day quiet period mandated by the National Voter Registration Act, claiming they weren’t American citizens.

These last-minute efforts to kick people off state voter lists aren’t accidental. They’re part of former President Donald Trump’s strategy to recapture the White House. And it’s working, at least in some regions.

Trump’s RNC is ground zero for the “purge”

Trump garnered a lot of headlines after tapping his daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, to serve as co-chair of the Republican National Committee, or RNC. Still, her role seems to be protecting — or enriching, according to watchdogs — Trump family interests.

Her counterpart, RNC Chairperson Michael Whatley, is credited with orchestrating a nationwide effort to clean up state voter rolls—especially in battleground states—that’s been embraced by traditional GOP leaders.

“President Trump, when he reorganized the RNC, brought in Michael Whatley…because of the things he had done in North Carolina to clean up their voting process,” House Majority Leader Steve Scalise told Raw Story at the Capitol a few weeks ago. “So he’s set up in each of the swing states — not in all 50 states but in each of the swing states — a really strong organization to address concerns that are being raised.”

Before being given the reins (at least half of them) at the RNC, Whatley was a vocal supporter of Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election results. But in 2021, in the wake of the failed Jan. 6 insurrection, Whatley went a step further.

When he was North Carolina’s Republican Party chair, Whatley established a 16-member “Election Integrity Committee,” actively recruiting local poll workers and advocating for stricter state voting laws.

At the RNC, Whatley’s role has, seemingly, been to stack the electoral deck in Trump’s favor. That means targeting eligible voters' lists one battleground state at a time.

“Well, I have faith in what Michael Whatley is putting together,” Scalise said. “It's a thorough operation in the key swing states where, you know, the race is going to be decided.”

Hyper-local nature of this national voter “purge”

In August, Whatley and the RNC sued his home state of North Carolina, demanding the removal of 225,000 people who they claimed didn’t prove they were citizens when they registered to vote.

In September, the Tar Heel State removed roughly 750,000 names from the state’s rolls.

While roughly half were deceased, others simply moved and hadn’t reregistered their new addresses. Others who hadn’t cast ballots in the past two elections were also booted.

Like other efforts to uncover mass illegal voting in America — including the voter fraud commission Trump launched when he was president that found no mass fraud — the GOP hunt for illegal voters hasn’t panned out.

Out of 7.7 million registered voters, North Carolina’s board of elections found nine were potentially non-citizens, though officials haven’t even been able to confirm the status of those nine.

The lack of evidence hasn’t stopped Trump’s GOP from waging war on the nation’s voter rolls, though.

In Ohio, Republican Secretary of State Frank LaRose removed roughly 155,000 voters who he claimed appeared inactive in elections since 2020.

Over in Arizona, the state Supreme Court stepped in last month and ruled roughly 98,000 voters in Maricopa County were eligible to vote despite a 2004 clerical error that allowed them to register even though they didn’t properly provide proof of citizenship.

Down in Georgia, the names of more than 100,000 eligible voters were removed. More than 40,000 voters were alerted that they got booted and reregistered to vote. In fact, shortly after President Joe Biden bowed out of the presidential contest in July, roughly 10,000 Georgia voters reregistered on the day Vice President Kamala Harris held one of her first rallies in Atlanta, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

In Nevada, Republicans were able to remove roughly 100,000 ‘inactive voters’ earlier this year, but that wasn’t good enough for Team Trump.

Last month, the former president’s campaign and the RNC sued Nevada’s secretary of state, arguing they had “evidence of thousands of non-citizens on Nevada's voter rolls who may be able to cast ballots this November.” In the suit, Trump’s lawyers claimed 4,000 noncitizens voted in 2020, even as they offered no evidence.

“Allowing non-citizens to vote suppresses legal voters, undermines the democratic system, and violates the law,” RNC Chair Whatley said in a statement at the time. “We have filed suit in Nevada to protect the vote and stop this Democrat election interference scheme.”

In the aftermath of the 2020 election, Team Trump filed upwards of 60 lawsuits challenging the results, but this election, Trump and his team got active early, filing so many court challenges that even the former president's own family could barely keep them straight.

"We have lawsuits in 81 states right now," Lara Trump told Newsmax this spring.

— (@)

The confusion stemming from the multitude of court challenges seems mutual.

Confusion aside, Democrats seem flatfooted in this multi-pronged challenge to the heart of U.S. elections: American voters.

“I haven’t seen that.”

Democrats have promised they’re prepared to get in the trenches this election, but party leaders hardly seem aware of what they’re up against.

“We're going to push back,” Sen. Gary Peters (D-MI) — chair of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (or DSCC) — told Raw Story a few weeks ago at the U.S. Capitol. “It's about making sure that people have the right to exercise their rights to vote.”

“What do you make of that new app though on the right that makes it easy for everyday citizens to challenge these?” Raw Story asked.

“I haven’t seen that,” Peters replied.

Our apologies because Raw Story misspoke to the senator. There are now numerous far-right apps that make challenging your neighbor’s voter registration easy.

There’s IV3, EagleAI — pronounced ‘eagle eye’ — and Fight Voter Fraud. And they aren’t all that new, even as the ways they’re being deployed in this presidential cycle are novel.

Just this week, an investigation by Houston Public Media found that 11 people challenged the registration of more than 15,000 voters, with one person registering more than half of those challenges.

In Pennsylvania, like in other battleground states, thousands of voters’ registrations were falsely accused of being illegally registered to vote by the fringe-right group Fight Voter Fraud, which was founded by conspiracy theory-peddling Linda Szynkowicz — “a failed Republican candidate for the Connecticut state house of representatives,” according to Pittsburgh’s WESA.

And back in July, ProPublica found some 100,000 Georgia voters had their registrations challenged by a mere “six right-wing activists.”

While Democratic Party leaders like Peters may not have heard of these subtly revolutionary groups, progressives say they’ve been fighting the new right and all their post-J6 tools.

“Of course, I’m concerned. It’s another tactic in voter suppression,” Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-MA) — a key member of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s so-called Squad — told Raw Story as she was heading to a vote at the U.S. Capitol last month. “I was in Georgia — it’s a big issue.”

It’s a big issue in more electorally overlooked states, too.

“Get registered or check your status”

This August, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott announced his administration removed some 1.1 million voters from the state’s rolls since 2021. While most had moved, the Republican governor claimed 6,500 of those removed were noncitizens, which sent shivers through the state’s migrant communities.

After his NFL career, Texas Democratic Senate candidate Rep. Collin Allred (D-TX) was a voting rights lawyer before winning his congressional seat six years ago. He doesn’t like the looks of what he calls efforts to “intimidate” voters.

“Specifically, I think in this case, sometimes what we're seeing is trying to do what states often do but package it in a way that is intended to intimidate, and that I find to be a problem,” Allred told Raw Story on the steps of the U.S. Capitol a few weeks back.

Even as he faces off against second-term Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), Allred tries to remain optimistic by encouraging voters to do their due diligence.

“This is part of why we have to just make sure that everybody checks their voter registration status. I've often thought that folks don't pay enough attention to what happens in the lead-up to elections,” Allred said. “But this is something that people have notice of. We can try and correct and make sure that you get registered or check your status.”

Bush v. Gore flashbacks

While some Democrats are publicly optimistic, others are having flashbacks to Bush v. Gore, the Supreme Court case that halted Florida's 2000 recount and placed George W. Bush in the White House.

“I remember in 2000, one of the underrated and understated reasons why we lost Florida was because they had done a voter purge, and you had hundreds, if not thousands, of African American voters who went to show up, and they were no longer on the voter rolls and couldn't vote,” Rep. Brendan Boyle (D-PA) told Raw Story at the Capitol. “And that's where the provisional ballots, hanging chads came from — they came out of that experience.”

Voter purges may not garner the most media attention this election, but they’re top of mind to many.

“This is such a close election, I would say there are several things that concern me,” Boyle told Raw Story. “The sort of antics that the Republicans may turn to again to invalidate the results if there's a Democratic victory, but certainly this is one of them. My understanding is, on the Democratic side, there's probably more of a focus on this than ever in a previous election.”